I was two years and 10 months old when all twenty of us children and our parents went gleefully off to NYC on a big Greyhound bus as winners of a nationwide contest for the largest living family in the USA sponsored by the American Toy Fair. I have snatches of memories of the event. I know they are my memories and not a result of other people talking about the trip because they are complete with feelings and my own thoughts. The other children talking about things endlessly for a while after the trip may have helped the memories stick, but they were exclusively my memories. Now, if I were to seem to remember long tales of the trip, it would be questionable. But I make no such claim.

I seem to have a vague memory of strange people coming to the farm and taking pictures. There was excitement in the air I breathed and a flurry of activity getting everyone bathed and dressed and picture ready. I felt the excitement rather than remember the event with any clarity.

I remember a few brief moments on the 400 mile bus trip. My sister Beverly was asleep snoring with her mouth open and someone put a banana in her mouth, I don’t remember who. I laughed and apparently I was the first thing Bev saw when she opened her eyes because our faces were very close and she screamed at me “What are you laughing about,” or some words to that effect. I was ordered to go sit with Ma and Dad and I clearly remember both sadness and my fingers clinging to the seats as I weaved my way forward on the moving vehicle.

I remember being in my Dad’s arms outside and looking down at tiny toy cars below and asking him if I could have one. My brother Keith, who would have been about eight, laughed and told me they were real cars. I remember nothing more about that particular outing. I learned much later that was the Empire State Building.

I remember breakfast at a huge table with siblings and Ma and Dad. I heard someone say that Valerie was lost. She being the sister closest in age I felt scared, probably not so much by the words, but by the sudden chaos that ensued. (She had gotten locked in a bathroom.)

I remember a very heavy curtain we were lined up behind. It was very dark. Some one told us to stay away from the chimp. Charlene did not listen and the chimp kicked her in the gut. I do not clearly remember a scream, but I remember the look in her eyes as she doubled over in pain. I also remember my initial reaction to the monkey’s antics was a laugh. Charlene was mad. I learned much later that it was The Today Show and J. Fred Muggs was the celebrity chimp who had a history of attacking people. In 2007 I learned he was retired and living in Florida.

I remember a big bride doll in a room where we were told we could pick out a toy. I half carried, half dragged the doll away and a man said I could not have it. I cried.

Those are the bits and pieces I have always remembered. The rest of the events, including the trips out to different locations for photos, I do not recall at all. I expect for a 2 year old it was all just tiresome. We met Norman Vincent Peale on the steps of his church, another photo op, but that too is a blank.

I remember nothing of the trip home. I do not remember being given a doll, all the girls got a doll. That was all we got. The boys got something, I do not remember what.

The aftermath of the trip was never clear to me. My life went back to normal. It is only years later, decades later that things have fallen into place, at least to a degree.

One thing I do remember was excitement whenever a truck came through the culverts on Lake Avenue just below our house. Someone would scoop me up in their arms and we all raced to the top of the hill under the Chestnut tree to see if it might be the truckload of toys we had been promised. How could I forget it. It happened often beginning with hoots and hollers and ending with sad faces all around. The promised truck never came. Nor did Ma’s prizes she won as a game show contestant. Nothing came.

In 2006 I chanced upon some writing that Dad had dated 1958, two years after the trip. In it he was trying to figure out why our family had been sent packing. There had been a rush to get us out of town before somebody found out about something. In his writing he laid out a sketchy timeline of what events in NYC that he knew about including some of the older kids activities. He came to no conclusion. Something had happened to their dream trip and he had no idea what. Also in 2006 Valerie told me she had tried to ask the older siblings about the trip but they all refused to talk about it. Apparently she remembered much more than I had.

I have never tried to put my life in context of what events may have caused other events or led to more trauma in the family. But life went to “hell in a handbasket” so to speak. Within the year I had lost my dad, though he sat there in stony silence before my eyes, been led into a life of regular incest, well, prostitution really because they paid me a quarter, and in the years to follow a succession of what must have felt like abandonment. Many of my siblings either quit school and left home before they were eighteen or went to live elsewhere to graduate. Two of my brothers who were happy to use me for there little games left when they were sixteen and they acted like they didn’t know me after that, and pretty much all of them, once they left they stayed away, some for years before they returned to visit. One sister and one brother I would have first met in NYC, but I do not remember that. When I met them a few years later I remember denying they were siblings. They were complete strangers.

The DeGolier family was never one big happy family at any time. The photos taken of all of us together parading around NYC were a farce. An incredibly huge lie, public and in the end humiliating for those old enough to feel it.

