Some of the seventy-five children were born here, knowing no other home than The Rock. Daughter of the guards grow up to be wives of guards. The island once had a kindergarten class; now all the children go to public or private schools in the city. Pupils caught up by a favorite television program at night catch up on their homework on the twelve-minute ride to the mainland on the prison launch, the Warden Johnston. Before dashing down to the wharf, one lad delivers the morning papers. Occasionally, on the return trip after school, there may be a convict aboard, but he is shackled and out of sight in a sealed-off cabin.
The youngsters of Alcatraz lead a life very much like that of their urban classmates, even to a curfew that sends them home at nine o’clock week nights, eleven o’clock Saturday and Sunday. They play ball beneath the frowning prison cliff, fish off the shore, shoot billiards or bowl at the Officers’ Club, where teenagers gather at a replica of a drugstore fountain.
Only in one regard is a boy’s life different on Alcatraz: he cannot own a rifle to hunt or sieve tin cans on a fence post. Nor a cap pistol. Nor a rubber knife. When they play cops-and-robbers, forefingers serve as revolvers and lusty “Bang! Bang!” for shots. And they must never step outside the fenced-in limits of the family acres.
Humor resides here with grimness, and the personnel christened the new staff dining room up at the prison The Top o’ The Rock. The Officers’ Club down below is the social and cultural center of the civilian colony: here old-fashioned square dances make The Rock sing on Saturday night; here the Alcatraz Women’s Club holds meetings, bridge parties, an annual Yule bazaar; here too the Alcatraz Ballet—girls four to fourteen, taught by a guard’s wife who had been reared on the island—stages performances.
Alcatraz was once the setting for nuptials, when a light-keeper’s daughter married a classmate at Utah Agricultural College. The Coast Guard still operates the light, a new light mounted on an octagonal column towering 214 feet above sea level, with a flashing beacon visible twenty-one miles at sea. While on duty the Coast Guardsmen—a married man and a bachelor, who occupy two of the three apartments in the lighthouse—are under the control of the prison authorities.
Rock families enjoy all the freedoms of the mainland. They can have guests at any hour of the day or night, and parties till dawn, subject to the same rules as party-givers anywhere: if they get too rowdy, they are told to pipe down. Residents are responsible for what their guests carry onto the island.
“We hope they’re sensible enough not to bring any firearms,” says Warden Olin D. Blackwell. “We’re particularly anxious about ammunition. The inmates can make guns, but it’s harder to make cartridges.”
Blackwell, fourth and current warden of The Rock, is a rangy, amiable, middle-aged, onetime Texas rancher who still wears an imprint of the open range: a western Stetson; on occasion, a bolo or cowpoke’s string tie; a tooled leather belt with an outsized buckle of Navajo Indian silver, turquoise adorned; a Navajo open bracelet on the left wrist, silver inlaid with turquoise stones. He feels that The Rock is an ideal place to live: “We have more privacy than people in the city. A lot safer at night, too. We never lock our doors.”
Like the islanders, guests need not pass through the metal detector. They reach the four-acre settlement by a private stairway to a footbridge over the dock area, then through a gate controlled by the tower guard. On departing, they stand at the gate until the guard opens it—after prison visitors are aboard the boat, after the five convicts on the dock detail line up in his sight, and after he has been assured that all the other prisoners are accounted for.
When the doorbell rings, an Alcatraz wife knows for a certainty it will not be a salesman, for this is one territory even the Fuller Brush man cannot penetrate. Rock wives do their shopping at their own “co-op” on the island or at markets in the city, either in person or by phone. They are no farther from downtown San Francisco department stores than women in residential areas such as the ocean-fronting Sunset district—perhaps closer, with no traffic lights on the bay segment of their trip to town. Normally, it’s a twelve-minute run from the island to the Fort Mason dock, where the Alcatraz wife takes either a bus downtown or the family car, parked in the huge pier shed. Rock residents can have a jolly night in town and catch a late, or early, boat back. The boat makes twenty-two trips a day, the first at 5 A.M., the last at 2 A.M.
