Al Capone Does My Shirts

by Gennifer Choldenko

  “Thank you, Daddy,” Piper says as the warden puts his arm around her.

  I watch them walk up the hill. When they are out of earshot, I ask my dad, “Just all of a sudden like that?”

  My dad nods. He chews at his bottom lip. “You know anything about this, Moose?” he asks.

  “No,” I answer almost before he gets the question out.

  He nods like he believes me, then pops a toothpick in his mouth. “Life is amazing, isn’t it? You can’t ever tell what will happen. Nobody knows until they go ahead and play the game.”

  “You can say that again,” I say.

  40. Al Capone Does My Shirts

  Wednesday, June 12, 1935

  The next morning I get up and pull a clean shirt off the hanger. As I shoot my arm through the sleeve, I hear something crackle. I dig my fingers in the pocket and pull out a torn scrap of brown paper. It’s folded in half and in half again. Inside is one word scribbled hastily in pencil and underlined twice.

  Done, it says.

  Author’s Note

  Alcatraz Island . . . when truth is stranger than fiction.

  Al Capone Does My Shirts is a work of fiction, but many of the details about life on Alcatraz are true.

  During the twenty-nine years when Alcatraz was a working penitentiary (1934-1963)—or, as one convict described it, “a maximum-security, long-term burying ground for convicts of particularly vile renown”1—the families of most of the guards and prison administrators lived on the island. Between fifty and sixty families resided on Alcatraz at any given time. Nine babies were born to mothers who lived on the island and some children lived their entire childhood on Alcatraz.

  There was a whole village on the island: a post office with a pelican insignia postmark, a tiny grocery store, a play area called the parade grounds and an Officers’ Club complete with a bowling alley. Many of the kids lived in 64 building, an army-issue apartment building that still stands today. No children were ever hurt or taken hostage during the Alcatraz penitentiary years. One guard felt that there was an unwritten “code of rule among the inmates that family men were safe.”2 This may have been true for some convicts, but certainly not all. During the Battle of Alcatraz in May of 1946, two guards were killed and fourteen injured. Almost all were family men. At least one autobiography of an Alcatraz inmate contains detailed escape plans, which included taking the warden’s wife as a hostage.3

  Today it seems surprising that so many children lived on Alcatraz, but at the time Alcatraz was thought to be a better place for kids than the city. “Our parents frequently said they felt safer living on Alcatraz than in San Francisco. There was no traffic, no burglaries; few of us, in fact, worried about security. It was a low-crime neighborhood, after all. Fences and locked gates were everywhere, yet some residents didn’t lock their doors.”4 “All of our bad guys are locked up” is a refrain sounded again and again in the handwritten accounts of island life found in the Alcatraz Island Ranger Library.

  Also, it was much cheaper to live on Alcatraz. 1935 was a depression year and San Francisco rents, even then, were costly. Prison guards were not highly paid, and as one former Alcatraz guard stated, he “Never even considered living off the island as it was too expensive to live in San Francisco.”5

  But perhaps the most important reason families lived on the island in the early years was because Warden James A. Johnston wanted it this way. Ready access to his staff of guards in the event of a prison break was an important aspect of his overall security plan. High-ranking officers were expected—perhaps even required6—to live on Alcatraz. “When we had a disturbance, if we were at a party, we didn’t put on our coats or anything, we just went right up the hill. They used to call down at 64 building and the phone was right outside my apartment and we answered the phone and they’d say: ‘We have trouble in the cell house,’ and that’s all they had to say. Everybody available went ...”7

  The warden lived in a beautiful mansion located right next door to the cell house. Warden Johnston (dubbed “Old Saltwater” by the cons) opened Alcatraz and ran it for fourteen years. Warden Johnston’s youngest daughter, Barbara, also lived on the island—though she bears no resemblance whatsoever to Piper.

