My Life with Bonnie and Clyde

by Barrow, Blanche Caldwell

  16. The Woman for whom Blanche worked was probably Artie, the Barrows’ oldest daughter and a beautician living in Denison, Texas, at the time. Artie was married to a man named Wilbur Winkler who was circulation manager for the Denison Herald and who owned the Cinderella Beauty Shoppe. Artie managed the shop at 430 West Sears, and it was no doubt there that Blanche worked. Cumie Barrow, unpublished manuscript; Denison City Directory, 1929, 1930, 1931, 1932, 1933, 1934. Some have said that it was Artie, not Wilbur Winkler, who owned the shop. Buddy Barrow e-mail, September 16, 2002.

  17. Clyde was serving two counts of burglary and five counts of auto theft, all from McLennan County. His FBI file only mentions burglary; his prison record lists his offenses as “burglary, theft (14 years).” Cumie Barrow, unpublished manuscript; U.S. Department of Justice, Division of Investigation, Identification Order No. 1211, October 24, 1933; Woods, letter to Phillips, March 19, 1985. “The Walls” refers to the main prison unit at Huntsville, Texas. It has been said that Clyde Barrow axed his toes because he couldn’t stand the workload at Eastham. Two other independent sources agree with the reason given here by Blanche Caldwell Barrow. Fults interview, November 5, 1980, and a letter from Sterling C. Henson to Kent Biffle, September 2, 1980.

  18. Eastham is a prison farm of approximately 13,000 acres located in an oxbow of the Trinity River, twenty miles north of Huntsville. Its name is derived from that of the Eastham family, who purchased the property in 1891 and immediately began leasing it to the state as a prison farm. The state purchased the property outright in 1915. Texas Historical Commission, “Eastham Prison Farm.” For a full account of the history of farm leasing and the Texas penal system, see Walker, Penology for Profit, 13–142. In Clyde Barrow’s day there were two camps at Eastham. On his arrival there in 1930, he was housed in Camp 2, a wooden structure said to have been one of the original buildings from Eastham’s preprison plantation days. Later he was transferred to Camp 1, a concrete structure located one mile north of Camp 2. It was there that Barrow killed his first man, a convict trustee who had sexually assaulted Barrow, on October 29, 1931. Among the many incidents involving Barrow, either as victim, eyewitness, or perpetrator, were fights, rapes, and murders between convicts as well as beatings, various forms of torture, and murder committed by guards at the facility. See Phillips, Running with Bonnie and Clyde, for a full account. See also McConal, Over the Wall, 90–91; Phillips, “Raid on Eastham”; Henson, letter to Biffle, September 2, 1980; Fulsom, Prison Stories, 80–83; and Martin and EklandOlson, Walls Came Tumbling Down, 9–15.

  19. Buck was robbing filling stations and oil company payrolls during this period. This revelation came up in response to an interview question about whether Blanche remembered Raymond Hamilton. She said that Raymond often wanted to accompany her and Buck during the above-mentioned robberies, but that Buck didn’t like him and both thought he was too young. Blanche said she and Buck would “just drive off and leave him” Blanche Barrow interviews, September 24 and November 18, 1984.

  20. On March 8, 1930, Buck had escaped from the Ferguson prison farm, near Midway, Texas. William Thompson, letter to Doug Walsh of the Dallas Police Department, May 17, 1932.

  21. Ralph Fults, who arrived at Eastham with Clyde in 1930 and eventually began plotting with him to one day raid the farm, remembered it differently, saying Barrow received many letters, not only from Bonnie but from his family as well. Fults interview, February 13, 1982.

  Chapter 3. Buck Makes a Pardon

  1. Denison City Directory, 1931, 1932, 1933; Blanche Barrow interview, November 18, 1984; Marie Barrow interview, August 24, 1984; Fults interview, November 5, 1980.

  2. Cabell Phillips, New York Times Chronicle, 35; Gordon and Gordon, American Chronicle, 316.

  3. Watkins, Hungry Years, 127–28.

  4. Ibid., 131–41. Dallas Morning News, July 29, 1932. MacArthur would do the same again under FDR regarding a preemptive strike against Japanese bombers being readied for a strike on the American bases in the Philippines on December 7, 1941. And he would defy President Harry Truman during the Korean War, prompting Truman to fire him.

  5. Andrist, American Heritage History, 215.

  6. Dallas Daily Times Herald, March 1 and 3, 1933; Gordon and Gordon, American Chronicle, 315; Schultz, “Great Depression,” University of Wisconsin Online.

