“ ‘All right,’ Blue told me. ‘If that’s the way you want it.’ Mr. Blue scared the hell out of me that night with this bit. I’m sure that if he were questioned, he would say he was trying to find out whether I was gay, but I don’t think you have to do that to find that out. I knew other boys who described similar experiences with him. Of all the counselors and disciplinarians I knew at MacLaren’s, the one that I hold the most contempt for in memory is Mr. Blue. He was a cold, sadistic son of a bitch, a very scary person, and last I heard, he was still working within the Oregon corrections system.”
That was Gary’s first night in incarceration, away from our family.
GARY WENT INTO MACLAREN’S as a smart and talented fifteen-year-old boy, on his way to a life of trouble. He came out a little over a year later fully committed to living a criminal’s destiny. “Reform schools disseminate certain esoteric knowledge,” he told Larry Schiller years later. “They sophisticate. A kid comes out of reform school and he’s learned a few things he would otherwise have missed. And he identifies, usually, with the people who share the same esoteric knowledge, the criminal element, or whatever you want to call it. So going to Woodburn was not a small thing in my life.”
This isn’t to say that reform school was principally culpable for Gary’s degeneration. I have read through MacLaren’s file on Gary—a body of documents that became so legendary following Gary’s execution that the school kept it intact and occasionally made it available for the perusal of curious law enforcement and corrections officers. Though the school would not let me see my brother’s psychological reports (possibly the most important part of his file), I still found the records fascinating— sometimes full of real insights about Gary and about his family. Indeed, if there’s any single theme that emerges from these documents, it is this: Gary’s troubles were inextricably linked to the influence of his father—a man who seemed altogether reluctant to face the difficult truths necessary to save his son. Following the first intake interview with my parents, one supervisor wrote the following: “The counselor feels that the fact that the father sat outside in the car during the interview with the mother indicates either a lack of interest or shame or the feeling of inability to do anything about the problem. At the same time it should be honestly recorded that the four-year-old Mike was in the car, and that possibly Dad thought it best to sit with this small boy during the time that the mother had the interview.” A few paragraphs later, the counselor added: “Mr. Gilmore … appears to govern that which is under his authority as [an] … absolute monarch … Unfortunately, the much younger but completely overshadowed mother would seem to count little in Gary’s parole plan if Gary were sent home.” And, from another record: “Physical standards of the home are very good, but because of the paranoid attitudes of the father, the boy has been severely damaged.”
Throughout Gary’s stay at MacLaren’s, my father remained hostile to the school’s efforts to bring about a better home atmosphere for my brother. The family, my father insisted, was not to blame for Gary’s trouble; Gary had been set up by others and was being wrongfully punished. Exonerate Gary and set him free, my father told the school officials, and the problems would be solved. One counselor was smart enough to figure out that my father’s unswerving defense of Gary wasn’t so much a sign of love for his son, or a desire to protect him, as it was simply an extension of my father’s belief that the world was out to ruin Frank Gilmore, even through his family. “Whether [Gary’s innocence] is true or not,” wrote the counselor, “Gary, at home, could scarcely avoid feeling that the school, the judge, the important community citizens and maybe a few others were conniving to destroy the entire family.”
But records don’t tell the whole story. I also spoke with (or read the recollections of) several men who had done time at MacLaren’s during the same period that Gary was there. Putting together these two perspectives—the accounts of the officials and the remembrances of former inmates—is like viewing two largely disparate versions of the same history. On one hand, it is clear that certain counselors at the school tried their best to understand my brother and to effect a change in his life. In turn, he paid back their efforts with a series of escapes and violent episodes that forced them to impose on him their worst punishments. But it is also plain from the stories I have heard that, despite everybody’s best intentions, the reform school experience of the 1950s had many brutalizing aspects about it. Boys were locked up in cold and isolated conditions, beaten at the discretion of their counselors, and subjected to an environment in which astonishing acts of violence and sexual abuse took place. For some kids, being caged up in such a world only deepened their fears and their hatred. “It doesn’t make sense to a normal person,” one former inmate told me, “but when you’re locked up you can become a very hate-filled individual. And if you can’t externalize that hate—or if a fantasy about going into a bank with a tommy gun and blowing everybody up isn’t enough for you—then you turn that hatred on yourself. You reach a point of self-destructiveness where you’re going to have somebody really give you the ultimate. And sometimes the only way to do that is by hurting or enraging other people as much as you can.”