Although the children share this tiny island with about 260 convicts, they seldom see any at close range except those who collect the garbage or tend the gardens and the sharp-spiked century plants along the paths. The older children ignore the inmates, but the tots sometimes grow curious, such as the preschool child who once asked her mother why a playmate’s daddy (a guard) watched over the gardeners so closely. After a moment’s perplexity, the mother answered: “They’re bad men—they’re being punished for not eating their spinach.” Later the child hop-skipped up to a domesticated gunman kneeling at a shrub and scolded, “Shame on you! Aren’t you sorry now you didn’t eat your spinach?”
The penal concept that created Alcatraz ruled out the trusty, the model prisoner trusted to perform duties outside the walls. Associate Warden Lawrence Delmore once explained: “Trusties get the idea they are privileged characters and expect the run of the place. Besides, guards are apt to turn their backs on them because they think they are safe. You can’t do that here.”
Warden Blackwell, who occupies a three-story, eighteen-room house on the edge of the bluff a few steps from the prison building, voiced a regret on that score: “It’s hard to find a prisoner to work in the house because if they can be trusted to do that, they don’t belong on the island.”
During the regime of Warden Johnston, in a day when the felons were regarded as far less trustworthy, a dinner guest at the mansion, aware of the reasoning that gangsters made unreliable trusties, was astonished to discover the butler was a convict. He was even more astonished to learn the chef was an armed robber.
“We’ll soon be losing our cook,” the warden said. “He’s coming up for parole.”
Barbara, the warden’s eighteen-year-old daughter, protested: “Oh, Daddy, you can’t let him out—he’s the only cook we ever had who could make Bar de Luc!”
Chapter 6
ARAUCOUS BLAST, THE CELLHOUSE alarm clock, jars you awake at 6 A.M. Twenty minutes till the head count. You wash up at the cold-water tap, comb your hair, brush your teeth. (If sensitive, you might vary the routine by brushing your teeth first, or putting on your right shoe first, but as you wear into the set ways of an automaton you skip these small variations.)
You get into the gray shirt, the gray trousers, the sturdy shoes. You make your bed, tidy up your cubicle, then take your position at the bars of your cell front. After the stand-up count, you hear the lieutenant call: “Ring in outside B!” A dozen cell doors slide open. You step out, march along the tier gallery, descend the circular steel stairway. As you approach the mess hall you remember and quickly button your collar. (This becomes automatic, for an open collar at mess lands you in solitary.) You file past the steam table with a compartmented tray, picking up your breakfast—rolls, dry cereal and milk, coffee, and you know the day is Tuesday: menus are your calendar.
Twenty minutes to eat. A whistle, you stand up; a whistle, you turn; a whistle, you check in your flatware and march out, up the winding stairway, along the tier, into your cell. Another count, then the command: “Ring out B!” Cells open, you march along the tier, down the circular stairs, through a metal detector into the yard. You stand on a yellow line until all convict workers come out. Then, “Brush shop!” You are checked off as you go through a gate, down a flight of steps in the cliffside to a landing, through another Snitch Box, down another flight, along a road to the shops.
At 11:20, you come back up the road, back up the flights, back through the yard, back up the steel stairway, back along the tier, back into your cell. A head count, the lieutenant’s command. You go along the tier, down the stairs, into the mess hall, eat, obey
the three whistles, march back to your cell. Another count. You walk along the tier, descend the stairs, go into the yard, stand on the painted line, file through the gate, down the flights, along the road to the shops.
At 4:30, you come back up the road, back up the flights, back through the yard, back up the stairway, back along the tier, back into your cell. A head count, the lieutenant’s command. You go along the tier, down the stairs, into the mess hall, eat, stand, turn, march back to your cell. The door clangs shut, stays shut for thirteen hours. At 9:30, your cell light winks out.
At 6 A.M., a raucous blast.…
In the timelessness of The Rock, an hour thins out into a day, a day lengthens into a stretch, and even a term with a fixed end seems endless. You pass through day after day after day with the feeling that somewhere in the past life came to a stop. Only Sunday offers a rupture in the routine, and after a time Sunday takes on a routine within routine: an hour at chapel in the morning, two hours in the yard in the afternoon (one hour, if you went to chapel). For this gift of Sunday you pay extra in solitude: lockup comes earlier. Twice a year you get an extra Sunday, Christmas and New Year’s, unless they fall on a Sunday; but there is no yuletide. All other holidays are routine days.
