BOBBY AND TRACEY
Bobby Bogle, one of Rooster's sons, has been locked behind bars for most of his life since he was 12. Sitting on his steel bunk in the Oregon State Penitentiary, the state's maximum security prison, Bobby could only remember one Christmas when his father gave him a present - a heavy metal wrench wrapped in a plain brown paper bag presented with no explanation. He was only four years old at the time and was momentarily puzzled by the gift. But he knew from family lore that his father had served prison time in Texas for burglary and that Rooster like to boast about his criminal record. So Bobby figured his father had given him a burglar's tool.
Bobby (center) and Tracey (right). Oregon State Penitentiary
Before dawn on Christmas day, he snuck out of his house and went to the neighborhood convenience store, using the wrench to pry open a lock on a stack of Coca Cola bottles. After he carried them home for a Christmas celebration, Rooster congratulated him, as if he had just gotten a school report card with straight A's. "My father had been encouraging us to steal practically since I was born," Bobby later said. "He told us stealing was good. So I had wanted to go prison from the time I was a young boy to uphold our family honor."
Bobby's younger brother, Tracey, recalled that one of the happiest moments of his life occurred one evening when he was eight years old and he and Bobby managed to sneak into the attic of a bar. They hid there till closing time, then climbed back down the stairs into the deserted barroom and helped themselves to all the money in the cash register. They walked home to the trailer they were sharing with their mother, Kathy, and dumped a sack of bills on her sleeping head. That woke her up and made her shriek with joy. Even many years later, when Tracey was in prison himself, just telling that story made him laugh so hard that his body shook with pleasure and tears rolled down his cheeks. Like Bobby, Tracey dropped out of school after the eighth grade, and graduated instead to more serious crime. They were arrested and sentenced to long prison terms for jointly kidnapping, assaulting, and robbing a couple in a dispute over a car detailing business Bobby claimed to own. When faced with a choice, the brothers always seemed to make the wrong one. "What you are raised with, you grow to become," Tracey explained. Both brothers are still in prison.