THE MOST RELIABLE and articulate observer I found on the subject of MacLaren’s was a man named Duane. He was in the reform school for almost exactly the same period as Gary, and he knew my brother well. One morning Duane paid me a visit at my apartment in Portland and shared with me some of his recollections. Duane had been a star student at his school until, at the age of fifteen, his stepfather began beating him viciously. Then he began hanging out with rough boys and stealing cars and other things. One time, they made the mistake of breaking into a cop’s home and stealing his revolver. They became the objects of a big chase and were arrested at gunpoint. The incident ended up getting splashed across the front page of The Oregonian. As a result, Duane and the friend he was caught with came into MacLaren’s with some standing. The other boys saw them as something like full-fledged outlaws. “Actually, we were a couple of dickheads,” said Duane, “but the kids didn’t know and we sure as hell weren’t going to tell them, because ninety percent of what you do in a place like that is bluff. You’re in there with some real bad apples. If they find out that you’re not a homicidal maniac like they may be, they’re going to put you in your place.”
Duane had been at MacLaren’s about a week when Gary was brought in. Duane’s first memories of my brother had to do with the psychological tests that were administered to the boys, to determine school placement and parole prospects. “They had this big fat psychiatrist,” said Duane. “This guy probably weighed three hundred pounds if he weighed an ounce. He’s a medical doctor, for Christ’s sake, and he’s talking to reform school kids, so how good can he be? Anyway, you go in there and sit down at a table across from this guy. He sits there and stares at you for twenty or thirty seconds, the sweat just pouring off him, and then the first question he would ask, right out of the chute, was: ‘How many girls have you fucked?’ Almost everybody I ever knew at MacLaren’s had the same experience with him. In my case, I figured if I tell him I screwed a girl, that’s another six months to my sentence. On the other hand, if I tell him I’m a cherry, my esteem will be lowered. So you’re torn. But I really was a virgin when I went up there, so I opted for honesty. Most of the guys would try running a bluff. They’d say, ‘Oh, fifty.’ And then the psychiatrist would want names, and he’d very patiently list all these names. I remember there was this one guy named Raymond, who told him he’d screwed something like two hundred girls or some damn thing, and the doctor had him put two hundred names on a list. Then Raymond signed it and MacLaren’s sent the list back to his high school. I imagine the shit hit the fan back there when they started bringing those girls in and asking them if indeed they had been sexually active with Raymond. See, they used to be much more intrusive in teenage lives back in those days than they are now. Back then, if a girl had three guys she was a whore. Five, and she was the arch fiend
of all times, could never be married to anybody.
“The next thing the psychiatrist would do,” Duane continued, “was give you pencil and paper and say, ‘Okay, draw a house for me. Now, draw a picture of yourself inside the house,’ and so forth. Well, I knew right away what he wanted. He wanted to see a house and he wanted to see where I was in this house. He was looking for me to give him clues to myself. I went ahead and played it straight with him, because I had already heard that if the psychiatrist thought you had a lot of problems, he’d assign you to one of the rougher cottages. I wanted to get sent to one of the better cottages, where the kids were likely to get out the soonest, so I wasn’t going to fuck up my psychological profile.
“When I got back to the squad room, I was sitting around with my buddies and we’re all laughing about this psychiatrist, thinking about ways we could fuck him up. That’s when I met Gary. I remember he was a nice kid, a little shy, but he was eager to get along with us and to establish himself as somebody notable. He saw what we were doing, and he was anxious to run a bluff on this psychiatrist and his fucked-up theories. Also, I think he wanted to impress us guys. He was a little younger than us—maybe a year and a half younger.”
