Pete Bass hitchhiked cross country for the first time when he was just 7, traveling with his stepdad from Colorado Springs to Lander for a ranch job in Wyoming.
By 17, Bass had run away to Hollywood — a circus of sorts — where he was tapped to appear on a dating show.
The night before, however, a man busted into his hotel room, attempting to molest him. Bass saved himself by laying on the room’s buzzer, alerting the front desk he was in trouble.
The attempted rape spooked him into going back home — but that was just the beginning of more trouble for Bass, whose life has been like something out of a Hollywood movie.
“My dad always told me, ‘You’re stupid, you’re ugly, you’re never going to amount to anything. You’ll probably end up in prison,” Bass said.
Dad was right about prison. Bass has been arrested not once, but three times.
Each arrest was a step closer to finding the right path. And, eventually, his lifelong dream of owning a coffee shop in Evanston, called For Pete’s Sake.
The coffee comes with prayers if you like, and second and even third chances.
First The Hitchhiking Trip
Bass still remembers that hitchhiking trip as an adventure from start to finish.
“I remember when we got to Cheyenne, my dad went into a Western wear store there and he bought this belt and a Hereford cow buckle.”
He also bought a fancy, tooled leather wallet. But the ranch job didn’t last long.
“I think he was drinking too much,” Bass recalled. “And they kind of pushed him to move out.”
In Lander, Bass was passed around to 24 families.
“There was no foster care system back then,” Bass said. “It was just, my dad would have a friend at the bar or whatever, and I’d stay with them for a while.”
For school, Bass was baptized into the Catholic faith, so he could attend the school on the reservation.
The Flying Nun
Bass was born in Germany and doesn’t remember much about his mom. She died when he was 6.
“Dad was just a hardcore drunk after my mom died,” Bass said. “He’d just spent 32 ½ years in the Army and lost his career and his wife all within a year.”
Bass thinks his father probably had PTSD.
“They didn’t have a term for it back then,” Bass said. “They called it shellshock, right? But they didn’t sit around and cry about it or anything. They would just pull their pants and their shoes on and walk through it. That’s why they called them the Greatest Generation.”
Despite his home life, people described him as a “good kid.” He was likable. People looked out for him. Like the nun who discovered he wasn’t getting breakfast in the mornings before school and sometimes wasn’t getting dinner after either.
One morning, he arrived at school and went to mass like usual. But his teacher, who was a nun, yanked him out, rushing him to the cafeteria.
He had no idea what was happening.
Was he in big trouble?
Was he getting kicked out?
“They fixed me breakfast,” Bass recalled. “And so that was great. I started getting regular meals.”
Next Stop, Evanston
Bass’ father, to his credit, realized he had a problem he had to fix.
“One day in 1965, my dad met me at the bus stop, and he said, ‘Son, I’m going to this place called Evanston, Wyoming. And they’re going to help me stop drinking.”
Bass stayed with a family who was ultimately moving to California. They dropped Bass off in Evanston on one of their road trips back to Wyoming, after his father completed his program at Wyoming State Hospital.
It was there Bass’ dad met a woman named Bee Fisher.
“Everyone at the state hospital said that Fisher caught a Bass, and that’s the way we became the Brady Bunch,” Bass joked. “So, I was 12 years old, and I had a family again finally, or whatever.”
But one of the stepbrothers in this particular “Brady Bunch” was getting high. Quite often.
At first, Bass was refused to get involved in “that stuff.”
“Mom would always say, ‘Don’t ever smoke pot, you’ll turn into a vegetable,” he said. “Because she worked at the State Hospital.”
Bass, cheeky as ever, told her he wanted to be a tangerine.
“That’s a fruit, not a vegetable,” she snapped back. “And it’s not funny.”
On average, most who try drugs start at age 12 to 13, but Bass held out until he was 16. That’s when he met an older man named Dan, new in town.
“So, I thought, I could just try it, and if it was cool, it’s cool, and if it’s not, I could just walk away from it,” Bass said. “No one would ever know.”
What struck him about it all in the end was that he didn’t turn into a vegetable — or a tangerine — and he felt great. For a change.
“I wasn’t like hooked,” he said. “It was just a good feeling.”
What ultimately clinched the deal, though, was a girl.
“She was really cute, and I got to talking to her and asked her on a date,” Bass recalled. “And she says, ‘Can you get me stoned?’ So I was like, ‘Wow, let me see what I can do.’”
The Big Escape
Girls would get Bass into trouble over and over.
“And then, too, I was always an entrepreneur,” Bass said. “So, I sold greeting cards, I shoveled walks, I raised worms and sold nightcrawlers. I was always doing something to make a little money.”
Bass didn’t sell much in the way of drugs then, though. Instead, he got a job at the State Hospital, and a secret apartment his parents didn’t know about. But the State Hospital job was about to lead him to the biggest trouble yet. All because of a girl.
A cute girl. She was a patient at the State Hospital, and the daughter of a prominent judge. She asked him to dance during one of the Friday night socials.
