An American approach to helping, one at a time

LOS ANGELES — The worst day of Sugar Bear's 55 years was one of the days — there have been many of them — when he got out of prison. In the early 1990s, in a prison where persons whose sentences have ended and are being released, and who see those whose sentences are just beginning, he saw one of his sons coming in.

Generational recidivism is not unusual in Sugar Bear's world of fatherlessness. His son, who was convicted of selling drugs, is still incarcerated because he has not been a model prisoner. He is an apple that did not fall far from the tree.

Sugar Bear — few call him Robert Lewis Jackson — was a precocious lawbreaker. His first arrest — "for GTA" (grand theft auto), he explains — involved a 1959 Chevy El Camino. He remembers that it was orange. He pulled off the freeway, into a gas station, and climbed down from the vehicle. The police who apprehended him there were startled. He was almost 5.

Really. LAPD records confirm this. He drove the El Camino by sitting on a large pillow so he could see out the windshield and using a long stick to work the pedals.

Born to an unmarried, mentally ill prostitute, he acquired his interest in driving from his grandfather, who would drive around the block with Sugar Bear in his lap. Not until Sugar Bear was 25 did he learn that his grandfather was his father, too, having had a sexual relationship with Sugar Bear's mother.

Sugar Bear grew up mostly on the streets, episodically drifting into and out of the care, such as it was, of various female relatives. He kept moving on because one relative was beaten to death in an alley, another killed by a shotgun blast, another had Drano poured in her eyes for reasons Sugar Bear does not remember. He supported himself gathering discarded bottles for their deposits, and cadging hamburgers and peanut butter sandwiches from sympathetic strangers.

His life in the nation's entertainment capital included the exciting night of Dec. 11, 1964, when he was outside the motel when singer Sam ("You Send Me") Cooke was fatally shot. Sugar Bear was 8.

Although he has never been married, he has five children, and has been shot only once. He says he "did juvenile time" but managed, largely because he was an athlete, to graduate from high school. After that, he was incarcerated five times, for sentences ranging from six months to 11 years. He says he was implicated in "a 187" — murder of a corrections officer — but was exonerated. Then his life's gyrations intersected with some benevolent institutions.