Duane paused in his story for a moment, then shook his head. “I remember this so well and afterward I felt really bad, especially after I heard what happened to Gary in later years. I mean, it’s humorous to tell about, but if I could change anything of what I did back then—and I include my so-called crimes—if I was only allowed to change one thing, I would not have done this to Gary, because I saw him take the bit and run with it. I told him, ‘Okay, what you want to do is draw a picture of yourself, and give yourself a little mouth, big eyes, big ears, and no hands. You know what this tells this idiot psychiatrist? You’ve got no voice and no hands, so you’re helpless to change anything. But you hear everything and you see everything, so you’re obviously a paranoid.’ Now, Gary wasn’t really like that, you know what I mean? But he did what I told him—he went in there and drew the picture of himself that way.
“I shouldn’t have been doing that,” Duane said. “I thought it was cute as hell that some other dumb-ass kid would follow my instructions, even though I knew that fat-ass psychiatrist was a contemptible fucker in many ways, and he had the power to assign Gary to one of the rougher cottages. You’ve got to realize, when you’re a kid and you get locked up, it screws you up. I had the idea that there were only so many people who were going to get released every month. I wanted to be sure I kept myself on the pipeline to get out as quick as I could, and I felt like I was in competition for release with the other kids. That’s the way those places can make you think. I was playing a game I shouldn’t have been playing.”
MACLAREN’S REFORM SCHOOL FOR BOYS offered its wards both counseling and educational opportunities, or, if a boy preferred, some vocational training—primarily farmwork. Gary, for the most part, chose MacLaren’s unlisted fourth option: full-time punishment. In fact, Gary had only been at MacLaren’s a matter of days when he began getting into trouble. His first punishments came at the hands of Mr. Blue. “Mr. Blue loved to administer something he called ‘spats,’ “ Duane told me. “I got them a few times. It didn’t take much—all you had to do was yell at or push another kid. Any sign of belligerence. I know your brother got spats quite a bit at first. I remember seeing it happen.”
And what exactly, I asked Duane, were spats’?
Duane grimaced. “Mr. Blue had a glassed-in office in the reception cottage. If you violated a rule, or just pissed Blue off, he’d call you into his office alone and he’d close the door. He would tell you to peel your shirt and drop your pants, so you’re naked. Then he’d tell you to reach over and grab your ankles. That’s when he would take this hard Ping-Pong paddle that had holes drilled in—to lessen the wind resistance— and he would pound your ass with it. You’d get ulcers on your buttocks from these spats. We called them headlights. I don’t know why we didn’t call them taillights. I guess because they were white and looked just like the headlights on a car. The minimum spats Blue would give you was twenty-five, and if you really pissed him off he’d give you fifty. I know your brother got this punishment several times, because I saw it happen.
“It was really weird, because with Mr. Blue there was no emotion. It was like a force moving against you. When he said he was giving you spats it was with a smile on his face. He’d say, in a monotone voice, ‘I’m really sorry I’ve got to do this, but I have to do it to you, Gary, because you asked for it,’ and then WHAM. I’ve never been beaten like that, never in my life. Believe me, it was a frightening experience.”
SPATS, THOUGH, WERE just the start. MacLaren’s had bigger punishments to offer, and Gary found them.
A few weeks after entering MacLaren’s, Gary was on a camping expedition with one of the counselors and several other boys, near Seaside, on the Oregon coast. It was something of a test: If the boys could work cooperatively in a setting like this, and proved responsible and trustworthy, they might be likelier to win an early parole. As the boys were heading back from a morning fishing trip, Gary and two others lagged at the rear of the group. Soon as they saw that the counselor was safely out of sight, the three boys ran hard the other way. They cut through the brush and made their way into Seaside, where they hitched a ride into Portland. That night, Gary and the others slept in an empty, trashed bungalow that stood behind our house on Johnson Creek, and the next morning, after my father had left for the day, Gary went inside to inform my mother about his escape. The school had already called and told her the police were looking for Gary, and she tried to talk him into returning to the school. But Gary refused. “I’ll go crazy in that place,” he said, and then he told her about some of what he had already witnessed and experienced at MacLaren’s. My mother gave Gary fifty dollars and a change of clothes. She told him to be careful and to write her from wherever he ended up. She did not call the police or MacLaren’s to let them know that her runaway son had come around. She decided right then she would never turn a son of hers over to the law, for any reason.
