CINCINNATI, OH, Jan. 27 — It was shortly before midnight Monday, and the newspapers were just off the presses and the headline in bold black letters said, “Manson, Three Women Guilty.”

An old man with grey hair and no teeth, who hobbled instead of walked, and wore a dirty white apron moved from tavern to tavern in the seedier area of lower Vine St. between 9th and 14th Sts. selling the papers.

The newspaper peddler looked old enough to have been making the same rounds 36 years ago when Charles Miles Manson was born in a Cincinnati rooming house and later as a small baby was carried from bar to bar in the Vine St. area by his mother, a teenage unwed mother.

Manson was born Nov. 11th, 1934 here, but no one in the city is proud of it. After hearing of his conviction, no one had much to say about anything, except as one bartender put it: “He’s a sick creature and should have been put away long ago.”

On his birth certificate, Manson was listed as “No name Maddox” but a few weeks after his birth, his mother, Kathleen Maddox of Ashland, Ky., had the name changed to Charles Miles Maddox.

It may never be known who Manson’s real father is. He may still be in the Cincinnati area. One report said he was a man named “Colonel Scott.” Another source said the father was William Manson, then a 24-year-oId Cincinnati dry cleaner. Anyway, Kathleen Maddox married Manson and gave his name to her baby.

There are indications that his mother rejected Manson from the first. There is little doubt that he was exposed as a baby to the seamiest sort of life possible. She would make money by picking up men in Vine and Race St. bars and taking them to cheap hotels where her brother would beat and rob them.

The mother and brother were arrested, convicted and given prison sentences. When he was eight, his mother was released from prison. She picked him up and moved to Indianapolis. There she resumed her former way of life, meeting men, either moving in with them or selling herself to them for an hour.

Then, when he was 13, the mother decided the boy was in her way. She tried to arrange for a foster home. The courts sent Manson to Gibault School for Boys. He ran away after ten months.

When he was barely 14, he was picked up and sent this time to Boy’s Town in Nebraska. He stayed for three days before running away from there.

Then he started his life of crime. He was sentenced to Indiana Boys School reformatory and tried to escape 18 times.

A cross country crime spree followed in ensuing years that saw Manson in and out of trouble, mostly for stealing cars.

He later met and married Rosalie Jean Willis, a waitress. They had a baby named Charles Jr. No one can locate the woman or the son today.

By DALE HUFFMAN