Bass liked dancing with her, and she seemed to like him as well. When she asked Bass if she could trust him, he said sure.
“If I give you my word, then that’s my word,” he replied. “I won’t tell.”
That’s when the girl revealed her escape plans and pleaded for his help.
Bass tried to talk her out of it over the next several weeks. But she was tired of being a “guinea pig.”
“I’m just a girl who got caught with some pot,” she said. “And they’re diagnosing me with all of these different things. I just want out of here.”
Bass empathized.
“There was a lot of experimentation with drugs in the 70s, and they were trying it out in mental institutions,” Bass said. “You get caught with pot and go to the state hospital, and the next thing you know, they’ve got you on all kinds of drugs, the Thorazine shuffle, so I was watching all this stuff going on.”
Finally, the girl told Bass the escape was on no matter what, that very night.
“Are you my friend or are you just going to let us be out there and freeze to death?” she said.
Bass had promised he would tell no one her plans, and he didn’t want her to freeze to death. Reluctantly, he agreed to wait for her on the nearby freeway, an isolated location at the time. No one to see and report them.
“I’ll wait for 10 minutes at 11:30 p.m.,” Bass said. “And if you don’t show up then, I’ll come back at 12:30 and wait another 10 minutes. After that I’m done.”
The Hollywood Circus
Bass figured the girl would lose her nerve. She didn’t show up during the first 10-minute waiting period, and it seemed she wouldn’t show for the second either.
With 30 seconds left, Bass was breathing a sigh of relief — until a couple of loud raps startled him.
“I about jumped out of my skin,” Bass said. “She jumped in the car and said, ‘Hurry, go, go, go.’”
The girl had a ride lined up in a couple of days and planned to hide in Bass’ apartment.
Of course, the moment this girl — a judge’s daughter no less — went missing, the manhunt was on. Police soon showed up at the apartment. The jig was up. Bass was hooked.
“That was a different time,” Bass said, acknowledging that such shenanigans today would mean instant arrest.
“The chief of the police at the time would take a bunch of us kids and hang out there at the pool hall,” Bass recalled. “And he had taken us under his wing and had us out shooing guns and riding patrol.”
Because of that, Bass didn’t get into as much trouble as he might have. But he lost his job — and the funds for his secret apartment.
“I could play my music as loud as I wanted there,” Bass said. “And I didn’t have to worry about my parents finding anything.”
That’s when he decided to run away from home. Twenty-three days from graduation.
In California, he successfully auditioned for a part on a dating show.
“They picked me to be on the show because I’ve got this like quick wit,” Bass said. “You know like the sign on my coffee shop says, “Great coffee, bad puns.”
But, the night before the appearance, a man broke into his hotel room. The only thing that saved him was the buzzer by the bed.
“They had told me down at the front desk, if anything happens just lay on that buzzer,” Bass said. “So, I laid on that thing, and he’s trying to rip my clothes off me. They came up and grabbed him and took him out of there.”
It was too much. Bass swallowed his pride and called his parents. He was going home.
Jail Time
Prison, Bass will say today, was God’s way of offering him another chance every time.
His first stint in jail got him back in touch with his dad.
“My dad was working at the jail,” Bass said. “And so he says to me, like, ‘Son, you know, this is one of those situations where all right, you got yourself in some trouble. Now what can you do to get yourself out of it.”
At first, Bass thought his dad was encouraging him to “rat” on his distributors.
“I wouldn’t even respect you if you did that,” his dad told him, shaking his head. “I’m just saying, you’re in this situation, how can you use this as a steppingstone to change?”
Bass would recall that advice every time he was arrested, even after his dad died.
This time, it inspired him to try the electronics technology program. Going back to school was hard. He nearly flunked out, but his teachers, impressed with his effort and the way he just kept coming back to try and try again, offered him a deal. If he could retake his trigonometry class and boost his grade by one letter, that would be enough to boost his GPA just enough to graduate.
So he got his first job in a new career. But his supervisor made less than Bass, which didn’t sit well with him. Nor did Bass’ sketchy past.
“He just kept booby-trapping me,” Bass recalled.
Bass eventually lost that job, and “went crazy” for a couple of years. Soon, he was right back in jail, this time a maximum-security prison.
That Old Prison Fellowship Seminar Trick
Bass made friends easily and one of his new prison friends happened to be involved in church. His name was Lloyd and the thing about Lloyd was, he didn’t know how to give up.
He kept pestering Bass to go to church. Bass finally told him if he asked him about church again even one more time, they wouldn’t be friends anymore.
“OK, I’ll never ask you again, unless you change your mind,” he said.
But Prison Fellowship Seminar was coming up, and that wasn’t church. So, Lloyd asked Bass to go with him to that.
“They bring in prizes, and they’ve got soda pop and homemade food and there will be girls,” he said. “And you’ll get a certificate from that. So when you go in for a sentence reduction, you can have that put in your file.”
By now, Bass had been a married man. He didn’t care about the girls, the prizes, or the pop.
But a sentence reduction?