  During 1935 all of the Alcatraz kids took the boat to San Francisco, where they attended school. The only exception was made for kindergarten-age children, who attended a kindergarten held on Alcatraz, taught by one of the moms who lived on the island.8

  As you might imagine, saying you lived on Alcatraz did, in fact, garner quite a lot of attention at school. Some kids thought it was weird. Others were “dazzled by the prison stories.”9 Most kids who lived on Alcatraz seemed to take the prison for granted. Jolene Babyak, who was a kid on the island during the ’50s, said it was like living next to the police station. She said she wasn’t scared “because there were so many guards around.”10

  Al Capone (AZ 85) was an inmate on Alcatraz for four and a half years, from 1934 to 1939. Warden Johnston described the intense interest in Capone this way: “The newspaper reporters telephoned me almost every day—‘How is Capone? Is he still there? Is he going to be transferred? Where is he working?’ ” Very little information came out of Alcatraz and erroneous reporting was rampant. “At times,” Warden Johnston said, “I became fed up with the gossip about him that had no foundation in fact. . . . A story was featured that though Al Capone was in Alcatraz, he was sending orders to a London haberdasher for silk underwear . . . I assured the Director of the Bureau of Prisons that there was no truth in such a report . . . that I had seen Capone wearing the regulation underwear and I had noticed it particularly because he had the waist of his drawers fastened with a safety pin.”11

  The residents of the island were as interested in Capone as the rest of the world. One boy described watching Capone’s first footsteps on Alcatraz: “Our apartment overlooked the island’s docks, and my mother’s old Kodak box camera took a photo of the first convicts’ arrival. We lived along the building’s upper gallery, but we went down a level to be closer to the action that we had waited months to see. Our binoculars located Al Capone, his face was familiar in those days. No others stood out.”12 Another woman said: “The first prisoners arrived, among them Al Capone.” She laughed. “And women and children were requested to stay indoors until the prisoners were locked in their cells. . . . Well, we kind’a snuck a look before the boat docked.”13

  Capone’s first job on Alcatraz was working the mangle in the laundry facility14—thought to be an undesirable post often offered as a first job because it was boring, backbreaking work. The facility handled the laundry for everyone who lived on the island and for some of the local army bases, like the one on Angel Island.

  The laundry scheme is fiction. No record of kids selling the opportunity to have a shirt laundered by Capone has ever been found. However, there is documentation of at least one army officer—a private stationed on Angel Island—writing home that “his laundryman was Al Capone.”15

  In fact, after completing Al Capone Does My Shirts, I discovered that World War II GIs sometimes used the phrase “Al Capone does my shorts”16 to indicate they were stationed in San Francisco. Capone was no longer on Alcatraz then, but the “Capone mythology”17 was as powerful as ever.

  In 1935, the convicts played handball and softball in the walled-off recreation yard on the island, and Capone was thought to have played first base.18 Capone liked baseball. As a kid, he “pitched sandlot baseball well enough to cherish dreams of turning pro.”19 The convicts were quite serious about their games and kept careful records of their leagues. “They played as avidly as any big league team out to win the pennant.”20 But the rules differed from those of a regular game in one important way. On Alcatraz “If you knocked the ball over the wall, you’re out. (It was not a home run and you couldn’t get out and get it, either.) We usually had an inmate that worked outside the wall—the gardener. He would throw them back.”21

  The kids who lived on the island did, in fac
t, collect convict handballs and baseballs. “Once when I was eight, a prisoner found a hard rubber ball in the weeds and beckoned to me. I shyly approached, as the guard stood there, and the man pushed the ball through the fence to me. It was a proud moment; I had in my hand the most valuable item on Alcatraz—the coveted black handball that had rolled down the hill from over the prison yard wall.”22

  Many of the other details of Capone’s time on Alcatraz are also true. There was, for example, a snitch box, which visitors and residents alike were required to walk through when entering the island. And when Capone’s mother, Teresina Capone, came to visit him on the island, her corset did indeed set the snitch box off. “Mrs. Capone, who barely spoke English, was visibly embarrassed at having to strip down to her corset, revealing the metal stays that had tripped the metal detector.”23

