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Nabbed! The Groomgrab¹ Phenomenon at the Turn of the Millennium

For fulfillment of the requirements of SOCI 917, ‘Methodologies, Dichotomies, Paradoxes, Iconographics, and Uncomfortable Shoes: The Millennial Nonsense and Why Everyone Made Such a Big Deal Out of It Instead of Pretending It Was Just Another Stupid Year, Which It Was.’ Professor Megan Woodhall/Sjoboen-Pimlico/Wren, Instructor, University of Western Los Angeles, Including Brentwood, Malibu, Santa Monica, and Scattered Portions of Ventura County November 30, 2015

It seems to have begun the way all trends do, with whim meeting opportunity.

The first groomgrab², as they came to be known³, can be traced back to July 14, 1999 to an area of Los Angeles then known as Westwood. James Roddick, 28, gay, single, and Anton Marshall, 27, also gay, also single⁴, were driving home from a movie when they spotted seven-year-old Aaron Booher playing ball by himself on the sidewalk. ‘“Desultory” was the word that came to mind,’ Marshall is reported to have said. Some eleven weeks later, just when groomgrabs were on the upswing, Roddick and Marshall appeared on the Sally Jessy Raphael Show to describe that historic first occurrence.

Roddick: [Booher] was just bouncing the ball, all by himself.

Marshall: It was the saddest thing.

Roddick: So Anton goes, ‘Poor kid, doesn’t look like he’s having any fun at all.’

Marshall: It was true, and you should have seen his clothes. I mean, who puts their kids outside in corduroy in July?

Roddick: Or any month?

Marshall: Really. Just because he’s seven doesn’t mean he doesn’t notice what he’s wearing.

Roddick: Right. So I said, ‘Someone should just grab him and take him to the Gap.’

Marshall: Re-do him top to bottom.

Roddick: Buy him an ice cream cone or a Mrs Field’s.

Marshall: Give him a nice time, in other words.

Sally Jessy: And that’s when you -

Roddick: That’s when we picked him up, yes.

Sally Jessy: You ‘grabbed’ him.

Marshall: Hence the name.

Three and a half hours later, Marshall and Roddick dropped Booher back on the same sidewalk, dressed in a new tan, short-sleeve, sueded crewneck sweater; khaki walking shorts; and a pair of Timberland Kids sandals. He also carried bags filled with Gap Kids polo shirts, a Guess Kids belt, a stuffed Godzilla, and a Richard Scarry book on multiples of five⁵. Booher’s parents, Mr and Mrs Donald Booher, were unaware anything had happened until Aaron returned home. The police report includes the fact that Aaron repeatedly asked his mother, his father, the police officer, anyone he could find: ‘Can I go again tomorrow?’

All arguments and counter-arguments to the practice of the ‘groomgrab’ begin here with little Aaron Booher’s question. ‘You see,’ say the grabbers, ‘Booher was never in danger and had a little fun injected into his life for the first time in ages.’ Anti-grabbers, with some merit, point out that seven year olds also often find activities like vomiting and bee-stomping fun, i.e.a seven year old is not exactly the best judge of what good, healthy entertainment is. However, the point of this paper is not to judge the action⁶, merely to map its movement across the country and see just how the country got swept away in this most peculiar of fads.

Witness Marcy ‘Pebbles’ Morrison, youngest granddaughter of (then) 9th Circuit Court Judge Bosco Morrison⁷. The younger Morrison, in her seminal Take Your Hands Back On Me!⁸, the first real study of groomgrabbing as a cultural phenomenon, reports that ‘my own, personal groomgrabbing was the most exciting couple hours of my life to date. Nothing else has come close. I would trade the best sex I ever had for that time in my childhood. In a heartbeat. It was the first time any adult had treated me like a special little human, and for no reason, just because I was there.’

Morrison goes overboard somewhat by calling her groomgrabbing an experience of feeling unconditional love⁹, but you can see her point. A research survey by the University of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Including Parts of Barbados and St Lucia conducted in 2003, roughly a year after the trend had died down, reported that the groomgrabbed children ‘overwhelmingly’ reported the grabbing as an unequivocally positive experience. Looking at the survey’s raw data, ‘overwhelming’ is actually an understatement for once. Fully 99.58 per cent answered ‘emphatically yes’ when asked if they considered their groomgrabbing to have been a good experience¹⁰. A smaller, more recent study of groomgrabbed children conducted by sociologist Zorah Blandershot-Fields at the University of Hawaii, Hilo, reported not only the same almost-impossibly-high satisfaction rate as the UMNHVIPBSL study¹¹, but also showed scholastic achievement including SAT and AP scores miles and miles above the national average¹². Naturally, in addition to the scientific studies, the anecdotal evidence is voluminous¹³.

