Did you ever steal anything as a child? If so, what, and how old were you?

I was a super moral martha. Except that I did take a pillow from a hotel for our car on the trip. This was way back to Los Angeles, back when, before I was me now with all the moral divesting, and still partly true.

(I'm reading Richard Rodriguez's autobiography now, Hunger for Memory, alternately pulled in and yelling at him as I read.)

I was seventeen.
That trip was already loaded. My father got a job doing a industrial film, easily within his background but also when he wasn't very well, for a big meatpacking company, and ...... me, I was set to enter the convent as a postulant, a whole 'nother story told on a2k before, my freaked parents thinking the trip would be good for me. Freaked is my description, not theirs. It was a good decision, looking back, whatever their mixed views. I was the script girl. But there wasn't a script I then knew about, just the shot programming. It was a good industrial film at the time, my father no fool, but I am dismayed by the product now and he would be too.

Anyway, I learned how to drive highways on that trip, and that some film editors can be men to love, if only in my case from afar as I was treated correctly and kindly - but I still had the time of my life.
It was a gentle introduction to humor between women and men. The guys jokes were light in retrospect, but an entirely new thing to me.
I learned to play pool in downtown Omaha in some dive, and what a Las Vegas casino was like late at night and early morning.
I remember one of the guys, the one I had a crush on, disappeared some nights.
Remember dragging my father who had lost money he didn't have back to our room.
Seeing a jackrabbit on the golf course around 5 a.m.

So, anyway, re the pillow.

I sent it back to the hotel at some expense.
That may be on their records as a first.


I retracted my application to the Sisters (etc.)
My world opened up.



Very sadly now, I can see that my mother's take would have been that my father had lead me astray, thus cementing their disparance.

I was upright and moral at first. But, my older brother influenced me to steal. First, he told me he took an envelope containing a dollar bill out of a mail box. When he took it to the store, the clerk gave him two or three nickle candies for the buck. Then he pointed to a windup caterpillar tractor toy that was on someone's lawn. "Go get that so I can look at it," he told me. I complied. It was a marvelous piece of work. The tractor had clock-like works that made it run strong for a long time. "Put it back," he told me. "No. You put it back." So my brother compromised by taking the toy home. Well, there were other episodes. I don't really know that my brother bears any blame for what I took. First, it was one of the oversize Hershey bars. When I came back the next day, they caught me with a box of colored pencils in my pocket. One of them walked me home. My mom covered for me re my step dad. Next day I had to walk back in the store, on my own and give the man the cost of the mercandise. I must have been about eight.

Yeah, I did, but even now I'd be too embarrassed to talk about it.

I stole, in 1963, a 5 cent pkg of cinnamon toothpicks My mother made me go back with them and apologize for the theft I was mortified! I was 5 yrs old. I didn't even LIKE cinnamon toothpicks - they burned!

Thanks for the great stories!
Here's one of my favorites about me and my dad, which captures his personality a lot...

One Saturday morning, when I was about 10 or 11, my dad gave me a dollar before he left to go to work. He told me I was to take it and go to the barbershop and get a haircut. Somehow after he was gone and I started out to get my haircut, I got the idea in my head that I would much rather spend the dollar at Miss Lett's store. My friend Linwood's dad just happened to keep barber shears in the house, and Linwood just happened to know (he said ) how to use them. So, with the hasty agreement made that I would split the candy bounty with him, he commenced giving me a haircut. How difficult could a haircut be, anyway? You probably guessed - it didn't turn out so well. In fact, Linwood left a deep glaring bald spot on my head that you could see a from a block away.

When my dad got home, he took one look at me, asked me where I had got my hair cut, snatched me by the arm and said "come on!", and we were out the door to the shop I'd lied that I'd gotten a cut at. We ended up going to 3 different shops, where he would ask the barbers "Has this boy been in here today?"

He didn't whup my butt that night, but he made me strip naked and "wait for him in the bathroom while I pick out my belt". By the time he got to the bathroom, I was crying and pleading so pitifully that he just shook his head and said "Boy don't you ever lie to me about money again." I never did.

Never stole anything. Wasn't in my nature.

Did engage in some very minor vandalism -- similar in principle, I guess, but the usual county kid stuff. Busting up abandoned buildings and the like.

One time we were throwing rocks from a ridge at a tin-roofed shack down a manzanita-covered hillside. I through one that went straight through, and a guy came out and yelled at us. Ran off feeling like a complete asshole -- ****, I could've hurt the guy. Felt like going back to apologize, but never had the gumption and other things came along...

I never stole anything as a child, but a friend of mine stole a candy bar when we were about 10yrs old, and I was appalled. I told him he shouldn't do it, but he did it anyway. I never forgot and I never viewed him as the same person afterward.

It wasn't until I was in my 30's that I ever stole anything, and that was towels from the hotel because someone told me they expect you to steal them, so I rationalized it and did it. I never even thought about it until this stupid thread came along, and now I feel guilty that I've damaged my otherwise perfect record on non-theft. But I don't feel guilty enough to return the towels, especially since they have now turned into rags.

when i was 11, me and a buddy had our own pencil collections.
we were obsessed with finding any pencil that was not a #2.
so we looked for them everywhere at school.

one day i wandered into the library.
seemed deserted, so i checked the librarian's desk.
as i rifled through the drawers, i failed to hear the footsteps coming up behind me.
"just what do you think you're doing, young man?" or something to that effect.
busted!

felt guilty as hell about it, but don't think i got into any serious trouble.
young RP was scared straight that day in 1976, and decided right then and there not to pursue a life of crime...

I was about 13. I went to a department store with some friends. My mother had given me money to buy a scarf. I bought something else with the money. Then I got worried about going home without the scarf. I took a scarf I liked and went into a phone booth with three of my friends (talk about inconspicuous) and shoved the scarf in my bag.

I still feel uncomfortable about doing this. Never did it again.

Gum, 5, caught, whooped by dad and mom

Cycloptichorn

You're talking about those three bank jobs I assume... Funny thing, nothing ever happened on account of any of that, nobody likes to admit that a six year old knocked over their bank.

Yea I steal money from the Purse of my mother, Later on I caught... At that time I was about 6 years old.