  Capone was horribly ruthless, authorizing and sometimes performing the slaying of hundreds of people, but he could also be surprisingly generous. “When the crash came in 1929, he (Al Capone) was first to open soup kitchens.”24 Some people considered him a Robin Hood kind of character25—or, as one fellow Alcatraz convict described him, “Outside of losing his head so easily and bragging about what he has done, Capone has a heart as big as a house.”26

  The accounts of children who grew up on Alcatraz differ according to the time they lived on the island and their own individual experiences. A doctor who worked on the island in 1937 said, “During their play, the children often came into close contact with the prisoners working on the outdoor details.”27 On the other hand, one former Alcatraz island resident whom I heard speak clearly stated she had no interaction with convicts whatsoever during her stay on the island. And a third said she formed a friendship with one convict based on the exchange of flowers. She called this inmate her “boyfriend.”28

  The convicts’ mail was routinely censored and wives of the guards were occasionally asked to help out with this task. As one convict described it: “It took a letter from ten days to two weeks to get to you after it reached the institution. You see, all the incoming letters are censored and then given to different guards to type in duplicate when they have time. Nothing was personal. Every officer could take your letters and read them and then discuss your personal affairs with each other. The prisoners’ personal mail was taken home by different officers to let their wives read.”29

  Incredible though it seems, residents of the island sang Christmas carols outside of the cell house with the express purpose of entertaining the convicts. As one woman who lived on the island during the early ’40s told me, caroling was a very big thing. And only the children who were the best singers were given the privilege of caroling to the cons.30

  And it is certainly true that convicts were sometimes seen in the residential areas of the island. They were on the dock handling the laundry. They acted as garbagemen, gardeners, and sometimes movers and house painters for the guards who lived on the island. And while it is true that convicts were always supposed to be escorted by guards, it is certainly conceivable that in some cases that rule would have been bent or broken.

  Meeting Capone was a big thrill to kids who lived on the island. One ten-year-old boy described the day he met Capone.

  On rare occasions dependents entered the prison proper. I became a more familiar figure because Doctor Hess, or medical assistant Charles Ping, gave me adrenaline shots for asthma. Of course, my father escorted me to and from the prison hospital/dispensary. On the notable occasion, Capone was being treated, and my father’s sense of history came through.

  He said, “Al, this is my boy, Roy.

  “Rollo, ” Dad’s nickname for me, “this is Al Capone.”

  Capone shook my hand and I said something and, I suppose, twitched around the way ten-year-olds do.

  Capone said, “Good-looking boy, Boss.”

  That was a big moment for a boy, and I can still recall the warmth of Capone’s hand around mine.31

  Though every attempt was made to make Al Capone Does My Shirts historically accurate, some details were changed to suit the story. For example, the weather—while true to the San Francisco Bay area in general—does not reflect the exact weather of 1935. Also, the island was run in “rigid military style,”32 with orders working their way down the chain of command. Talking to a kid about the rules of the island would probably be something the warden would have delegated. And though the concept of separate schools for children with problems was certainly in existence,33 everything else about the Esther P. Marinoff School is completely fictional.

  About Natalie

  The character Natalie Flanagan would probably be diagnosed with autism. Autism is a disease that affects the way your brain and sensory system work. It usually becomes evident in the first three years of a child’s life.34 While there is a whole range of behaviors of people with autism, typically a child with autism has an extremely difficult time making eye contact, playing with other kids and sometimes even speaking. Children with autism are often prone to tantrums, repetitive behaviors and intense physical sensitivities and desensitivities, “some sensations being heightened and even intolerable, others (which may include pain perception) being diminished or apparently absent.”35

  Temple Grandin, perhaps the most famous person with autism in the world today, says autism is “A near normal brain trapped inside a sensory system that does not work.”36 Noted autism experts Theodore and Judith Mitrani describe autism as “Extreme aloneness from the beginnings of life.”