This was the way it was in the early years of Alcatraz, a brooding and grimly forbidding island prison in the bay, shrouded in fog and secrecy. And then came rumblings that this pet project of the Department of Justice was not an original experiment in penology after all, but an idea borrowed from the Middle Ages, a horror chamber Torquemada might have dreamed up. Bryan Conway, a released convict, reported: “Men slowly go insane under the exquisite torture of routine.” Al (Sailor) Loomis, counterfeiter and onetime boxer, set free in February 1936 after sixteen months on The Rock, told the United Press that a suicide watch was even maintained while a man shaved. A guard twice a week handed a convict a dull blade, gave him two minutes to shave, then stood by to prevent any attempt at self-destruction. Loomis said: “Many almost succeeded by slashing legs and arms. It’s hell there. Life gets so monotonous you feel like bucking the rules to break the monotony. That’s it—the monotony. It’s driving the men screwy.” He said the one-man cells were maddeningly simple: “The walls were the barest things I ever saw. No pictures. Nothing. If a con tried to put up the photograph of his mother he was headed for the hole.” Loomis summed up life on The Rock: fog, sand fleas everywhere, unceasing scrutiny, censored mail, utter lack of hope, no amusement, no relief from boredom. “They never give a guy a break.”
Conway, writing in the Saturday Evening Post (“20 Months in Alcatraz,” February 19, 1938), reported that in his last year on The Rock fourteen prisoners went “violently insane” and “any number of others” were isolated as stir crazy. In a period of three years thirty-five inmates reportedly were packed off in straitjackets to the Federal Prison Bureau’s asylum at Springfield, Missouri.
The Department of Justice ignored these reports with a loftiness that indicated they were the mere ravings of ex-convicts. However, in 1938 the physician in charge of the medical staff (the prison hospital was then staffed and accredited, but no longer is) was abruptly replaced, without explanation, by a psychiatrist, Dr. Romney Ritchey.
It was about then that Roy Gardner, the train bandit, came off the island to report Capone a madman: “Al’s mind is gone. His enemies and the hell nights did it.” He described hell nights as the nights made sleepless for a convict by anxiety over family affairs, or a long term awaiting him in some state prison when he leaves The Rock, or enemies on the outside waiting to fill him full of slugs; or by the screaming wind and blasting foghorns. Almost nightly the wind funneling through the Golden Gate shrieks down the ventilator shafts of the cellhouse. On foggy nights, and it’s more often foggy than clear, the horns at each end of the island set up a strident reverberation, one every twenty seconds, the other every thirty seconds.
The evidence seemed clear that hell nights alone had not deranged Capone. The “exquisite torture of routine” played a part, and the minor infractions, such as talking, that put him so often in the dread dungeon. What apparently tipped the scales, a convict later testified, was a medieval display of punishment in which Capone was forced to squat for days in a cage three feet high.
Other stories, some shockingly grisly, of inmates being driven to suicide or self-mutilation by the rigors of The Rock began coming to light, either through coroner’s inquests or tips to newspapers long after they had happened. There was the suicide-by-flight of husky, forty-year-old Joe Bowers, described by Warden Johnston as a man of more brawn than brains. He was serving a twenty-five-year term for the $16.63 robbery of a store in the mountain hamlet of Isaiah in the Feather River country of the High Sierras—a federal offense because the post office was in the store.
Joe Bowers worked alone at the incinerator on a lower level of the island’s west side facing the Golden Gate, next to the cyclone fence. He burned trash and mashed tin cans and sent them rattling into the bay down a chute through the fence, a chute too small for use as a slide. The fence bordered a cliff with a sheer drop of sixty feet to jagged rocks.
His job came under the surveillance of the south gun tower. On duty that bright April morning of 1936 was Guard E. F. Chandler, whose keen custodial eye pivoted from incinerator to the yard, to the steps from the yard, to the vehicles on the winding road from the shops to the wharf, on around to the bay where a boat might venture within the buoyed boundary and need a warning shot. When he heard the 11:20 whistle, the signal for all workers to return to their cells for the pre-lunch count, Chandler glanced down to watch Bowers head up the road. He was astonished to see the convict dash to the fence and start climbing.
