When George was a small boy, he had a dog named Span and they were very good friends. Span was a black and white English Setter, and he went with George everywhere he went. When George started in school, Span went with him and waited for him every day. They lived in a a small town of a thousand people and everybody knew George and Span. Halfway through his first year in school, George's family moved to Kansas City which is, of course, a large city.
I was talking on the phone in my new office in the big city when the switchboard operator broke into my conversation and said, "Mr. Hawley, the principal of J.C. Nichols School is on the telephone. I thought it might be an emergency." I told the person I was talking to I would call him back and asked the Principal what I could do for her. She said, "Mr. Hawley, this morning, when it was time for recess, there were so many dogs on the playground I was afraid to let the children out. I started identifying the dogs and telling their owners to take them home. I told your son George to take his dog Span home and not bring him back. George told me he would take Span home and neither one of them would be back. Now Mr. Hawley, I don't have to take that kind of talk from a six year old." I said, "How does it stand now?" "They are both still here." "I apologize, let me talk to George."
When George was eleven years old, he announced that he and Span were going to walk from Kansas City down to Warsaw, Missouri. Warsaw was the small town where we had moved to Kansas City from. It was a little over a hundred miles from Kansas City, but George had figured out a route that would be back roads and it made it a little farther. His plan was to carry a small pack and sleep on the ground. I tried to point out all the problems he would have but he still wanted to try it. His plan was to follow the railroad tracks for the first leg of the journey. In about twenty miles they would take him to Harrisonville, Missouri. He would spend the first night there.
I had agreed to drive them, George and Span, to the edge of Kansas City, where the railroad tracks left town. I drove them out there in the early morning and showed them the starting off place. We all got out of the car and I gave them some last minute admonitions. George looked awfully small and the pack looked like it would grow heavy. I had left the door to the car open and while I was giving George the last minute chance to turn back, Span quietly sneaked back to the car and got in. I said, "George, Span doesn't want to go." He said, "that's alright. He might have caused me trouble anyway." George started out and I drove Span home. I thought Span looked like he was ashamed of himself
That evening, we were playing bridge with the Jim Merits in our living room when the phone rang. I answered it and a man's voice said, "We got your boy." I said, "Who is this and where are you calling from". He said, "This is the sheriff of Cass County. I picked him up walking on the railroad tracks in Harrisonville. I spotted him for a runaway the minute I saw him." "Has he broken the law?" "Not unless you call running away to be breaking the law." "He didn't run away, Sheriff. You had better turn him loose at once. Better yet, let me talk to him." I figured George must be exhausted and would be too tired to look for a place to spend the night so I talked him into letting me come and get him and bringing him home to sleep. I promised to drive him back out to Harrisonville in the morning and let him start in right where he had left off. George slept in his own bed that night and I drove him back out to Harrisonville the next morning.
The next night, the City Marshall of Holden, Missouri called me to say they had George. I told them if he hadn't broken the law to turn him loose. The next night, George arrived in Windsor, Missouri, and it was raining. He went in the bar on Main Street and asked the bartender if he knew of any rooms to rent. The bartender directed him to a house down the street and George rented a room. The next morning, George called me and said it was raining in Windsor, He had a nice room he had rented for two dollars a night. His feet were tired and he would like to spend the day resting in Windsor. When George arrived in Warsaw three days later and told them he had walked there from Kansas City by himself he became a legend. Span was sorry he hadn't gone.
During the next school year, things were not going well for George and he announced that he was going to run away. I asked him where he was going to run to. He said he hadn't decided. I told him I had done quite a bit of thinking about running away when I was his age and I had some suggestions. Maybe I got the idea from reading Huck Finn but I thought it would be a real adventure to go down the Missouri River to St Louis where it joins the Mississippi- and consider going down the Mississippi to New Orleans. George said he couldn't go down the Missouri without a boat and he didn't have one. I said if he would put this trip off until school was out, I would help him get a boat. He felt out some of his friends at school and decided this was a good idea.
