3/17/2023 0 Comments Toby young datelineShe started working part-time at a veterinary clinic, assisting with procedures, answering phones, scheduling appointments. But her 14-year career ended with the dot‑com bust of 2001. There was always a new problem to solve, a more efficient way to do something, and she’d work relentlessly to figure it out. She was a project manager specializing in systems development. In 1987, when she was 30 years old, she started working at Sprint. She graduated summa cum laude with a double major in accounting and business administration. On top of everything else, Toby attended college at night. Her sons played baseball, basketball, football, soccer. Her husband was a firefighter, and Toby worked at a utility company. Toby dealt with the pains of life by staying busy and ignoring whatever hurt. The middle child, their only daughter, died a few hours after birth. They got married at 20, bought a house not far from her parents, and had three kids in four years. She doesn’t remember how her high-school boyfriend proposed, for example: “It was probably something like ‘We might as well get married.’ ” She said yes because she thought that was what she was supposed to do. She tried to be positive and just go along. She tried not to question her circumstances. In high school, she was the president of the pep club and dated the star of the baseball team. She was a perfectionist, the type who spoiled the curve for her younger siblings. “Deal with what life gives you,” Toby’s dad would say whenever he heard one of his kids whining. Every day, he’d crawl under the engines and spend hours reaching up to service the equipment, stretching his scalded skin. Her father eventually came home, and although he could barely move his arms, he started working again as a machinist at the railroad. “She was less like a sister than like a third parent,” one of her siblings would later tell The Wall Street Journal. She changed diapers, packed lunches, tried to provide stability in a stressful time. Even then, she wanted to solve whatever problem was in front of her. He was hospitalized for eight months, and Toby felt it was her responsibility as the eldest child to help take care of her younger siblings. His ears were gone and his flesh looked like it was rolling down his shoulders and arms, “like it was my mom taking off her pantyhose at night,” she recalls. When she was 5, her father was burning willow branches in their backyard and the fire flared in his face. Growing up on the Kansas side of Kansas City in the early 1960s, Toby Phalen was the oldest of seven children-five girls, two boys-in a middle-class Catholic family. Of course, for most of us, that’s just a fleeting thought.Ĭheck out more from this issue and find your next story to read. What it might be like to escape our responsibilities, to get away, to start over. But from time to time, it’s only natural to imagine a different life. Our relationships, our children, our jobs: #blessed. We love to tell the world how happy we are. “I mean,” she says, “except the one time.” “I was a rule follower for sure,” she says with a sweet Kansan lilt. She can hardly remember what she was thinking. She says the woman in those videos is another person entirely. Watching news clips from that time in her life makes her sick to her stomach. Looking back now, it all seems surreal to Toby, like a dream or a movie. In the papers, she was known as the “Dog Lady” of Lansing prison, but that moniker barely hints at why she made headlines. For more than a decade, people here have argued about whether what she did was stupid and selfish or brave and inspirational. She’s been stared at in restaurants, pointed at on sidewalks. But people in Kansas City remember Toby’s story. She’s in her early 60s now, just over 5 feet tall, and with her wry smile and auburn curls, she could be your neighbor, your librarian, your aunt. To hear more feature stories, get the Audm iPhone app.
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