My Cameras Caught My Own Family
Who I am and what I build
My name is Rhonda Dale. I am fifty-four years old, and I have spent most of my grown life building things.
First I built a name for myself as the Dale who never needed a thing from anybody. At the start, that seemed useful. In time, it got lonely. In my family, “Rhonda doesn’t need help” slowly turned into “Rhonda gets nothing,” and then somehow curdled into “Rhonda’s things are there for the rest of us to use.”
So I built something better than a reputation. I built a business.
Dale Security and Alarm. I started it in 1998 out of the spare bedroom of a rented apartment on the wrong side of Coldwater, Missouri, with a used van, a soldering iron, and one belief that has kept my lights on for almost thirty years. People almost always underestimate what a camera can see.
We wire alarm systems and cameras for the folks around here. Farmhouses out on the county roads. The grain co-op. The Casey’s station and the little bank branch on the square. Two churches, the elementary school after the trouble a few years back, the funeral home, half the storefronts on Main. Nothing fancy by city standards. But steady, and mine, and respected. When somebody in Tucker County has a break-in, a fire, or a dispute over what happened on their own porch, my name is the one they call before the sheriff.
I know cameras. I know motion sensors and door contacts and smart locks that keep a log of every single time a code gets punched in and by who. I know cloud backup and time stamps that hold up in a courtroom, because I have sat in that courtroom more than once and watched my footage decide a case.
I wired my own house first. Of course I did. Cameras inside and out. A smart lock on both doors. Motion in every room but the bathrooms. Audio in the main living area, which a homeowner is allowed to record on her own property in this state, something I checked with a lawyer years back and wrote down.
Long before any of this, I believed the same thing I tell every customer who signs a contract with me. Documentation is a form of love. It protects the people who are telling the truth.
The house they decided was too much for me
The house is a brick duplex on Poplar Street, three blocks off the square, in the old part of Coldwater where the sidewalks buckle up over the tree roots and everybody’s porch has a flag on it.
It is not a mansion. I want to be clear about that, because my family liked to talk about it as if I lived in some kind of palace. It is a solid two-family brick, built in 1952, with a shared center wall, a little covered porch on each side, and a hackberry tree in the front yard that drops sticky berries all over my truck every August.
I bought it in 2011 at the courthouse steps for forty-one thousand dollars when it came up in a tax sale, half rotted and full of raccoons. I put four years and most of my weekends into it. New roof, new wiring, new furnace, refinished the old oak floors on my hands and knees. I paid the whole thing off in 2019. It is worth maybe a hundred and seventy thousand today, all told, which around here is a real number but not a fortune. It is paid for. It is titled in my name and no one else’s. It is the only thing I own free and clear, and it is the closest thing I have to proof that a woman can start with nothing and end up with a roof that belongs to her.