This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

A 12-year-old Layton girl went missing last week. She failed to return home from school. When she still wasn't home by nightfall, her family called the cops. It was on the news a few hours later.

This story has a happy ending. The young girl was located the following morning when unbelievably, at least to me, she showed up for school again. She had spent the night at a friend's home.

Times have changed. When I was that age, no one I knew ran away from home and then voluntarily went BACK the following day. Most of us ran away from home because of school.

Keep in mind that this was a long time ago, back when nobody really panicked over a recently missing kid. It was generally accepted that a kid would soon get hungry enough and slink home to a peanut butter sandwich and a whacking.

Also, a kid being gone overnight wasn't that big of a deal unless a bear or a pack of wolves had been sighted in the area. No one got too excited until a kid was missing for at least a week. I know because I did it. A lot.

I ran away from home several hundred times before I was 12. My parents never called the police. At most they would perform a cursory search for me by looking under my bed and calling the homes of some friends.

My Mom: "He's not on the roof either."

The Old Man: "Fine. Maybe now we'll get some peace and quiet."

Things aren't that way anymore. Either the world has become a more dangerous place or people have gotten smarter. Now every missing kid is a potential kidnap victim until proven otherwise.

As I recall, the police came looking for me only twice. Once when I started a fire in a large field, and then the time I painted a neighbor's horse.

I cried both times the cops found me. But they were tears of joy and relief. I knew that as long as the cops had me, the Old Man couldn't beat all the hair off me for making Mom worry.

Normally when I ran away it was for something I didn't want to do rather than something I already did. I ran away from home every time we had liver for dinner. Liver Night never came as a surprise. I would smell it cooking a block away and immediately hit the road.

It didn't take me long to get over that. The Old Man soon taught me — with a fork and a strong right arm — that warm liver swallowed a lot easier than cold liver.

When I got older, I started running away from home for things I wanted to do. For example, when we moved to Utah in 1970, I tried to hitchhike back to my friends in Southern California twice.

I aborted the first attempt near Point of the Mountain when the guy who pulled over made the mistake of winking at me BEFORE I got into the car.

The second time a UHP trooper stopped and told me that soliciting rides on the freeway was illegal. When I tried to argue that America was a free country, he said it was free except for people who were in jail or naked and tied up in the trunk of some pervert's car.

Around that time I stopped running away from home. Maybe because I got lazy, or maybe I got smarter, thanks to grim news stories.

Running away could cause more problems than the one I was trying to escape, especially if the wrong people found me before the right people did.

Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/stillnotpatbagley.