We looked in the classified section of the Sunday paper every week and went to look at used boats. We finally found an old aluminum Lone Star fourteen feet long with a small outboard motor on it. I bought it and George started planning the trip. His biggest problem was there were so many of his classmates that wanted to go with him he couldn't accommodate them all. I told him he shouldn't rule any of them out until he found how many could get permission to go. As the time of departure drew near, they began to drop out. George couldn't believe it. Their mothers wouldn't let them go. It was finally down to one boy and his mother called me. When I told her it was true, she said she wasn't that crazy. George said he would go by himself. I started working on Charlie. Charlie was George's older brother. There was five years difference in their ages and Charlie's interests had graduated. He had bigger fish to fry. It didn't appeal to him. When I gave up trying to sell him the idea, I tried bribing him. I thought Charlie was nice to George to agree to go but I also thought Charlie would enjoy it. They cooked their meals and slept on the banks of the river. They visited the small towns and dodged the tugboats pulling the big barges up the river. It is 250 miles by highway to St. Louis but with all the curves and bends in the river it must be 500 by the way of the Missouri river.
When they reached St. Louis, Charlie called me and he was ready to come home. I talked to George and he wanted to go on down the Mississippi. Between George and I we talked Charlie into trying it. They had a lot of adventures between St. Louis and Memphis. At Memphis Charlie called again and he sounded overjoyed. He said, "We have to quit now. The boat sank." The constant vibration caused by the outboard motor had loosened the rivets that held the boat together. It sank while it was tied to the bank.
George's main love at this time was drawing. When other people in our family were reading books or watching television, George was sitting on the floor drawing. He didn't want to miss the sociability so he would sit in the middle of the group, but he was drawing instead of watching the show. Hallmark Cards took one student from each of the city's eleven high schools and formed a class that met twice a month at Hallmark's big factory and their best artists showed these kids some of their tricks. George was the representative of his high school.
About this time, someone painted a large mural on the wall of the boys' restroom at the high school. The principal didn't care for it and did his best to find out who did it. He was unsuccessful until he thought of the art teacher. He brought her into the boys' restroom and she took one look. She said, "I don't think I know who did it. I know who did it. There is only one boy in this school who could have done it. That was done by George Hawley". For that little job, George was rewarded by getting to clean the graffiti off the walls of all the restrooms in the school.
George followed his older brothers into several adventures. One of these was mountain climbing in the Colorado Rockies. He seemed to enjoy this a lot and I bought him a used mountain climbing rope for his birthday. A couple of weeks later, I got a call one night while I was playing tennis. The voice said, "Mr. Hawley, this is Sargent Smith of the Kansas City police department. We apprehended your son, George, rappelling off the top of the new Alameda Hotel. They are having a meeting down here at the hotel and they would like for you to come on down here." I said I would b a few minutes as I had to change my clothes. He said he would meet me at the front door. The hotel was the newest thing on the Kansas City skyline and was going to open in just a few days.
There were about twelve men in the room and the sargent did a fair job of introducing me to all of them. There were three corporations involved. One owned the hotel. One was building the hotel and one was going to operate it as soon as they turned it over to them. After we all got introduced, one of the underlings, I don't know who he worked for, pointed a long finger at George and said,"Is this your son?" I said, "Yes, he is my son. But before you get too excited, keep in mind that I wasn't climbing on your building and if you called me down here to bawl me out, I am going home." Then Mr. Nichols spoke up, the president of the company that owned the building, "Let's not let this meeting get out of control. George didn't hurt the building and George didn't get hurt." The finger pointer spoke up. "Do you realize we have lost three television sets and this building isn't even open yet?" I said, "If you can rappel off of the roof and carry a television set to the ground, I will pay for the three sets." Mr. Pistelli, the president of the company that was going to mange the hotel then said, "All we want to accomplish here is to have George and his father agree that George will not do this again. In return for that promise, I would like to invite them to the opening ceremonies. I would also like an understanding from everyone here that George's outside descent will not appear in the paper so no one else will get the idea to try it."
