Will Hurd's Parents: Meet Robert and Mary Alice Hurd

My mother, Mary Alice Knapp, grew up in the small town of Alexandria, Indiana. Her parents divorced when my mom was in high school. And her mother, my grandma, moved to Los Angeles following the divorce.

After graduating from high school in 1962, my mom, who could sew, knit, and crochet, worked Bullock’s in Fabrics & Notions (buttons, thread, and sewing tools).

Mary Alice eventually worked her way up to be the Head Buyer in Fabrics & Notions. My mom rose in her career to where she was making buying decisions for most of the stores in Bullock’s greater L.A. empire.

When most salesmen at Bullock’s met my mother, they tended to dismiss her as an inexperienced girl, but soon realized she knew more about their products than they did.

One company that sold to Mary Alice’s department was Coats & Clark, and its account manager thought Mary Alice was a straight-up pain in the ass. So he handed off the Bullock’s account to a new trainee who was the first Black salesman Coats had ever hired — my dad, Bob Hurd.

My father supported a family of five as a traveling textile salesman. In our house, there wasn’t much money, but there was a lot of love.

My older brother, Chuck, says we were always broke, but I never realized that. I would have called us lower middle-class.

Yes, my mother made a lot of our clothes, but I figured it was because she was a good seamstress.

Yes, I knew what it was like to put water in my cereal because we didn’t have milk, but I thought it was because we couldn’t get to the grocery store.

We did have two cars — a company car for my dad, and his first company car that he bought on the cheap. He was proud of those cars.

We didn’t have cable, but we had a nice TV, which allowed me to take advantage of the Golden Age of cartoons in the early ’80s. I was especially hooked on the Challenge of the GoBots, about two warring factions of robots that could turn into vehicles. After one riveting episode in 1985, I decided that I needed a new GoBot toy. My father’s blunt response to my entreaty: “You ain’t getting a fucking robot.”

Indignant at this injustice, I stormed out of the house. For some unknown reason, I came to the conclusion that the only remedy was to pick up a rock and, in clear eight-year-old chicken scratch, etch onto the hood of my dad’s company car: “I want Gobot.”

When my dad discovered my declaration, I claimed I wrote it with a clump of dirt and was unaware of a rock hidden inside. The incident resulted in the second-worst whipping I’d received in my life (the first was when the collective disobedience of my siblings and I concluded with my sister cutting up the belt that was my father’s preferred tool to administer consequences). While my dad was pissed that he was going to have to pay a body shop to fix my handiwork, he was angrier that I lied.

I learned that day the consequences of not heeding my father’s advice— physical pain, disappointing someone I loved, and feeling the shame of losing the trust of people I cared about.

With that act, my father gave me my first lesson about being honest and doing the right thing.