## What He Left Behind
When Charles Harrelson walked out in 1968, Woody was seven years old. The departure was not accompanied by a dramatic scene — or if it was, Woody has not described one. What the departure produced was a single-parent household, anchored by Diane Harrelson, who was working as a legal secretary to support herself and three sons. The family was poor, by Woody’s own description: they relied on his mother’s wages, which were the wages of a legal secretary in the 1960s, and those wages were enough to sustain the household without being enough to make life comfortable or secure.
Diane eventually moved the family back to Lebanon, Ohio — her hometown in southwestern Ohio, a small city in Warren County that is the kind of place American small cities were in the 1970s: post-industrial, modest, with the specific texture of a place where the people who stayed were held by family rather than by economic opportunity. Woody attended Lebanon High School and graduated in 1979.
His childhood, in the accounts he has given of it, was shaped by the absence of his father and by the specific character that absence took. Charles was not simply absent — he was absent and then, before Woody finished high school, famous for reasons that had nothing to do with anything that could be publicly claimed as a source of pride. The news came to Woody by radio, according to the account documented in multiple sources: he heard a broadcast about a murder trial involving a man named Charles V. Harrelson, and he asked his mother about it, and she confirmed the connection.