Hey, Mr. Wiiiilson! I’m back from Vietnam. Let’s play.

Small pouches and long strands of beads line the end of the sand-colored folding table in the garage after being tossed out of the pockets of jeans that are held up by suspenders. A measuring tablet is laid out, cradling red and tan wooden beads for a forthcoming rosary. The white-haired, blue-eyed crafter, sifting through his collection that lives inside a retired Styrofoam to-go box, is stuck between what to put between the Hail Marys and the crucifixes — this piece is a new one for him.

He usually makes earrings and magnetic bracelets, but today he is figuring out the logistics of making a rosary for his younger brother Craig, who just became a minister.

What could be considered tedious to some is therapeutic for 74-year-old Dennis Crumpler. After all, jewelry crafting is what helped him stay grounded and relaxed after he got out of the Vietnam War. It’s part of what kept him occupied when he lived in-hospital during treatment for his Stage III prostate cancer 50 years later.

“I don’t have to think about things,” he says, his chin propped up on the palm of his hand.

When he needs to get up to find another storage box of beads ranging from jade to Swarovski, he won’t ask for help. From the time he could make his own decisions as a child, he’s had something on his agenda, something to catch his attention. Whether or not he uses the attitude he has or “flirts with you in front of your old man,” he does what he wants and doesn’t care what people think. He has had a variety of rough patches throughout his life, but he has a delicate craft to fall back on.

He’s just a stubborn old man who likes making jewelry, his granddaughter says.

Dennis gets by with making earrings of all kinds, leather and plastic adjustable bracelets, magnetic necklaces, and anything else he decides he wants to make. For him, jewelry making is mindless — by the time he calls it a day, he has 50-plus items ready for homes. And here’s the catch: he refuses to put a price on them; instead, he wants to give them away. It’s his way of giving back to the world that he has had a love-hate relationship with his entire life.

His senior yearbook photo has “Dennis ‘The Menace’ Crumpler”
scribbled across it, one of his high school nicknames. He was selected by his high school teachers to deliver the Class of 1961 baccalaureate speech, something that might be considered pretty serious for some, but just encouraged his charm in front of an even larger audience than his friends.

He might have fading white hair, a scruffy face, and some tanned age spots on his face and arms, but underneath his stout frame, Dennis is a kid at heart.

He saw a hat at the store one time that read “Over the Hill Hippie” and knew he had to have it. When Dennis needs his caffeine fix, he orders large caramel lattes at Starbucks where he asks the baristas to “empty the bottle” of caramel drizzle. He’ll wink at any lady who will look his way, and he’s not a stranger to flirting. His high school friends knew his pranks.
His army friends called him “Crumps,” which was tattooed with a sunglasses-wearing mouse on his right forearm along with “Beat-Nick” in 1962, a faded gray image weathered from the passing years.

But it all starts with a big-eared, freckled child in 1950s California with a long life ahead of him trying on many hats as a young farmer, a lifelong student with various interests, a seaman, a prankster, a father, a husband, an ex-husband, a grandfather, a cancer survivor, and jewelry maker.

Dennis was born out of wedlock in 1942 to young parents who couldn’t take care of a baby, so they gave him up for adoption to a couple that could and wanted to: Maryann and Howard Deloid Crumpler. They had a daughter, Colleen Renee, who was about 12 when her parents brought her baby brother home. They were relatively close until her death in 1987 from pancreatic cancer.

When Dennis was around 7 years old, Maryann divorced Howard, a full-blown, functioning alcoholic. Howard avoided the draft for the Second World War because he worked in essential services as an engineer for the Santa Fe railroad system. As an alcoholic, he was limited to that work, Dennis remembers.

When Maryann started working in homegoods production — similar to today’s Jo-Ann’s and Hobby Lobby — she taught Dennis how to sew, knit, and cross-stitch. Howard continued to work on railroads, which was good father-son bonding because when he was old enough, Dennis got to go to work with his dad on occasion.

“I used to go into the roundhouse (in Bakersfield),” Dennis says about the time he would spend with his father. “I learned how to play mahjong there.” Mahjong isn’t the only thing he learned on the railroad. When he was 10, he took a seven-hour trip from Needles to Bakersfield, California with his adoptive father, and he learned everything from blowing the train whistle to operating the dead man’s switch, as he calls it, which was the train’s emergency brake from one of his dad’s work friends who also worked as a fireman.

Maryann married Bud Plunkett in 1948, who became a second father to Dennis. “The Old Man” Bud served in World War II in the Corps of Engineers, and he saw combat when he and the rest of the men in his corps had to run gas to the U.S. tanks through German warfare and back across the field to their side. Dennis would see combat eventually, too.