Some excerpts:

 Ronald Laramie, Butte, Montana: ‘I didn’t even think there were any gay people in Butte, so getting groomgrabbed never really entered my mind. As far as I know, I was the only one in the whole state to be grabbed¹⁴. My grabbers were this older couple who’d apparently driven all the way down 1–90 from Deer Lodge, which, my God, has like seven people so you can just imagine the kind of risk they were taking. I was ten, and they took me to one of those pizza-arcade places, Charlie Cheese or something¹⁵. They also bought me a boxed set of The Chronicles of Narnia and this great little black suit with an antique Golden Girls tie. It was a ton of fun, and I pretty much became a celebrity. They even asked me to be Grand Marshal of the Elk Parade, which is a big deal in Butte.’

 Jessica Mankiewicz, Encino, California: ‘It happened when I was seven, and I remember it was near Halloween. My two guys were Harry and Reed. Reed was Asian, and Harry had wavy red hair. It’s funny how clear it all still is. Anyway, they asked what I wanted to be for Halloween, so of course I say Spidergirl because that movie had just come out¹⁶. So what do these guys do? They take me to the studio to get outfitted! My guess is that one of them had to work at the studio, because otherwise how would we have gotten back there? But I got this kickass little Spidergirl suit made of the same rubber they used in the movie. It weighed like 35 pounds. I dragged and sweated my way through trick-or-treating, but how cool was I that year?’

 Savon Carmichael, Carson City, Nevada: ‘I remember that I’d been kicked out yet again from my group of so-called friends. See, I was a fat little kid, and unfortunately I wasn’t even that funny which is pretty much the only thing that saves you if you’re a kid and you’re fat. Actually, my grabbers, who weren’t even black, said it’s pretty much the same thing with being gay. If you’re a sissy, you better fucking be funny, or you’re going to get your ass kicked. My grab was just the simplest thing, you know? They bought me a sweater and a watch which I still have, and I remember, of all things, this belt. This really nice entwined leather belt that didn’t have holes in it, you could just hook the little prong anywhere in the entwined leather. Do you get my meaning? It didn’t have holes in it. So I didn’t have to worry about making a new hole or being too fat for a hole. I could just wear it however. I can’t tell you how much something like that meant to me. I really believe that that little belt was a catalyst for everything I’ve achieved so far. Med school¹⁷, my beautiful wife, everything. I owe those two guys a lot.’

 Maggie Nakagama, Cadley, Georgia: “From what I’ve been told, I guess I was the first recognized fabgrab¹⁸. My couple didn’t buy me any clothes, which is what I guess happened on the groomgrabs. I remember I was playing by myself in my babysitter’s front yard, and these guys drove up and grabbed me. They left a Fendi¹⁹, and we drove to Six Flags Over Augusta. I just had the best time in the world. We spent hours there, hours, going on all these rides that my parents would never let me do, eating cotton candy, playing those parkway games. I mean, I threw up twice, but it was all in good fun. And you know, when I got back, the Fendi was still in the yard. No one had even noticed. My grabbers let me keep the flag so I could prove that it happened.’

 Hunter Poulsbo, Redding, California: ‘I guess I had kind of a weird grab. Mine took me to a mall and bought me a new outfit, but what I really wanted to do was figure out fractions. I was only nine, and I was having the damnedest time figuring them out. So when they asked me what I wanted to do next, I said, “Fractions.” And we spent the rest of the afternoon in a booth at McDonald’s doing fractions. I don’t think I would have ever cracked them if it hadn’t been for my grab.’

Working in Pairs

Most of the anecdotes mention the still-unexplained phenomenon that all groomgrabbers worked in pairs, never alone, and never more than two. It’s possible that since the first groomgrab by James Roddick and Anton Marshall happened with just the two of them an unspoken tradition formed. There is also the possibility that the still-tenuous feeling surrounding homosexuals and children²⁰added an extra note of caution to the grabbers, that is, two homosexuals together was somehow less questionable than one homosexual alone with a child²¹. Other theories include the ‘Ostensible Parental Substitution Matrix Principle’ by Dr Timothy Prong of the University of Nome, Et Al, whereby the grabbers subconsciously acted as mother/father figures as a sort of ‘Ideal Parental Pair’ to enhance the grabbee’s feeling of comfort, thereby displacing the ‘Actual Parental Dichometric Placement’ in the something-or-other for the somesuch and so on²². There is also an interesting idea put forth by the Gay and Lesbian Association for Public Statements in which the pleasure of the experience for each member of the grabber-grabbee group is enhanced by sharing it with two others rather than just one, the grabber being able to share the joy of the child with the other grabber and the child feeling as if he or she is being selected by not just one adult but by two, making the child feel all the more special.