  Autism wasn’t identified until 1943, a full eight years after this book takes place. Children with what we now call autism received many different diagnoses during the 1930s and were sometimes institutionalized. Up until quite recently there was little hope for children with autism. As Oliver Sacks put it, “We almost always speak of autistic children, never of autistic adults, as if such children never grew up, or were somehow mysteriously spirited off the planet.”37 But in the last few years a lot of progress has been made in the treatment of autism. The most encouraging statistics show that intense early intervention with applied behavioral analysis can help as many as half the children diagnosed with autism to achieve normal functioning.38

  Natalie is a wholly fictional character. She is not meant to symbolize or represent autism in any way. She was inspired by my own sister, Gina Johnson, who had a severe form of autism.

  Notes

  1. AL BEST [pseud.], “Inside Alcatraz: The Prison Memories of Inmate Number 107: The Untold Story of Al Capone on the Rock,” ed. Richard Reinhardt, San Francisco Focus, December 1987, 76.

  2. Unpublished Alcatraz notebooks. Accounts of life on Alcatraz written by Alcatraz residents. Rangers, docents and volunteers on Alcatraz have access to this information in order to prepare programs for the public. I worked as a volunteer docent on Alcatraz from October 1998 through November 1999.

  3. ALVIN KARPIS, On the Rock: Twenty-five Years in Alcatraz: The Prison Story of Alvin Karpis As Told to Robert Livesey (Don Mills, Ont.: Musson Book, 1980), 110.

  4. JOLENE BABYAK, Eyewitness on Alcatraz: True Stories of Families Who Lived on the Rock (Berkeley, Calif.: Ariel Vamp Press, 1988), 4.

  5. Unpublished Alcatraz notebooks.

  6. Ibid.

  7. BABYAK, Eyewitness on Alcatraz, 66.

  8. ROY F. CHANDLER and E. F. CHANDLER, Alcatraz, the Hard Years, 1934-1938 (Orwigsburg, Pa.: Bacon and Freeman, 1989), 86-87.

  9. BABYAK, Eyewitness on Alcatraz, 3.

  10. JOLENE BABYAK, daughter of Arthur Dollison, Associate Warden on Alcatraz, during a conversation with me on January 21, 2002.

  11. JAMES A. JOHNSTON, Alcatraz Island Prison, and the Men Who Live There (Douglas/Ryan Communication, 1999), 31.

  12. CHANDLER and CHANDLER, Alcatraz, the Hard Years, 29.

  13. BABYAK, Eyewitness on Alcatraz, 12.

  14. JOHNSTON, Alcatraz Island Prison, and the Men Who Live There, 41.

  15. Ibid., 41.

  16. JOHN A. MARTINI, author of Fortress Alcatraz: G
uardian of the Golden Gate, in a phone conversation with me on January 23, 2003.

  17. Ibid.

  18. BEST, “Inside Alcatraz,” 130.

  19. ROBERT J. SCHOENBERG, Mr. Capone: The Real—and Complete—Story of Al Capone (New York: Morrow, 1992), 21.

  20. MILTON DANIEL BEACHER, M.D., Alcatraz Island: Memoirs of a Rock Doc, ed. Dianne Beacher Perfit (Lebanon, N.J.: Pelican Island Pub., 2001), 67.

  21. FRANK HEANEY and GAY MACHADO, Inside the Walls of Alcatraz (Palo Alto, Calif.: Bull, 1987), 52.

  22. BABYAK, Eyewitness on Alcatraz, 18.

  23. Ibid., 13.

  24. SCHOENBERG, Mr. Capone, 179.

  25. Ibid.

  26. BEST, “Inside Alcatraz,” 124.

  27. BEACHER, Alcatraz Island: Memoirs of a Rock Doc, 128.

  28. “Kids on the Rock” presentation given by people who grew up on Alcatraz, Alcatraz Alumni Day, August 12, 2001.

  29. BEST, “Inside Alcatraz,” 80.

  30. “Kids on the Rock” presentation.

  31. CHANDLER and CHANDLER, Alcatraz, the Hard Years, 31-32.

  32. JOLENE BABYAK in a letter to me dated February 13, 2003.