Coffee with Mike (Part 1)

Hi All!
Well I am finally getting Mike's story on here to share.  I am sorry it is so long in coming...life just seems to keep happening around me and easily gets me off track it seems.  But I finally have gone through the interview tapes I have from when I met with him, and I am ready to share them.  I will have to post in sections though as it is quite long.  Just a note to you readers.  I really tried my best to keep Mike's testimony in his words and not mine.  I wanted you to feel as though you were listening to him...reading his own words and story, and not reading my representation of it.  When I was transcribing his story I often just typed exactly what he said, so as you read you are reading Mike share his story...not Ranae telling Mike's story.  Some parts of his life are pretty hard core.  When we talked he felt strongly about having his whole story shared because he hoped that people would learn from it...he hoped something good would come from something so bad.  I pray that is the case.  May you be blessed as you sit with Mike and share in his life Journey.
Now go grab a cup of coffee or tea, and sit with Mike for a little bit....

My name is Michael J. Lampton. I am 51 years old and was born in Denver, Colorado on November 15th, 1957 to my parents Harold & Charlene Lampton. I am the oldest of four kids. I have a sister named Kathleen and two brothers named Roger and Patrick.

I was about five or six years old when my family and I moved to Long Beach California. We all moved out there so that my dad could look for a job. He was a bad alcoholic, but managed to find a few jobs here and there to keep us going. When we first got to Long Beach he got hired as an auto-mechanic at a shop. My mom was always a stay at home mom. We eventually found a little house to move into which was right next door to Wesley United Methodist Church. It was the churches property and my mom got a job with them as a janitor to help pay for the rent on the little house. It was probably a 600-700 square foot house with four kids and two adults. The rent there was just $35 per month, hard to imagine these days! We lived there for 14 years until they eventually tore that little house down and we bought our own house there on the corner.

I did well through school. Not a whole lot to tell about school. I was in the Boy Scouts growing up. My dad was Scout Master, Weeblo’s leader and Cub Master. He went through all the scouting with us boys as we were growing up. My dad and I were close. My parents were involved in PTA. Every time there was something going on they were there.
 As a child I went to church at the church we lived next to. I was in junior choir and was a member of the youth group. Any time they had any kind of youth activities I was always there…that is until I turned 12. About that time I got out of it, but as far as Jesus being in my life…it was only as a child between the ages of 6 and 12. After that we stopped going to church , and stopped doing anything with the church. I don’t even know why. The only one who kept going was my mom. She went every Sunday. But us kids just drifted out of it. My dad never went, but he was the maintenance man for the church. Anything that needed to be done, he would do…plumbing, painting (he painted the whole church twice, and it was a huge church). He knew everybody that went to the church. Everybody liked him and he liked everybody, but he never attended a service unless it was a Christmas or Easter service.

Six or seven years after we moved to Long Beach my dad got really heavy into alcohol. I was about 10 when this started happening. He would get his paycheck and would be gone for a couple weeks, and then would come home like there was nothing wrong or nothing ever happened. I remember my mom driving around town with me in the car and she would stop at all these bars and I would have to run in and look through the front door to see if he was sitting there. I did that for a long, long time….a couple years probably. I hated doing that because I was either ratting on him if he was sitting there at the bar, or I would be lying to her if I would say that he wasn’t there. I didn’t like getting caught up in that mix. I am not sure what made my dad change like that. He never mentioned anything about his childhood. I never did see my dad drunk. He would do this every couple months or so, but I never did see him drunk because he would always sober up before he came home, and he would always take us kids to a store and buy us a toy when he got home. I guess that was his way to relieve his guilt or something…I don’t know. When my dad would go away for two weeks I did feel like I had to take over some of his part of the responsibility as head of the household. This went on for five or six years. I think it was really tough on my mom, but she always played it off and when he came home there was no arguing or fighting. There were no repercussions for him doing that. I don’t know what was said behind closed doors of course. Back then in the late 60’s and early 70’s it wasn’t that big of a deal for the husband to be the alcoholic and run around…not like it is today. It was known but it was kept within the family and a few close friends. I always loved and respected my dad. I didn’t hate him. What he did was just something I grew to know….something we all just accepted. I didn’t even know it was wrong for a while because it seemed so normal. As far as I know he did everything he was supposed to do as a father. What finally made my dad stop was that my mom had given him an ultimatum. I found the letter on top of the refrigerator one day. She kicked him out and he was staying in a motel. He was begging her to come back and said he would never do it again. I think he was gone two or three weeks, and when he finally came home he kept to his word and didn’t do it anymore.

 I went to Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, California. During High School I started meeting new people, and all my buddies were the car and motorcycle guys. We got into racing our cars, but the guys and I didn’t get in a lot of trouble…maybe just once in a while when we were racing up and down the street. We built our own little funky motorcycles. They wouldn’t go over 10 mph, but we didn’t care we still thought we were pretty hard core. You know…long hair, beards, wanna-be outlaws, drinking and smoking pot. On the weekends we would go to somebody’s house with a bunch of beer and pot and party. We stayed clean during the week for the most part, but had fun on the weekends. I only had a couple girlfriends in high school. I wasn’t really into them much. My group of friends and I were more into motorcycles. We weren’t the jocks that all the girls wanted. I graduated High School in 1976 with a 3.4 grade point average, so I did pretty good in school and enjoyed it.

(Check back soon for the next post from Mike...)