There seems to be no consensus among the grabbers either. Given the veil of anonymity that descended shortly after the Sally Jessy Raphael interview²³, there exist only nineteen verified interviewed grabbers, all within the first two months of the trend²⁴. There is scarcely a mention of the significance or even reason for working in pairs. All grabbers seemed to act in unspoken agreement or with subconscious purpose. An (August 29, 1999) interview in the Chicago Sun Times with a grabbee known only as Colin contains the only mention this researcher could find in any of the published materials on grabbing²⁵:

“At first, my lover and I just thought it was a neat idea. You know, sort of sprucing a kid up without any of the leftover responsibility. All of the good, none of the bad. Like being a grandparent for a day. But then it just sort of took on a life of its own. It was kind of an unspoken thing between the two of us that we never mentioned and that we never talked about with anyone else until one day we saw this seven-or eight-year-old girl hopping over cracks in the sidewalk. And her hair was all ratty and her jacket was frayed, but she was having a good old time leaping over cracks. There was just this sort of feeling between me and my lover, and we grabbed her. We took her to the mall, bought her this Bugs Bunny bomber jacket that she loved and some patent leather shoes she picked out. We took her to Chinese and taught her how to use chopsticks. Then we took her back. This was before the Fendi became popular, but it turned out no one was looking for her anyway. I’ve no idea what happened to that girl, and to be honest, my lover and I don’t really talk about it. Just sort of think of it and smile together, you know?’

Colin’s remarks suggest a happy-go-lucky conspiracy, a kind of benevolent coup that one person wouldn’t have the guts to do without another to egg him on. The couples²⁶came upon the idea and it blossomed at the urging of both. This would explain the ‘euphoric’ atmosphere so many grabbees note, feeling the thrill of the danger and rule-breaking of it all. Unfortunately, given the anonymity that has remained in place for the last 15 plus years, all of this tantalizing speculation will have to remain just that.

‘A Sweepstakes Appeal’

‘I remember there was this air of excitement hanging around the neighborhood and especially the school. We’d all seen groomgrabbing talked about on TV and the web, and everyone was coming up with reasons why it would or wouldn’t happen in Monmouth²⁷. People were saying it was too small. Other people were saying that’s exactly why someone would be grabbed from Monmouth, because most of the grabs were happening in small towns. You know, it’s like when there’s a super huge Powerball Jackpot, like that one last year that got up to two billion? Everyone talks about it, everyone wants it, nobody really thinks anybody will, but everybody secretly hopes²⁸.’

Elizabeth Bopp-Twernig,

Grabbed aged seven in 2000

Bopp-Twernig mentions an aspect of groomgrabbing also discussed by Blandershot-Fields in the UHH study. She (Blandershot-Fields) writes that as the trend spread and the months passed, groomgrabbing began to take on ‘a sweepstakes appeal. The grabbings came, in a surprisingly short amount of time, to be regarded as a prize, a luck of the draw windfall which anyone’s child could win.’ Anyone else’s child, that is. According to an Us-People sidebar feature at the time, parents tended to preface any comment about groomgrabbing with something along the lines of ‘Well, my child will never be grabbed because he/she has so many friends and is so well-loved, I can’t ever imagine him/her looking quite pathetic or lonely enough to be grabbed. For everyone else, however …’

This was, of course, more or less an outright lie on the part of the parents. Economics Nobel Laureate Ken Kern-Terwilliger of the AT&T Gallup Nielsen Institute calls this phenomenon the ‘Martin Cramwell Would Be a Terrible Governor; Long Live Governor Cramwell’ Effect²⁹ in which poll participants, afraid of the opinion of the polltaker, lie about their real feelings. As a matter of fact, parents were actively placing their children in solitary spots: leaving them with only a ratty tennis ball at the public park, say, or forcing them to walk any number of miles home from school. National statistics of child neglect cases covering the years before, during, and after the height of the trend look like an especially precipitious bell curve³⁰.

Not that it mattered. Colin, in the interview quoted earlier, indicates that groomgrabbers were expert at picking out fakes:

Are you kidding? We have to spend all our lives secretly looking for other gay people in things like church and work and school. Oblivious is one thing we’re not.