At first I thought perhaps the first lie, that all members of the family were still living, was the thing that got us sent home with nothing. But if that were the case, Dad would not have been still mulling it over two years later. If one of my brothers had attacked a woman or young girl or got caught stalking little blonde girls around hallways in the hotel like his future wife says she watched him stalk little blonde girls around campgrounds for fifty years, I would think there would have been some criminal action. (Shirley told Wanda and I about her fifty years of torment in the fall of 2008 while sitting at a picnic table at Popehaven campground in Randolph, NY.) Just think, all those little girls over all those years being stalked and very possibly frightened for there lives and nobody tried to stop him.

The whole town of Brocton probably knew our big dream trip had gone awry. It puts more things in context that I remember from my growing up years. Like meeting someone and them asking “You’re one of the DeGolier girls aren’t you?” and peering over glasses to inspect closer. Of course, I learned in 2007 when I had a book event in my hometown that there were indeed people who knew about incest on the farm, they told me they could not legally do anything. What happened in the home was nobody’s business. Except of course we were there business when it came to juicy gossip.

All my school years I felt the sting of being a DeGolier. I do not know how much might have been due to a bad reputation inherited from older siblings, I do know the feeling of being inspected as though there might be a telltale sign. Maybe that is where I began to perceive the word DeGolier branded on my forehead.

At Owen’s Drug Store I was always, yes always, followed by one owner or the other. Those dark hawk eyes peering around every corner until I exited.

In kindergarten my very old teacher Mrs. Furman told the whole class she had waited for the last DeGolier child to come through her class before she retired thus making a spectacle of me. Then a week later she shamed me in front of the class for not remembering to say “Yes, Ma’am.” I had never been taught that. I hated school. I was always to be known as the last of the DeGolier girls, never Janeen, I was just a DeGolier girl, it seemed that that was enough for people to know. There was no me as an individual. I hated being one of the DeGolier girls.

Ma hated Nurse Gardener, the school nurse. Whenever there were lice found on anyone, the DeGolier family would be called to the nurses office over the loudspeaker. I did not at first feel the impact of that, at first it was just a chance to see my siblings. At that time there were still quite a few of us in school. But the result was always the same. Mother would drag that damned old fine tooth comb through our scalp cussing and swearing and not at all gently, find nothing, and phone Nurse Gardener to tell her off. I do not recall if we ever had lice, if we did I do not remember it. But I read that lice liked clean heads and ours only got washed once a week along with our bodies. We did not have a real bathtub. We were dirty though, sleeping 3 and 4 to a bed and a couple kids wetting the bed every night, not the freshest kids in town for sure.

Eventually Nurse Gardener gave up and stopped calling us all to the office over the public speaker.

Childhood was one long trauma with intermittent sunny days. One of the biggest, or perhaps just the stupidest lie about my life was when my ex-husband told my children that the worst thing that ever happened to me as a child was being poor. like he was some kind of authority on the inner workings of the DeGolier family. He may have gotten me confused with my sister Valerie who he escorted to the Junior Prom. She told me once that when she left home she vowed to never be hungry again, like Scarlett O’Hara in gone With the Wind I guess, and she set her sights on money. She said she remembered always having been hungry as a child. When I left home I was searching for love, someday, someway, someone would love me. Valerie and I both felt the sting of knowing we were not loved, but for her being poor was, for whatever reason, a bigger thing. I did not feel the poverty as much as I felt the cold emptiness of home, the silence and hate, and the fear. I wanted the relative safety of someone’s loving arms. I just wanted love. I dreamed of five acres and a garden and chickens and maybe a milk cow and raise my family on healthy food and fresh air.

It was actually my husband who had yearned for money. He used to take us for long Sunday drives and we nearly always ended up slowly passing all the fine houses in the rich section of Charlotte with Fred complaining that he should have that. I came to hate those trips. I felt sad for the life we could have had if only he could just be content to be just him. There was nothing particularly appealing about a man always focusing on what he didn’t have and probably never would. But then he met Cindi. She “came from money” in his words and could introduce him to the right people. In effect he married for money. Well, more power to him, but pinning his quest for money on me was rather cruel. He did not know me very well.

And he certainly did not know my family except as an outsider who saw the masks all around. He was best friends with my brother Reed, though, a rather smarmy man who’s sexual appetites outraged many people from family to barmaids. Funny story. Reed had nude parties at his house in Mayville, NY. One day Wanda and Homer were out riding with Ma and Dad and decided to drop in on him. I cannot imagine the shock when they pulled up and began getting out of the car. But I do remember Mother cussing up a stream when I drove her up the beach in Daytona during Bike Week and a girl in the pickup truck ahead of us ripped off her blouse and shook her breasts about. She was soooo angry that I took her to such an awful place. But Reed was everybody’s darling, as was Denis, so I imagine there was no cussing at him.

Well, I have gone on and on now, and it is all true and a bit pathetic as well as traumatic. Did I have time to worry about being poor? No, I was busy surviving a pretty much unlivable life.