When Bud came home from his cattle driving work, he showed Dennis how to fix a car; all those years under Generals Omar N. Bradley and George Patton weren’t going to waste just because he was out of the war, no-sir-ee. “I have fond memories of Bud,” Crumpler says. “He was gone for long periods of time, but when he was home, he would help me with everything.” Bud was a family man who was hard around the edges but loved his family fiercely. Dennis got to see a loving side even moreso when he had children of his own, Kimberly Lynn in 1967, Sean Michael in 1972, and baby Brandy in 1976, who had a special relationship with her “Buddy Wuddy,” as she called him.

“He taught her how to lick her finger and stick it in the sugar bowl, which really irritated my mother but it was all for a laugh,” Dennis laughed.

Because of Bud’s postwar career in cattle raising, he had connections around town, which he passed down to 15-year-old Dennis, who happened to be involved in his school’s chapter of Future Farmers of America (FFA). Their neighbor noticed that Dennis was starting to become more familiar with farm-work, so he offered Dennis a little piece of land where he and Bud built a corral for rabbits and rats, animals he would end up selling to state university research labs and local restaurants to make money in high school, precisely $900, from what he remembers.

When Dennis lived in Bakersfield with his adult daughter and her family, he bought nine chickens, two ducks, and two Kamikaze pheasants because “he liked the name and was fascinated by them,” says his 21-year-old granddaughter Janessa Byrom. After living in California for most of his life, he packed up with his daughter and her family last year to move to Bethel Heights — across the country, but a breath of fresh air. Living in Bakersfield, “burnout would be a polite word,” he says. In his new house in Bethel Heights, there’s a rooster and five chickens that live across the street, so the farm isn’t too far away.

While he was involved with FFA in high school, he also snuck in Glee Club practice for kicks and joined the Naval Reserve as a seaman apprentice during his junior year of high school, something he felt he had a calling for. The program was California Cadet Corps, which he describes as the beginning of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC).

As his senior year was approaching, he went to bootcamp in San Diego. As part of his training, he had to stand guard duty, and his shift happened to be from midnight to 4 in the morning at the wash racks. While he was standing on guard, two officers drunkenly drove through the base.

Dennis can’t tell this story without laughing, and he’d do it all over again if he could.

“I had a practice rifle with me, and I wanted to have a little fun,” he recalled. “‘Halt and be recognized! Halt and be recognized!’ they kept shouting. I hid behind the wall ready for them to come through and when they came ‘round, I leaped out, yelled and I put it (the rifle) right through the windshield. Well, it startled them and rolled the car. But I wasn’t written up for the windshield or the car.”

Instead, he was cited for damaging government property, which was not the machine he put his rifle through, but the rifle itself. “I scratched the rifle, it wasn’t big at all, but that was it. I didn’t hurt anyone. I went into the service knowing I had a job to do, but I was going to have fun.”

In 1962, a year after he graduated high school, he was a third-class petty officer stationed on the USS Hancock at Alameda air base in the San Francisco Bay. In A-school, the next step after boot camp, he was part of the explosive demolition crew: “I put bombs and bullets on planes.” The crew was even color-coordinated. He wore a red shirt. Engineers wore green. Flight deck crews wore yellow.

He was 19 and ornery, a trait that would hang on his coattails his whole life. One day onboard, he and one of his officers were down in the hangar bar working, and his executive officer kept calling him a son-of-a-bitch. After many requests to stop calling him that, Dennis popped him in the mouth.

“We had to go to Captain’s Mass, which isn’t a court martial, it’s all in-house, so I had a chance to speak my piece, and he thought it was all a joke, so right in front of the captain I said, ‘If you call me that one more time, I’ll come across this goddamn desk and toss you into the trashcan. So they asked me to wait outside, and you could tell it was a heated deal through the door. And then all of a sudden, he (the executive officer) came out and apologized to me. He apologized to me!”

The year after, on the way to Vietnam, he became a second-class petty officer, a higher position than where he was before. The ship was stationed in the Phillippines, and while the men were there, so was the British Navy (“you put Brits and Americans together there is going to be World War III!”). Dennis befriended a British seaman named McAllister. They were anchored at Subic Bay near the town of Olongapo  where they decided to take the night off and explore.

“If you wanna be adventurous,” Dennis advised, speaking as if it was then, “the barbecue meat on carts was something. It was monkey. You very seldom tried a dog. Yes, I tried it all.” Later that night, Dennis came back to his ship, and McAllister went to his. But something was different.