Most fakes were easy to spot. As Colin puts it, ‘Children in stained white t-shirts do not bounce rubber balls off blacktop wearing Kenneth Cole shoes.’ Even more easily, all groomgrabbers usually had to do was ask if there was any doubt. Paradoxically, a child instructed to look like an appealing candidate to a groomgrabber would usually want to please the grabber so much that they would reveal the lie in an effort to win trust. Children don’t really learn irony until they get to Joseph Heller in the eighth grade.

As it is, every major study has attempted to cross-section the ‘average’ groomgrabbee and has come up lacking. Both the UMNHVIPBSL study and especially Blandershot-Fields cross-referenced, graphed, mapped, collated, coded, signified, indexed, concordanced, cataloged, enumerated, scheduled, classified, and alphabetized the grabbees until finally throwing up their hands in frustration. The youngest grabbee was four, the oldest thirteen, and about all anyone has been able to generalize is that groomgrabbees were between four and thirteen.

Grabbees were evenly split between boys and girls. They fell along racial lines at roughly the same rate as represented in the population. There were grabbings in all fifty-two current states plus Guam, with the only even mild statistical spike being a larger-than-average number of grabbings in Alaska³¹. Interestingly enough, the grabs cut across all financial and social strata as well, which would seem to contradict the point of the groomgrab. Booher, the first grabee, makes for an interesting study on this matter. West LA at the time was a fairly wealthy neighborhood. Booher, who it turned out lived in a $2 million home and had a six-figure trust fund, should not necessarily have been a test case for looking like poverty. Nonetheless, despite his wealth, as his groomgrabber Roddick said, ‘Money doesn’t always mean a kid’s not going to fall through the cracks.’ To which Marshall added, ‘Or have appropriate taste.’ The grabbers seemed to concentrate on how pathetic the grabbee seemed rather than his or her financial background. Another reason for the demographic well-roundedness of the grabbees might be the much-discussed notion of homosexuality as a vertical minority, encapsulating bits from every other group including the rich and the poor. As Blandershot-Fields writes, ‘Maybe it’s as simple as they went with what they knew. ‘

Official Reactions: A Note To Historians

Of course, groomgrabbing was, by any definition, as illegal as treason, and future historians removed from the Zeitgeist might quite credibly wonder where the hell the authorities were in all this? But picture if you will the state of the country at the time: The manned Mars mission had been sabotaged by extremist MarsFirst!ers; the Namibian Potato-Chip Debacle had its claws deep into the nation’s economy, sending unemployment into double digits; and the Argentinian War victory was turning out, thanks to the MSCNN investigation, to be even more Pyrrhic than previously thought. Malaise wasn’t even the word for it; the country was downright morose³². It’s the same reason Bonnie and Clyde and the James Brothers became cultural heroes at earlier parts of the previous century.

The Winfrey Administration, naturally, reacted to the trend with what became its legendary pragmatism. On February 17, 2001, shortly after the inauguration, the White House issued a press release stating, ‘I don’t see anyone getting hurt. In fact, I see people getting helped. What’s the problem?’ Not a single one of the over four-thousand known incidents of groomgrabbing resulted in even an arrest³³. Local politicians typically opposed it until they met someone who was groomgrabbed, then the issue just dropped³⁴. The official opinion seemed to be a need to condemn groomgrabbing, but secretly, everyone liked it and wanted it to go on.

At the bottom of it all, like so many other things about groomgrabbing, the true cause for the lack of reaction remains elusive.

The End

As does, it seems, the end of groomgrabbing. The last known groomgrabbing was on November 3, 2002³⁵, and after that, nothing. There weren’t even scattered grabs or copycat grabs. What happened? Why did it stop? It’s a circular question that leads back to why it began in the first place. A whim meets opportunity, and then the whim leaves. Blandershot-Fields touches on the subject only briefly³⁶, but suggests that groomgrabbing simply ran its course the way all trends do.

The author has another theory. Rather more than a theory, actually. An unknown fact of groomgrabbing, not shared with any of the studies so far discussed in any forum, is the fact that all groomgrabbers imparted a single instruction to all grabbees. The author knows this because, as previously stated, he was a groomgrabbee himself. He has confirmed this with numerous private interviews with other groomgrabbees³⁷ who are in agreement that the time for the instruction is near. They have graciously agreed to let the author be the first to make the instruction known, partially because this format³⁸ lends itself so nicely to rumor.

The instructions were simply, ‘Pass it on.’

The way all trends do, groomgrabbing is going to make a comeback.

The first groomgrabbing of the second wave happens sometime next month³⁹.