George told us that when he graduated from high school, he was going to hitchhike around the world. I thought that might be a good idea to get that out of his system before he went to college. That summer he didn't get a job and he hung around the house until I was tired of him. I told him if he was going to go, to get on with it. He said he was waiting to sell his motorcycle. He needed the five hundred dollars he was going to get for it. I said, "Go ahead and go. I will sell your motorcycle and send you the money to some agreed upon location when you send for it." My brother, George, suggested that our George look up a friend of his in Tehran, Iran. This man had gone there with the State Department. He got tired of trying to rescue American hippies who were arrested with marijuana and quit and went to work for a bank. He would be a good avenue through which to send George's five hundred dollars.
George went first to Washington to get the visas he would need. He bought a cheap ticket across the Atlantic. He hitchhiked through Europe to Africa. He got robbed in Morocco while we was asleep on the beach. He got a temporary job in a movie they were making in Greece. It was also in Greece that the boy who had gone with him from Kansas City said he had had enough and turned around and started home.
George went up through Constantinople into Turkey. He got stranded in Turkey in a village of mud houses where the roof was too low to stand upright. After three days, the villagers stopped a volkswagon van on the road and blocked its passage until it admitted George. It was driven by Canadian kids who were terrified of the Turks. When they said to George, "Where did you come from?", George said, "I live here."
When George reached Tehran, Iran, he was hungry, dirty, long-haired and broke. He found my brother's friend, the banker. He got his five hundred dollars. The banker's family fattened him up for two weeks and he was on his way through Iran and Pakistan. Part of the way in Afghanistan, George traveled by camel train. He went through Pakistan down into India where he stayed three months. He stayed in an area called Goa, which is on the southwestern coast of India. He wrote us that he was out of money but, we couldn't find him. He finally found a hundred dollars I had sent to an American Express office, hoping he would stop there.
Resuming eating, he went on. He met up with a girl working in the Peace Corps in Malaysia who was from Kansas City. She used to date George's brother, Charlie. The two of them rented motor scooters in Bangkok and toured Burma.
George rented an empty seat in a tour plane in Hong Kong for a hundred dollars that took him to Los Angeles. When he got home, he had been gone nine months.
After an attempt to go to college failed to prove exciting and an attempt to make a living planting trees in Bellingham, Washington, failed so support him, George was at home in Kansas City when his cousin, Charles Clay, propositioned him to ride motorcycles to California. They were going to visit Charles' married sister. Charles had a new motorcycle that he wanted to try out and George had an old worn out motorcycle that he had put together from parts on his basement.
The first part of the trip went fine. Twenty miles before they reached Albuquerque, George's old motorcycle gave up and threw a rod through the block. George sold his motorcycle for junk and climbed on behind Charles and rode on into Albuquerque. They found a place to spend the night and George called his father. George told his father that he had some money but not enough to buy another motorcycle. What should he do? His father told him he should get up the next morning and look for a job. His father told him he was very fortunate to have this emergency occur where it did. Many people spend a lot of time and energy getting to Albuquerque because that is where they want to spend their lives. "When you wake up tomorrow morning, you will already be there." I was over at cousin Charles' house when Charles called his father two days later. Charles said, "What do I do now?" After the talk with his father, George went out and bought a haircut. Then he bought a cowboy hat and a pair of cowboy boots. Then, he bought a horse and a saddle. Then, he said, "Goodbye Charles, I will meet you in California." Charles' father said, "You get on your motorcycle and go to California."
When Charles got back to Kansas City, he wrote an interesting book about this trip.
As it turns out, George couldn't slow down to the pace of the horse. After several days of playing "Wagon Train," he stopped at a ranch to spend the night and he sold the horse and saddle and started hitchhiking.
At the time George got hurt, he had a good job working as a property manager for a big real estate firm in Kansas City. He managed several apartment houses. He hired the managers and janitors, supervised the maintenance and took care of the rent.
George was on his motorcycle when he was hit by an inexperienced sixteen year old driver making a left turn. George was twenty four years old.