Not only did Dennis accidentally go up the officers’ gangway instead of his own, but he was dressed from head to toe in British naval uniform. The next morning, he was the only one on the U.S. flight deck wearing a British naval uniform. He was restricted to the ship for two weeks, but what was new? They were departing from land  anyways, so the consequence wasn’t a huge deal to him. “I mailed that uniform home, and I still have it to this day,” he said.

Dennis came home from the war in 1964. “I got out of Saigon and went to Japan, took me to NAS Alameda. From there, they took me to Oak Knolls (Naval Hospital).”

That’s where the darkness comes in. “I was a basketcase. I came back with an attitude. I had a jaded sense of humanity.” He stops there, not wanting to go any further. “Simple as that.” So he got a hobby.

According to a 1978 study by Charles R. Figley about stress disorders in Vietnam war veterans, 58 percent of veterans experienced some sort of socialization problem because they did not have satisfying interests or hobbies. Because Dennis came out of the war a self-proclaimed basketcase, he decided on something new: jewelry.

Dennis is a man of many pastimes. He writes haikus, he makes pottery and writes out glaze recipes for friends, he builds model trains, planes, and naval ships — he was even a part of a model train building club when he lived in Bakersfield — and next to making jewelry, one of his favorite hobbies is photography, which started as a teenager.

He stands in his garage in Bethel Heights, showing off his most recent purchase, a pinhole camera, and his old friend, a Honeywell Pentax.

“This one went to Vietnam with me,” he says as he holds it up to his face and aims to shoot. “It still works just fine.”

After he left the war he enrolled in Bakersfield Junior College in August 1965 and had a photography class with a girl named Patricia Fogliasso. They hit it off and were married March 4, 1966. But it wasn’t easy; her parents were not fans of their daughter’s new husband.

“They were just against me,” Dennis says with forlorn eyes. From telling Pat she had to take birth control so she wouldn’t have his children to insisting they live in separate houses, Pat’s mother did what she could to separate the couple. Because of this, there was an instance when Dennis got in a fight with Mr. Fogliasso that ended in the police being called, and then explaining to Pat’s father that the married couple could do as they please, which meant they needed to live together.

Dennis has struggled with anger problems since he came back to the United States from overseas. His vision of life had changed, and he didn’t get the proper care he needed when he stayed in the Oak Knolls Naval Hospital once he was discharged. He learned how to handle it, but there were times he couldn’t control his anger, especially in fights with Pat.

“There was fighting throughout our marriage,” he says. “I would try to hold my temper and go into another room so we could talk about whatever it was later, but she knew which buttons to push, and she would.”

About 30 years ago, one of the last times he can remember being at his breaking point, he had an argument that he says Pat wouldn’t leave alone. He started pounding a countertop and when he got up to walk away, his hand was dripping blood because he had shattered a glass that was in his fist’s path.

“I was a very angry person.  I never beat my wife up, bruised her, had the cops called out on me, but I did do two things I regret to this day,” he says, his eyes searching the room for focus. “I have punched her in the shoulder, and I shoved her. I was angry, and it wasn’t right.”

When leaders of their non-denominational Christian church found out about the Crumplers’ failing marriage, they offered to pay for counseling. Dennis was advised not to file for divorce so they could work it out, and also because that “would have given her the ammunition to say I walked out,” Dennis says. Pat’s sister got her into counseling services with the Alliance for Family Counseling and Abuse because she refused to go to counseling with him.

“We lived together for two years before she filed,” he says. “She had a bedroom in the back of the house, I had one in the front of the house. If I was in the front room, she would not come in there. I liked to read, even if I was reading a book with some light music on, she wouldn’t come in.”

Dennis and Pat were married for 27 and a half years before she presented him with divorce papers in November 1996, right around his 54th birthday. Pat was not available to comment on their marriage.

“She got mad at me and to this day I don’t know why.”

Pat still attends counseling as she has for the past 21 years, according to her granddaughter. Dennis is no longer in counseling and still wears his silver wedding band.

Janessa Byrom, 21, is Dennis’ closest grandchild and his youngest daughter Brandy’s daughter, and she says she is just like him.

“We’re both stubborn and we joke around a lot,” she says. “I love my grandfather, but I don’t take a lot of his crap.”

Her Heepaw, as he is known to his family, has never screamed out of anger in front of her, but he does get a teenage attitude. She knows of his anger issues, and she has a relationship with both of her grandparents (Pat is known as MeMe, and Janessa will usually wake up to texts full of emojis from her).

