This ran here back on June 17, 2013…
As I've mentioned here the other day, my father had this horrible, horrible job at the Internal Revenue Service. If another kid at school pulled the old "My dad can beat up your dad" line, I'd fire back with "Oh, yeah? Well, my dad can audit your dad!"
But that was a hollow threat as mine was not an accountant. Matter of fact, he really didn't know how to make out tax forms any better than most people. Friends and family members would ask him to do their 1040s for them and rather than say no — he hated to say no to anyone about anything — he'd take them on and then my mother would sit down with the manual and figure out how to fill in the forms. She sort of enjoyed it because then she got to see how much money everyone made.
My father's position with the I.R.S. was as follows: If you hadn't paid your taxes in, oh, more than five years…or if an auditor had ruled that you owed more taxes and you hadn't coughed up yet…you'd receive a visit from my father. So he went through life with a lot of people hating to see him and then taking their anger (often, self-anger) out on him.
His usual mission was to negotiate some sort of payment plan with you…but he had no power to sign off on one. He'd go over your finances and suggest, "Well, can you pay thirty dollars a week?" That would be a huge hardship for you at that point but you'd grudgingly agree to do without lunch on weekends so you could pay the thirty. Then he'd go to his superior who'd look at the proposed plan and say, "No. Tell them it has to be fifty!" And he'd have to return to you with the bad news.
You can probably name more painful tasks than that…just nothing that would have caused my father more grief. He simply felt too sorry for people who were in financial trouble, especially if it wasn't their fault and if they had kids to feed. Few things made him more upset than a case where children were suffering because their parents were spending all their money on liquor or hookers or anything of the sort.
And one of those other few things began in 1969 when a man named Richard M. Nixon took office. During those years, the policy in his office — dictated from on high — was to sock it to lower-income folks and to let the rich ones, especially Republican donors, off lightly. He'd come home some days and say, "Another poor person has to pay more so that one of Nixon's multi-millionaire friends can pay nothing." One time, I heard him yelling in the living room and rushed out to see what he was yelling about.
The news was showing a party that the then-president had thrown at his "Western White House" in San Clemente. It was Nixon surrounded by many of his friends and my father was pointing at certain of those friends and saying, "I had a case on that one and that one and that one…" Some of this came out in the Watergate Hearings and it made him very happy. A few years ago, I met John Dean, the Nixon lawyer who'd spilled most of the beans, and I thanked him for doing that. On behalf of my late father.
My male parent was supposed to keep his cases confidential, even from his family, but I occasionally heard about one. He had a case — a very long, ugly case — against a man who was prominent in the animation business. It dragged on for a few years with my father playing Inspector Javert to the animator's Jean Valjean but it was finally settled and I think the fellow lost his house in the process. Two decades later at a cartoon festival, June Foray introduced me to the animator and he stared at me for a long second.
"Evanier…" he muttered, trying to remember. "I knew someone once with that name…"
"Oh, it's a very common name," I quickly told him. "I run into ten or twenty Evaniers a day." (I think there are less than twenty in the entire country…) He never did place it.
There were other cases on famous people, including a prominent TV right-winger who scolded liberals for not loving their country enough. My father seriously pondered ways to "leak" to the press how though this fellow may have loved America, he was doing everything possible to never pay it a dime. Ultimately though, Bernard Evanier was incapable of doing anything illegal or unethical…and to be honest, a little afraid of losing the only job he thought he could do or get.
My favorite case of his that I knew about involved a rather shoddy (but beloved by many) amusement facility out in Santa Monica called Pacific Ocean Park. It was in operation out there from 1958 to 1967. What happened in 1967? My father closed it down.
Or rather, he helped close it down. The owners owed the government millions. The place was falling apart and a lot of the rides were still operating even though the departments that monitor such things said they were on the verge of being declared unsafe. Making the necessary repairs would have cost more than P.O.P. could be expected to gross over the next few years. My father attempted to negotiate a deal where the owners would be able to remodel the park and bring its attractions up to code, make a profit and then pay their back taxes…but the math simply wouldn't work. When it all fell apart, the word came from above: Shut 'er down! And one morning, a veritable S.W.A.T. team of taxmen did just that.
My father had to get up at 5:30 AM to be there at seven when they moved in. Every entrance had to be padlocked and posted with a notice that the owners would face felony charges if they touched the locks or attempted to gain entrance. That was the easy part. The tough one was that everything in the park had to be inventoried and all the perishable goods (ice cream, hot dogs, etc.) had to be removed from the premises. He came home that night around 10 PM, dead tired but proclaiming proudly, "We did it."
Before he collapsed into bed, he watched the 11:00 local news where the shutdown was the lead story. In it, he heard people denouncing the "Gestapo tactics" of the I.R.S. agents who'd taken away their beloved playground…and there he was on the screen, being likened to Nazis for doing his job, trying to collect what was owed. It was not one of my father's happier evenings.
He hated being thought of a villain by anyone. He knew it came with the job and he understood why people despised the Internal Revenue Service. He said, "I hate paying my bills too but I do it." A few days later, he sat me down for a father-to-offspring chat in which he repeated something he'd said to me on several previous occasions: "Do whatever you want with your life, son. Just make sure you can make a living at it and you love it."
I'd already told him that I intended to be a professional writer…a goal I set around age six and never really considered changing. I sometimes changed my mind about what I'd be a professional writer of and there was a point in there when I wanted to be a writer-cartoonist — though never a cartoonist without the writer part. But I couldn't conceive of a future in which I wasn't a writer. I still can't.
A few years after that particular talk with him, I graduated high school and got serious about pursuing my long-planned profession. I got lucky right away. My first week trying in earnest, I made about three times as much money as my father was then making per week. But it took a while before I convinced him that I could really do it on a regular basis.