## Lovelady, Texas: The Man Charles Became
Charles Voyde Harrelson was born on July 23, 1938, in Lovelady, Texas — a small town in Houston County in East Texas, the kind of place that has been economically marginal for most of its history and that has exported people, for generations, to the larger cities of the state and the country. He was the youngest of six children. Members of his extended family worked in law enforcement, which is the kind of biographical detail that invites symmetry — the youngest son of a family with law-and-order roots becoming the most wanted criminal the family produced — without being the kind of detail that explains anything.
He served briefly in the United States Navy in the 1950s, which again provides context without explanation: a young man from a small East Texas town who went into the military, came out, and found himself without a clear direction. What he found, in the absence of direction, was a facility for selling things. He worked as an encyclopedia salesman in California in the late 1950s, which was a specific kind of work in that era — door-to-door, performance-based, reliant on the salesman’s ability to charm strangers in their own homes and convert that charm into a purchase. Charles Harrelson appears to have been very good at this. He was charismatic, articulate, and capable of making people like him in very short order.
He was also, almost from the beginning of his adult life, capable of breaking the law. He was charged with robbery in 1959 in California and convicted of armed robbery in 1960, sentenced to five years, of which he served only a fraction before being released. The robbery conviction was the first entry in a criminal record that would, over the subsequent two decades, grow into something remarkable.