“I know he was verbally aggressive, but he has gotten a lot better,” she says. “He takes all the steps to not get to that point.” What helps him is spending time with family, which she is intentional doing with him, partly because of how close they are, and partly to get him out of the house.

“He likes going outdoors, but it’s hard for him to,” she says. It’s not just age that hinders him.

Dennis was diagnosed with Stage III prostate cancer in October 2013 after months of MRIs, X-rays and prostate check procedures at the West Los Angeles Veterans Administration Medical Center. He had been having trouble using the bathroom and decided to go get it looked at by his doctors.

A month later, he began radiation treatment, and made arrangements to live in the housing facilities typically reserved for recovering addicts. He lived there during the week and would go home to Bakersfield — 115 miles away — on weekends, non-treatment days, by bus. He was in treatment until mid-January 2014, and as far as he knows he is still cancer-free.

But the pain didn’t end — a year later, he was having issues urinating because scar tissue was “plugging it up,” he says. He went through the procedures once more, and he ended up having a catheter placed, which has caused urinary tract infections, which prevent him from getting a surgery to heal everything, and on top of this, he is drug resistant to nine antibiotics, and one was prescribed to him for the infection, which he has had since the catheter was placed.

He attends the Northwest Arkansas Veterans Administration Medical Center now, but the news he receives isn’t usually good, and that flares up his anger.

“I worked so hard during the divorce to learn how to control and manage my anger. I’m just frustrated. I get upset with this merry-go-round they have me on. “I haven’t given up on life, there’s too many damn things I want to do. But I’m done with this. I don’t want to be frustrated.”

Because of the radiation and stacked medical bills, Janessa’s mother Brandy and her husband Tommy moved Dennis in with them, whom he still lives with today.

“He just couldn’t live on his own, so we moved him in so we could drive him down there (to the Los Angeles hospital) and help him take care of everything. He had a lot of medications he had to take at one point… He has drawers full of medication that they’ve given him for pain,” Janessa says. “If he gets bad news from the V.A. or feels like nobody wants him around, he gets in these moods, and he does his own thing.”

Only a fraction of the beads Dennis has.

Temporary workstation in the garage.

Making jewelry isn’t something that helps Dennis control his anger, but it is something that aided him once he got out of the war, especially with the lack of proper care he received. He gets his disability through the V.A. and social security to make his income. Along with those, he received a settlement from the V.A. that made up for the lack of medical care veterans like Dennis needed when they got out of the war, when it wasn’t available, Janessa says.

“He bought himself a new car, and helped pay off some medical expenses, stuff like that,” she says.

When Dennis, Janessa and their family moved to Bethel Heights for job opportunities, their local barista-turned-friend Autumn Garnica, 21, helped them load the U-Haul. She didn’t realize Dennis was Brandy’s dad until much later into their friendship, and after going through a bad breakup, she decided to move to Arkansas, too.

“I called Brandy, and she helped,” and before long, Autumn was moved into one of the four bedrooms in their little Bethel Heights home. She calls Dennis Heepaw, too, and instead of butting heads with him like Janessa, she sarcastically rolls her eyes at him, most of the time. One day she asked him for a ride home from work.

“I said, ‘No, I’m busy around that time,’ and she asked me what I was doing,’” Dennis says with a grin on his face. “I said back to her, ‘I’m picking up my friend from work.’ I thought it was so funny, she just huffed.” That’s their relationship in a nutshell.

“Dennis is a little bit of a hoarder,” Autumn says when thinking about his room. He has boxes of beads for his jewelry, cameras, and model trains that are in the process of being built.

“Beads. Trains. Cameras. Those are his three main hobbies,” Janessa says. When he isn’t involved with those things, he’s writing poetry. She would know, he wrote an essay about “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe for her during her senior year of high school. She came home from class that day with an assignment, and he “wanted to play around with it,” she says.

They got an A on the paper.

When he isn’t assisting his granddaughter with high school papers, he is just getting through the days on practical jokes, sweet-as-can-be caramel lattes, and haiku-writing — another written medium he gets a thrill out of. Shiny Purple silk/Skirt up over her head, he writes. It leaves me laughing.

Back in the garage, he remembers fights with his wife by laughing through the pain, and when he talks about his glory days, he has a twinkle in his eye. He might have experienced a debilitating war firsthand, had cancer and radiation, gone through a nasty divorce and still can’t get the surgery that he wants, but he isn’t letting anything hold him down for too long.

Dennis the Menace is all grown up, and he is still causing a ruckus.

---

This article was updated at 1:10 p.m. March 7, 2017.