Faces of Carapace: Roger Goad, far from Hobo Jungle

[This is the third in a series of profiles from Carapace, a free event of true personal stories told without notes to a pre-chosen theme at Manuel’s Tavern, 602 N. Highland Ave., on the fourth Tuesday of every month at 7:30 p.m.]

When his alcoholic father died of tuberculosis, 10-year-old Roger Goad, the seventh of seven kids, found himself in even more abject poverty than before. “He beat my mother, and he beat us kids, but she loved him desperately,” Goad says, faltering. “Within a year [of his death], she had a complete breakdown.”

The family’s descent had begun before Roger was born. His parents sold their farm and moved into the city: Louisville, Ky., where his father started drinking and “we never had anything again,” says Goad.

“I hated living in housing projects – poor, slummy neighborhoods,” he says. “I ran with gangs of boys. When you live in places like that, you have no choice, in order to survive.”

His “street punk” past – there was “trouble with the law” – is all but impossible to recognize in the happily settled general contractor in Ringgold, Ga., married for 40 years. Regulars at Carapace still talk about Goad’s riveting story about his wife Deborah’s brush with death in 1976 (see link at the bottom). Goad delivered the tale last August with an expertise honed from boyhood, as he made his way amid bigger, louder siblings.

“You had to speak up if you wanted to be heard,” Goad says. “You had to jump in there and do it.”

"Most of my heroes are women"

After his father’s death and his mother’s mental collapse, young Roger found himself “just walking the streets.” For a while he stayed with an aunt and uncle on their farm, milking cows and picking tobacco. “We worked really hard, all day long, but we would laugh and talk,” he says. “To me, it was wonderful. I never wanted to leave.”

His older sisters had scattered, except for the twins, then teenagers. “They were out running around, doing their thing,” he says. “When you’re 14, 15 years old in that world, you’re basically an adult.” His brother had joined the military before graduating high school.

“It was a very difficult life for all of us, especially my mother,” Goad says. “Very few men say the heroes of their lives are women. I have several heroes in my life, and most of them are women. It’s difficult for me to say sometimes, because men are not expecting you to say that, but I say it very proudly.”

Another sister had married and lived in California; when Roger and his mother ended up there, he says, “Our lives completely changed.” With awe, he recalls opening a drawer to find “socks, underwear, everything folded nice and neat. I hadn’t seen that in a long, long time. I’m 62 years old now, and I still have that feeling.” His brother-in-law taught him to water ski on Lake Tahoe.

Goad’s job as a contractor has taken him all over the world, renovating American embassies in remote places, following orders to travel as needed, chasing the money that once had been so rare.

“My wife told me I could have 20 billion dollars in my hip pocket, and I’d still be the poor little boy from the projects,” he says. Deborah also threatened to have his often-used phrase, “I’ve gotta go,” framed and hung on their wall. “But I wasn’t going out of her life. I was going to make her life better. That was my intent.” He pauses. “It wasn’t always the case, but that was my intent. We’ve had many rounds, many ups and downs, but we’ve stuck it out.”

The topic of children arose early on. Absolutely not, Roger said. To a child of poverty, children mean one thing: more poverty.

They had been married nine years before they took their first vacation, spending a full month on their round-trip by car to Quebec, Canada. “It was something I’d never done in my life,” he says. “A vacation was something somebody else did.”

When they got back, Deborah was pregnant. Of course, she was afraid to tell Roger. But he was “tickled” at the news, and calls his previous stance “crazy.”

"A very fortunate person"

Their only child is Stacey, also a storyteller at Carapace events. “By the time she was 14 years old, she had been to 14 different countries,” Goad says. At every opportunity, he flew his family to wherever in the world he had been assigned. Stacey has traveled plenty on her own, too. “She taught English in Nepal when she was 19 or 20 years old, lived in a little hut, all that kind of stuff,” Goad says. “She knows what poverty and difficulty is, firsthand, through seeing it.”

But not, Goad made certain, through experiencing it the way he did, shuffling through the Louisville streets, hanging out with vagrants and listening to their stories in what was known as Hobo Jungle.

“I told Stacey when she was in sixth or seventh grade, and we started talking about college, that I wanted her to have the street sense I got through living my life, and I wanted her to have the education to do something about it,” he says. “I said, ‘I want you to be able to sit on a bucket with the hoboes and be a big hit, or go to dinner with ambassadors and be a big hit,” just as her father has done, against huge odds.

Goad chokes a little when he looks back. “I think of all the people who came to my rescue, who loved me and took care of me,” he says. “I’m just a very fortunate person.”

Roger Goad's story, told at Carapace on Aug. 23, 2011.