Crime of Franklin E. Zaring Sr. My maternal grandfather
apparently was not a very nice guy - at least when he was drinking. When he was 21, got my grandmother pregnant, married her in 1920 when she was
only 15, and my mother was born about 5 months later. Now I know people got married at a young age in the early 20th century, but there's a big difference between a 21 year old man and a girl of 15. My grandmother also discovered he was an abusive alcoholic. In fact the only thing I remember her telling me about him was "he got really mean when he was drunk." He abandoned my grandmother and her two small
children in the early 1920s and disappeared (both in real life and in government documents) on and off throughout the years. For a long time I had nothing on this man between his 1937 application for a social security number and his death in 1964, but I soon learned more about him than I really wanted to know (not really...I want to know everything, but what I did learned was a shocker.)
While browsing the Colorado State
Archives website one day, I found an index of prisoners who spent time in the Colorado State Penitentiary. As I usually do whenever I find a new index of some kind, I look for all
of my main family names just to see if luck will shine on me. In this case I found a name strikingly similar to my grandfather's - the name I found was Franklin Earl Zarling with a prisoner number 28869. I figured 
there was little to lose so I ordered up the record. I knew this was a long shot, but I had to check it out. A couple of weeks later I received a big manila envelop in the mail with a couple of pages copied out of a ledger used to record when I prisoner arrived and when he/she left prison...AND a CD with mugshots!
The first thing I did was put that CD into my computer and when I clicked on one of the files, up came a mugshot of my grandfather Franklin Earl Zaring - this was pretty exciting stuff! I pulled out the prison ledger and learned quite a bit of new information about my grandfather. I learned he was in the Navy for a year during World War 1; joined the Army in 1942 and was discharged in 1943; joined the Navy again in 1943 and was discharged in 1944; he was convicted of his crime in February 1955 and sentenced to 2-8 years; he was released on parole in June 1956; and when he left prison, the ledger page listed where he was going to live. Oh, the ledger page also stated what his crime was.
The big mystery: When the possibility arose, before I ordered the record, that this was my grandfather I began imagining what the crime was. I was hoping it was robbing a bank, or maybe involved in organized crime - something cool. Unfortunately my grandfather was not in the "cool" class of criminal. The ledger says his crime was "attempting to take indecent liberties" with no additional explanation. This is the big mystery...just what the heck does this mean? What "indecent liberties" did my grandfather attempt to take getting himself sentenced to 2-8 years in prison? When I searched for "attempting to take indecent liberties" in Google the word following the phrase was either child or minor, but the prison ledger page makes no distinction between an adult or child. Since he was a drunk, I can picture him in a bar trying to push himself onto a woman and taking it way too far, but I can't imaging him doing this with a child. How was this phrase "attempting to take indecent liberties" used in the mid 1950s? So far I've had no luck locating the court records associated with his trial, but I would sure like to know exactly what he did.
