Two years after his father’s death, Tim Allen’s mom, Martha Fox, married her high school sweetheart, Bill Bones. His new stepdad relocated the family to Detroit, forcing Allen to start over again at a new school, which is a daunting task for any 13-year-old, let alone one still grieving their dad’s demise. “When my family [moved across the country], I went from being in a cool group at one school to being at the bottom [of the social hierarchy at another],” Allen told Entertainment Weekly.
The teen was already suffering anxiety about having no control over his life, so the sudden move couldn’t have helped. “I have irrational fears, and they all go back to losing my father as a kid. I’ve never gotten over it,” Allen told Esquire. “As children, your world is yours. That day taught me that it’s really not your world. Somebody else is in control — fate, God, whatever it is. It is not your show. And the show can be brutal. Brutal in its coldness. Brutal in its love and affection. S**t can hit you straight between the eyes, and you never saw it coming.”
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It likely also didn’t help with Allen’s ever-increasing teenage angst. “I was an adolescent who woke up too early when my father was killed, and I stayed at that angry adolescent level [until I went to prison],” he admitted to the Los Angeles Daily News (via All That’s Interesting).