Chandler grabbed up his megaphone and shouted, “Joe! Get down out of there! Joe! Stop …! Get back down, Joe!” Bowers kept climbing. What happened in the next few seconds, Chandler described to a coroner’s jury:
“I picked up Mary Ann and fired a couple of low ones, thinking I might get him in the leg. When he kept on going and went over the fence I leveled Mary Ann and let him have it. I knew if he got to the bay, God knew where he’d go next. He might be robbing banks in San Francisco. I had my orders and I followed them. That’s what I’m there for.
“Bowers was over the deadline. He knew what he was doing, and I couldn’t get him without wings.”
Bowers was at the top, picking his way over the barbed wire, when Chandler leveled Mary Ann and let him have it. A single bullet sped from the tower, on target. Bowers leaped convulsively, plunged to the rocks. The prison launch recovered the body. He had been shot through the lungs.
The general belief among the inmate population was that Bowers, growing stir simple and bent on ending it all, had taken this means to circumvent the canon against self-destruction.
John Stadig, counterfeiter isolated in a bug cage upstairs when he began acting a bit wacky, exhibited a gruesome cunning. A guard handed in lunch one day and then, instead of standing watch, let Stadig alone behind the locked, solid door. Stadig bent a prong of the fork and jabbed it in his wrist, worked it under the big vein and pried the vein out into the open. Then he bit it in two. He was prying the vein out of the other wrist when the guard returned for the luncheon tray. Besides his wrist, Stadig punctured a hole in the concept of Alcatraz as a super-lockup for troublemakers: too much of a trouble on The Rock, he was shipped back to Leavenworth. The day he arrived there, safely locked away in a cell, he broke a lens of his eyeglasses, took a jagged piece and sliced his jugular vein. He had at last found release.
One night in 1937 the San Francisco Chronicle, a morning paper, received a tip of an incident on the island and, unable to get verification, ran a vague account of “a prisoner, last name of Percival,” that read, in part: “A story of horror, almost unbelievable, came out of the prison fortress, Alcatraz, last night. It rivaled in grimness some of the tales of Poe and, although shrouded in a close veil of secrecy, it remained undenied … Warden Johnston would neither deny nor c
onfirm the story.”
Washington conformed it the next day. The episode had occurred a month earlier. The convict who played the Poe protagonist was one Rufe Persful, Arkansas robber. He was working with the dock gang. He laid his left hand on a block and chopped off the fingers with a hatchet, one after the other, like a butcher cleaving chops off a pork loin. He then offered the hatchet to a gaping convict, laid his right hand on the block and said, “Chop them off, too!” The convict flung the hatchet aside and ran shouting to the guard.
A question naturally arises: How many other incidents of men driven to appalling self-mutilation by The Rock’s refined system of medieval torture have been successfully covered up?
For three years the grim rule of silence gave The Rock the strange aspect of a prison for the dumb, convicts untutored in sign language. Warden Johnston contended the rule was not so severe as it sounded, that the men could talk in the shops during a three-minute rest period in the morning and for three minutes in the afternoon; that, at meals, one might say, “Pass the sugar”; that they could chat in the yard on Sunday afternoons, except that the guards zealously kept the men separated to prevent the hatching of plots. In 1937 Johnston announced to the press he had rescinded the rule as a step in easing the rigidity of discipline. The action was commended as a humanitarian gesture.
Convicts who were there at the time offer another version. Johnston, dubbed Salt Water for a reputed practice of hosing down unruly inmates, had a habit of coming into the mess hall at lunchtime to sample the fare. He would then stand near the door as the prisoners filed out. The dining room had the subdued, almost sedate atmosphere of a gentlemen’s club, the polite requests for salt or pepper arising like the murmur of cultured conversation. Suddenly, above the murmurous quiet sounded a clear, strong talking voice, distinctly not saying, “Sugar, please?” The effect produced was that of a rattle of gunfire. The warden glanced in surprise at the captain. A guard headed for the culprit. A voice broke forth in response to the speaker, then a convict piped up at another table, then another. Within moments the place range like a boilermakers’ banquet. The guards were helpless. There wasn’t room in the eight dungeon cells to hold everybody. The rule of silence on The Rock had come to an end, by the simple expedient of talking.
Escape from Alcatraz Page 5