While reading about Charles Manson for another article (Self Portrait of a Madman: Charles Manson), I ran into several interesting facts about him that I had never heard before.  His life has been under extreme scrutiny in the last four decades since he has been incarcerated for multiple killings.  I guess people just want to have some sort of understanding of how someone could become like him.  This article and the facts within it are not an excuse for the kind of person he has become merely a list of weird facts of his childhood.  While there has been much rumor and speculation of his life, I’ve tried to ensure that the list only contains items which have been reported by multiple sources, hopefully Manson himself.

Charles Manson is not the name he was born with

In fact for the first few weeks after he was born, he was known as “No Name Maddox”.  When his mother did get around to legally naming him, his name was Charles Milles Maddox.  His last name did not become Manson until after his mother married William Manson and his mother gave him the surname.  While the marriage did not last, his last name did.

He was once traded for beer

Manson relates the following story:  “Mom was in a cafe one afternoon with me on her lap. The waitress, a would-be mother without a child of her own, jokingly told my Mom she’d buy me from her. Mom replied, ‘A pitcher of beer and he’s yours.’ The waitress set up the beer, Mom stuck around long enough to finish it off and left the place without me. Several days later my uncle had to search the town for the waitress and take me home.”

He wore a dress on his first day to school

After his mother was incarcerated for robbery, Charles was shuffled off to various relatives.  The uncle that he was living with when school started decided he was too feminine and made him wear a dress to school.  Manson wrote:  “Grandmom said I don’t fight – I didn’t fight – my uncle beat me with a douch bag and no fight.  Then he put a red dress on me and said if you gonna be a girl, dress like a girl.  If I remember fighting and fighting and fighting.  Reckon I’ll ever get this red dress off.”

He describes his childhood as only have one joyful event

This was his mother’s physical embrace of him upon her release from prison.  He is quoted as saying “I loved my mother.  She’s a good girl” in one instance and “I punched my mother out once” in another.

His mother’s boyfriend was chosen over him

Charles and his mother were briefly reunited after her release from prison.  The family reunion was short lived because his mother Kathleen’s boyfriend did not want to have any children around.  There upon she tried to release Charles to a foster home.  When this did not work, he was sent to Gibault’s school for boys in Indiana.

He was in the paper in Indiana as an example of a rehabilitated youth

The title of the article was “Boy leaves ’sinful’ home for new life in Boy’s Town”.  He was 14 years old in this picture and escaped from Boy’s Town 3 days later.

He was illiterate at the age of 17

In 1951 after another escape from an institution, he was arrested with two other boys and sent to the National Training School for Boys in Washington, D.C.  While there, he underwent several tests including an IQ test and an aptitude test.  These tests resulted in him being classified as illiterate with an IQ of 109.  They determined that his aptitude for everything except music was average.  He was later testsed as an adult of having an IQ of 122.

His illegitimacy and short height caused feelings of inferiority

A psychiatrist who examined him in 1951 says this of the youth:  “the marked degree of rejection, instability and psychic trauma. His illegitimacy, small physical size and lack of parental love caused him to constantly strive for status with the other boys. This could add up to a fairly slick institutionalized youth but one is left with the feeling that behind all this lies an extremely sensitive boy who has not yet given up in terms of securing some kind of love and affection from the world.”

Manson is quoted as saying this of his illigetimacy:  “I was borned illigetimately.  That put me on the wrong side of the law.”

He spent most of his youth institutionalized

Manson is quoted as saying: “I have been punished since I was ten years old.  I’ve been in every reform school you’ve got across the country.”  He was, in fact, in the system in one form or another on and off since the age of ten.  He learned to work the system and it became his home.  When he was released in 1967 before forming “The Family”, he had spent more than half of his life behind bars.  He actually did not want to be released.  He had become so used to jail life that he asked to be kept there.  He has said “I understand jail so I understand myself so I can deal with that.”  Also, “I said I can’t handle the maniacs outside, let me back in.”

He never knew his father

His father’s name would appear to be Colonel Scott.  In 1937, an agreed judgement was made in response to a bastardy suit filed by Manson’s mother.  In this suit, she claimed Colonel Scott was the father and was awarded child support payments from him.  He never made one payment and is widely believed to have never been a part of Charles’ life at all.

Conversely, Vincent Bugliosi suggests in his book Helter Skelter that Manson’s father may have been a black man.  He was lead to believe this by some of the early paperwork filed in Manson’s institutionalized days.  Manson vehemently denied this assertion although it does bring into question Manson’s ideologies of race and race wars.

Manson is quoted as saying of his father:  “My father is the jailhouse. My father is your system…. I am only what you made me. I am only a reflection of you.”