That was mighty interesting …
“It’s really funny how God works sometimes,” Bass said, chuckling. “And if I’d really thought about it, I would have realized what was going on. But so, I said Prison Fellowship Seminar. Let’s break this down. OK, prison, that’s where I’m at, and fellowship, that’s something you do with fellows. A seminar is where you learn stuff.”
That didn’t seem like church to Bass. He was in.
“I know I’m Evil”
There were several doors to go through to get to the seminar, and Bass could turn back at any one of them — until that very last door.
“Once you go into that door and it closes, they will basically tell you, ‘I’m not your doorman. And you went in there, so you will respect the people that came out here and you’re not just leaving.’”
When Bass walked through that last door, he heard a little click as the door popped then locked. And then he heard this big, exploding “Bam.”
The jailhouse doors were shutting behind him with a finality that hit him hard. This was the point of no return.
“All I knew right then was God is real, and I’m a real sinner,” he said.
When they started singing the church songs of his youth, Bass lost it.
“I was just weeping,” Bass said. “And then we broke up into these little, small groups to do a study on Proverbs.”
By now, Bass felt incredibly out of place and guilty. He told the group he really didn’t belong there at all.
“I’m not a very good person,” he said. “I know I’m evil.”
They didn’t kick him from the seminar though, as he’d thought they would.
“They just dropped everything and came over and laid hands on me, praying for me,” Bass recalled.
Then they gave him a Bible and asked him to do one small favor. Just read the Gospel of John that night in his cell.
Bass thought back to all the times he’d tried to read the Bible before.
“It was just like Chinese or something,” he said.
So he agreed. No way it was going to make any sense this time.
But there he was in his cell, and he found the words were just “jumping off the page” at him. He set a small cushion on the floor and started praying, going through all the things he’d just read, and all the wrong he’d done in his life.
Then he said, “God, I don’t know what you’ve got, but I’ll take it.”
After that, he collapsed in bed. That was it, he thought, as he drifted off to sleep. He felt no different. He was lost, for good.
“But the next morning, I swung my feet around, and I stood up, and it was like there was no floor,” Bass said. “It was like I was floating on air.”
Bass kept reading his new Bible after that. He kept praying. And he finally accepted the fact that he’d been in the wrong for a long time, and that this wasn’t anyone’s fault but his own.
Eventually, he put in for a sentence reduction, feeling that God had a plan for him, a plan outside of prison.
People told him not to get his hopes up. The judge, when he finally wrote back, said no way Jose.
But Bass didn’t stop believing.
Eight days later, a jailhouse lawyer put in an appeal for Bass, and, about the same time, the judge just changed his mind, with no explanation.
Bass had his sentence reduction, against all odds.
Prison 2.0
It was another steppingstone to changing his life, but not without some backsliding.
He’d had a great summer working in the oilfield, with people who understood his need to avoid drugs and alcohol. They wanted him back the next summer, but meanwhile, his parole officer insisted he take a new job to bridge the gap.
This time, his fellow employees weren’t understanding. In fact, they knew who he was and all about his background. They wanted him to get them drugs, and they wouldn’t take no for answer.
Bass was soon back to old habits — and a brand-new prison term. This time he was looking at a lifelong sentence, he was told. He wasn’t leaving except inside a box.
Thanks to Bass’ attorney, he ended up with more like seven years, on good behavior, with parole. Just enough time to really think about what had gone wrong.
The biggest error, he decided, was taking a job that hadn’t allowed regular church attendance.
He was offered a great-paying position after he got out. But it was two-weeks on, two-weeks off.
“A little voice in my head said, ‘Pete, is it really worth going out there and making yourself vulnerable like that?’ So, I worked at Walmart, and I told them I needed to have Sundays and Wednesdays off.”
God’s Coffee Shop
Regular church attendance brought him new friends. Friends who helped him stick with his goals. And a new woman, with a like mind, who he eventually married.
The two made plans together, a plan that included the coffee shop he’d always dreamed of having one day — although its mission now is quite different from what he envisioned as a younger man.
“We decided our mission with the coffeeshop isn’t really coffee,” he said. “This is like God’s coffee shop.”
It’s a place for anyone to come and feel a sense of refuge. And a place for anyone who wants to do a Bible study. Most of all, it’s a place for anyone who needs a second, a third or even a fourth chance.
Bass believes in second chances. Because God never stopped giving him another chance to fix his broken life.
“We will pray for our customers,” Bass said. “And we pray for our employees every day. And I talk about Jesus. I don’t force it on anyone. But it’s just kind of my thing.”
Bass became an ordained minister on Aug. 25, 2015 — 25 years to the day from when he had prayed on a prison cell floor for salvation — and now leads the Calvary Chapel Church. He can’t see the milestone as merely coincidence. It’s part of God’s plan, a plan in which he just tells everyone about his life.
“I’ve been a despicable person,” Bass said. “But God has done so much for me, so I can’t help but tell people about it.”
And he can’t help but hope, as he passes out each cup of coffee or tells each little story to fellow travelers, that he is paying it forward by helping someone else find their own second chance.
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
