For 11 years, James Michael Starr knew a handful of facts.
It was 1962 when his parents stuck him, his sister, his pets and his belongings into a car. He was 11 years old. The family drove from Ohio to Dallas in the sweltering, late August heat.
And two weeks later his mother was gone.
He didn’t see her again until he was 22 years old.
“I went up to visit her after we reconnected and she was kind of slowly spilling out all these stories about exactly what happened,” Starr says. “I think she had a lot of guilt.”
What the longtime Kiestwood resident learned, and what he is now chronicling in his soon-to-be-released book, On the Wing, was that his mother left the family after receiving a threat saying she and her children would be hurt if she did not return to Ohio.
Joanie Starr, his mother, had unknowingly married a man with mob connections.
A city employee and nightclub singer in East Liverpool, Ohio, Joanie had become enraptured with a man named Bus Cartwright as soon as she met him. Her nightclub singing career had caused a strain on her first marriage with Starr’s father, so she turned to Cartwright.
Family members warned her Cartwright was “shady.” Joanie ignored their concerns and married him anyway.
Within a few days, she realized her mistake and fled the state alongside her first husband.
“She got this call and the voice on the phone wasn’t my stepfather, she said it was some stranger,” Starr says. “He said, ‘If you’re not on the next plane back to Ohio, we’re going to throw acid in your face, and we’re gonna hurt your kids.’”
While doing research for his book series, Starr learned there were mob families in Pittsburgh, Youngstown and Cincinnati during this time. East Liverpool sat within that triangle, and Starr believes Cartwright was involved with the LaRocca organized crime family, earning their trust by “doing the books.”
When the Starr family first arrived in Dallas, Joanie went to a pawn shop to sell the ring Cartwright had given her. The sale led the Ohio men looking for her to Dallas, over 1,200 miles away, within a matter of days.
In a small town like East Liverpool, word traveled fast and everyone knew Starr’s uncle had recently made the move to Dallas. When Joanie disappeared, Cartwright “started contacting all of the network” of “shady businesses” in Dallas, putting out the word of the kind of ring to be on the lookout for.
“When she got back to Ohio, she said one of the first things (Cartwright) did was hold up that ring in his hand. Kind of like saying, ‘Don’t ever try this again,’” Starr says. “So that was one of the freaky scary things to me that just, it made me think she wasn’t making it up.”
The “you can run but you can’t hide” message stuck with Starr, who says his “sweet and innocent mother” was not conniving enough to invent such a dramatic story.
When Joanie called Starr over a decade later, her life had finally stabilized. Cartwright had died, and Joanie had remarried a kind man named Paul and moved to Cleveland.
Starr ended up settling in Oak Cliff, after moving around Texas and Oklahoma in his 20s. He got married and had a successful career as an ad writer.
Then, 13 years ago, he realized he had a story to tell.
“I was like how do you do this? I don’t know how you write a story that (is fiction). So I felt the need to have as much fact under my belt as possible,” he says. “So it was a long time before I figured out how to feel confident with it.”
Plus, the nature of the story left Starr feeling a bit “paranoid” about publishing.
“There may still be people that are in Dallas and have a little bit of a kind of shady connection with the mob, right? And I was wondering that when I started writing,” Starr says.
So, Starr started with a blog where he chronicled the timeline of Joanie’s life and his own with as many details as he could surmise.
He started on a fiction book, then pivoted to a young-adult series told from his perspective, before returning to a fiction story set in a “shady” steel mining town.
On the Wing was released on Amazon Jan. 1. The story follows a Joanie Starr-esque protaganist whose life follows a similar path that Starr’s mother’s did. It is the first of three books in the series. For Starr, the opportunity to share his mother’s story has been a way of healing the hurt of a little boy who grew up thinking his mother had abandoned him. And it has given him a sense of justice for the “kind lady” who just wanted to sing.
“The difference between a small town and a big city, in a big city (corruption) kind of comes out in the news,” Starr says. “Whereas in a small town, where I lived, people intentionally avoided talking about it because they didn’t want to talk about people that they know are trouble. They didn’t want to get in trouble for something that they might have said or didn’t say.”
