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When Larry finally recuperated he struck out on his own again. Although he never attended college, he was a gifted mathematician, and was soon put in charge of a construction crew that designed bridges. A few years later he landed a job with a pipeline company and traveled all across the country.
Things were finally starting to look up. He was making good money, and at age 28 he got married. Over the next seven years he and his wife had three daughters. But the good times didn't last.
"My wife was an incredible lady, but I didn't know what the hell I was doing," Larry says. "I didn't know how to love or be a good husband." The marriage deteriorated, and Larry found himself drifting through life once more, without any real direction or purpose.
In 1979 he tied the knot a second time. Less than two months later the newlyweds were involved in a terrible car accident in which Larry's wife was killed instantly and he was severely injured. Another month in the hospital. Larry had hit rock bottom. Overcome with grief, he checked himself in to a mental hospital, where he spent 60 days. During his stay, he told the doctors about his mother, and how he felt abandoned and unwanted. Somehow the doctors were able to convince Larry's real mother to fly from Tennessee to the Norfolk hospital to see her son. It wasn't the reunion Larry had been hoping for.
"We were sitting around this big table at the hospital, and I confronted her about everything," Larry says. "Her reaction was, "What do you want me to say?' She had a real attitude about it."
In another unbelievable twist, during Larry's stay in the hospital, he met another woman who later bore his child.
After Larry left the hospital he resumed doing what he was most familiar with -- drifting aimlessly. He met another woman in Michigan, which resulted in yet another baby -- Larry's fifth. But again, Larry couldn't keep it together, and that relationship ended too. He eventually returned to Virginia to be near his grandmother and other family members.
The human spirit can be very resilient, and Larry, admittedly a physical and emotional wreck, slowly started to recuperate. He moved to Swansboro, NC, in the early 90s and opened an antique business. His shop was along a bustling tourist corridor near the coast, and folks heading to the beach would often stop by. Always good with his hands, Larry started building birdhouses using the wood from old tobacco farms. One day a big executive from a paint company stopped by Larry's shop and bought four of his birdhouses on the spot. That started the ball rolling, and soon folks from all over the country were stopping by to check out Larry's birdhouses, including, Larry says, cousins of the Kennedy family. In all, he sold over 2,600 birdhouses and, at prices ranging from $85 to several hundred dollars, he did pretty well for himself. One day, almost as an afterthought, Larry decided to make a weathervane for one of his birdhouses. He took a piece of metal he'd gotten from an old tobacco farm and folded and cut it into the shape of a little rooster, and affixed it to the birdhouse. Something clicked, and Larry started making other metal sculptures -- at first little boats and cars, then more elaborate pieces. In 1997 he sold one piece for $1,400 to a couple that shared a veterinary practice. "That was a pretty good chunk of change," Larry says. "And it just took off from there."
In 1999, Larry sold his antique business and opened a studio and gallery in Swansboro, where he started working on his metal sculptures full-time. Larry soon earned a reputation as one of the more innovative and cutting-edge "outsider artists," a term used to describe a self-taught artist whose work is outside the mainstream art world.
Larry's work indeed seems inspired by a purely visceral impulse -- a compulsion, really -- to create and give shape to the ideas in his head. "It's an internal thing, an emotional thing," Larry says. "I can't stop. I'll get up in the middle of the night and work for hours. It gets me higher than any drug ever could."