Gary and the others spent the rest of the day hiding out in movie theaters and sleeping in abandoned cars. The next morning, Gary hotwired a 1947 Chevrolet coupe that was parked on Division Street and drove over two hundred miles to Pendleton, Oregon, where the car threw a rod. The boys then stole a 1955 Chevy and were close to crossing the Oregon-Idaho border when a state policeman pulled them over. The arresting officer reported that the three escapees seemed excited by the chase and proud of their exploits, and that Gary in particular bragged about his knack for car stealing.
Back at MacLaren’s, the escape went over badly. “Every effort had been made to give [Gary] opportunities to improve,” wrote his counselor. “The boy has air of instability that does not inspire trust, is resistant to authority and resentful of his commitment. [He will] continue to be a security risk on open campus and would benefit by the program offered by L. E. Darling.”
L. E. Darling—also known as L.E.D.— was MacLaren’s equivalent of a maximum security unit. It was a large cottage located at the rear of the grounds and separated from the rest of the place by a tall wire fence.
Said Duane: “I think the kids in L.E.D. had a daily routine something like ours, except they didn’t get to go outside and the discipline was much more harsh. By harsh I mean, rumor had it that instead of being sent into segregation, L.E.D. allegedly had a room with manacles where you’d actually be chained to the wall, which we didn’t have. I never had to endure that, but I heard from other kids who were in L.E.D. that they were manacled to the wall, and that the supervisors beat them. Instead of spats across the butt it was a real whipping, with a belt across the back, like being flayed. And if they put you on bread and water in L.E.D., you were on bread and water—with a cup of milk in the middle of the day— for up to three weeks. I received that treatment for a week a couple of times and didn’t suffer any lasting effects. I don’t know what would happen if you
went for two or three weeks on it. I think it would be pretty bad.”
Gary spent the rest of 1955 in L.E.D. Shortly before Christmas, the cottage manager made the following note: “Gary is still our boy in the corner. I still believe Gary will not trust anyone, staff or boy. He tries to be one of the group but seems unable to do so. When I talk to a group he will go into a corner and not take any part in the discussion.” The manager also noted that Gary seemed to have bad dreams almost every night and often talked in his sleep.
But while Gary was quiet and aloof, the supervisors in L.E.D. didn’t find him particularly troublesome. “Some staff thought Gary was the best boy they had ever had and did not belong in L.E.D.,” one counselor wrote. “Different ideas were expressed that perhaps the boy was caught in a web of circumstances not his fault, and therefore may have minimal if any delinquency.”
On January 1, 1956, MacLaren’s released Gary from L.E.D. to the custody of Cottage 3—considered by many to be the school’s best cottage. Two days later Gary went to the cottage’s manager and told him that if he was not put back in L.E.D., he was going to run away again. He didn’t like the fact that he couldn’t smoke in the regular cottages, plus he found life outside L.E.D. too crowded and loud. The manager put him back in L.E.D. for the night, then decided that Gary had been bluffing and returned him to Cottage 3. The next day he ran away, and within a week he was back in custody and assigned again to L.E.D.
This penchant for hard-time punishment became a pattern that would hold true for my brother for the rest of his prison career. He would invariably commit flagrant violations that had the effect of earning him sustained bouts of severe punishments—usually in isolated circumstances. Indeed, by the time of his death, Gary had spent roughly half of his jail time in isolation, segregation, or some other form of maximum incarceration. MacLaren’s was where he established the pattern: For the next several months he would behave admirably inside L.E.D., and as soon as he was released into the school’s general population, he would run away or commit some infraction that would land him back in maximum security.
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