Growing up, you know, it's
average childhood, you know,
this whole Manson thing
didn't occupy any of my time,
it was, 99.9% of my life was
normal as anybody else's,
and there's that one little
tenth of a percent that,
that things would come up.
And everybody has that, really.
I mean, everybody has a little
something in their history
that they keep in the closet.
 
Spent a lot of time in
the woods, in the water,
and not married, kind of an
average guy from up north.
I served in 1986, I went to basic training
and I spent most of my time in Germany.
I've been management,
I've been--I've been,
I was self-employed for a lot of years.
We're doing a lot of, we're
trying to be self-sustaining.
So I wouldn't call it
farming, but planting
and taking care of animals
and that sort of thing.
My life's been easy.
Yeah, oh yeah.
I make things easy.
I don't get too upset
about too many things.
 
Things fell apart in California.
I would've ended up in a foster system,
and Lord knows what coulda happened there,
but my grandparents took
me in and treated me
probably better than
their own kids
and George and Elsie gave me what I needed
to survive and thrive, and made sure
that I was doing the right thing.
I think they wanted to,
to get rid of the Manson name
because of school, and make
me a little more normal,
you know, so I wasn't
being pestered or bullied,
or that sort of thing, which
didn't happen very much.
I would expect these calls
every Sunday from Mary,
and of course that leads to questions.
Okay, that's my real mother,
who's my real father, and,
and they never, never would lie to me.
They would, they would tell
me and I'd ask 'em to tell me
about him.
Oh, he's a crazy guy, and
I don't think they lied.
They told me what I needed to hear.
Back in, I wanna say, I was
nine, so it would've been 1977,
I believe, I got a letter from him.
Grandmother gave it to me
and allowed me to read it,
and I read it and then I think
she asked me to tear it up,
or she said, "Won't you just tear it up?"
And I think symbolically, that
was something that she was
pushing me to do.
Well, after Charlie's
passing, it turned out
she had made a copy of that
letter, and it was kind of
in the family's hands,
and I received it back
after Charlie died.
Charlie had a unique way of
talking, and some of the way he,
some of the things he was
saying would make it sound bad,
but now as a 50-year-old
versus a 9-year-old,
I don't think he meant
it that way, you know.
For instance, he said,
"Your grandmother is a horse
with large teeth."
Which, yeah, that doesn't sound
like a very flattering thing
to say, but Charlie loved horses.
Horses are strong, and
she was a strong woman,
and she had a bite.
Everything that Charlie
said, that I've seen,
you had to read into it a little bit.
You had to think about what he was saying,
you couldn't just
dismiss him as babbling,
because there's some truth
into what he's saying in those babbles.
Growing up, I knew that my
mother was incarcerated,
I knew it was for a
robbery, and I guess that's
the long and short of it.
I got to meet her, I
would guess nine or ten,
somewhere in that area.
She would send things.
She would make things.
I still have a number of different murals
and different things she
would make and send, so
we're closer than we've
ever been, I would say.
She lives for the days,
she's, I mean, very active
and enjoying life, enjoying retirement.
 
People would ask questions,
and I knew so little,
I never read Helter Skelter,
I never read any books,
I never saw any movies.
I buried my head in the sand,
as far as that's concerned.
Doesn't matter how deep
you bury your head,
you're gonna, you're gonna
hear about Charles Manson.
Fifty years now, I see why
people are still interested.
The sex, the drugs, the
fame, the notoriety.
I think the public has
been fed some untruths.
And this whole thing has
been glorified and glamified
and blown out of proportion.
And do we believe in brainwashed zombies,
out killing people?
I mean, is he 100%
responsible for these crimes?
This Helter Skelter thing just,
when you look into it deeply
it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
I believe the unanswered questions are,
the big one is, why were
these crimes committed?
I don't believe there was
an impending race war,
or I don't believe
Charlie believed there was
an impending race war.
Charlie saw some things
while he was in prison,
he was in prison with the
Muslims and the Black Panthers,
and I'm sure he heard a lot of rhetoric,
but was he actually trying
to start a race war?
I don't think so.
He did a lot of petty crimes
and did a lot of hard time
for these petty crimes.
In the time that he got out
until this all happened,
I think he probably
really enjoyed himself.
Living free, and a lot of
girls around, good parties,
he's playing his music.
I don't think he would've
thrown that away for silliness.
Charlie's music is, is good.
It's folky, it's fun to listen to.
"Garbage Dump" is a fun one,
I don't know if you know any of these.
 
♪ Garbage dump, oh, garbage dump, ♪
♪ Why do they call you a
garbage dump? ♪
♪ That sums it up in
one big lump ♪
Yeah, I do know a lot of the words.
 
Charlie spent a lot of his
life being kind of a commodity,
selling the--they sold movies,
they sold books, sold papers.
Even in death, they
were selling his ashes,
they were selling videos of his body.
I don't think that a person in death
should be exploited like that.
He was embalmed, pictures
for TMZ, for a documentary.
After he was cremated,
the ashes have been sold,
and used in paintings and tattoos now,
and really just kind
of, to me, disrespected.
What I think of Charlie
now is, is what happened
was blown out of proportion.
I believe he went through
a lot in his lifetime,
before, during, and after these incidents.
I think 95% of the public looks at Charlie
as this mass-murdering dog,
and I don't believe that
that's who he was.
I've definitely come to
greater peace with him.
I don't have those,
the negative feelings
that I had at one time.
I wish I would've given
him a chance, yeah.
Yeah, I wish I would've
at least got to know
him a little bit, yeah.
 