  7. Dallas Daily Times Herald, March 4 and 5, 1933; Roosevelt’s “First Inaugural Address—March 4, 1933,” http://www.nationalcenter.org/FRooseveltFirstInaugural.html; Schultz, “Great Depression.”

  8. Dallas Daily Times Herald, March 11 and 15, 1933.

  9. Ibid., March 17 and 19, 1933. Thornton and Parker were married on September 25, 1926, when both were teenagers. They had not seen each other probably since 1927 or 1928 but they never divorced. Thornton eventually wound up in the Texas penitentiary where he quizzed Ralph Fults extensively about Barrow’s relationship with his wife. Fults interviews, December 10, 1980, and July 18, 1981.

  10. Dallas Daily Times Herald, February 15 and March 20, 1933. This relates directly to the visit a few days later by Bonnie and Clyde and W. D. Jones to the home of Blanche’s mother near Dallas. During the visit, described by Blanche Barrow in her memoir, Clyde tries to enlist his brother Buck in a plan to raid the Eastham prison farm.

  11. Dallas Daily Times Herald, March 22, 23, and 24, 1933. In her memoir Blanche Barrow mentions a lot of beer drinking in Missouri.

  12. Cinderella Beauty Shoppe, 430 West Sears, Denison, Texas.

  13. Artie Winkler, Buck and Clyde Barrow’s older sister.

  14. Blanche Barrow knew about this firsthand. She was an eyewitness to brother-in-law Clyde Barrow’s attempts to hold a job and live a normal life following his release from prison in 1932. Some have said the experience, coupled with his nightmarish prison memories, largely shaped Clyde Barrow’s actions over the subsequent two years. For the full story, see Phillips, Running with Bonnie and Clyde.

  15. In the original text, “never more to roam” is written here, then crossed out.

  16. Huntsville, where Buck Barrow was imprisoned, was one of the many stops on the Houston-to-Oklahoma City bus route. It was also the release point for all Texas convicts leaving the state prison system. Indeed, it still is.

  17. Elvin W. Barrow, also known as Jack, the oldest of Buck’s siblings, was born in 1894. Blanche is not specific about the location of Elvin Barrow’s house. In the 1933 city directory he is listed as residing at 1308 Second Avenue, which does not exist anymore. That part of Second Avenue was eliminated when Fair Park was expanded in the 1930s to accommodate a new building for the Dallas Museum of Fine Art, which has since been moved and renamed the Dallas Museum of Art. However, in 1931 and in 1934, Barrow’s residence is listed at two successive addresses on Forest Avenue (Martin Luther King Drive today), 3218 and 3210, respectively. Worley’s Dallas (Texas) City Directory, 1931, 1933–34, 1934–35. LC Barrow was born in 1913. According to the Barrow family the letters “LC” are not initials. They represent the full first name of the youngest brother and should not be accompanied with periods, as would be the case with initials. Marie Barrow interviews, September 15 and 25, 1993.

  18. LC was picked up for questioning so often, especially by the Dallas police, that there were instances when he would be detained as soon as he left the police station following a prior round of questions. Marie Barrow interview, August 1, 1998; Buddy Williams interview, August 1, 1998. There was another, more sinister side to some of these frequent arrests—extortion. In April 1934 a man named Jody called the home of Ruth Lefors, a friend of the Barrows, to report that he and another man named Sonny had been arrested for possession of alcohol. Jody rather offhandedly explained that they needed twenty-five dollars to pay Captain Phillips of the Dallas Police Department or he would file charges against them, that Phillips had actually wanted twenty-five dollars from each man but backed off to twenty-five for both men. Dallas Police Department telephone wiretap transcript, April 26, 1934, 40. Ralph Fults an
d Clyde Barrow contracted a pair of Dallas policemen to act as lookouts in front of several Greenville Avenue businesses while they burglarized each one, later sharing the loot with the officers. Phillips, Running with Bonnie and Clyde, 66–67.

  19. Actually Buck had served just a little more than seven weeks, from approximately January 16, to precisely March 8, 1930. Buck Barrow, letter to family, January 16, 1930; William Thompson, letter to Doug Walsh, May 17, 1932.

  20. This sentiment, certainly not uncommon at the time, was apparently the same way Clyde Barrow felt about Bonnie Parker. In a scathing, sarcastic letter written to Raymond Hamilton after Hamilton’s capture on April 25, 1934, Barrow notes, “When you started the rumor about Bonnie wanting a ‘cut’ of the loot you sure messed yourself up. I have always taken care of Bonnie and never asked any thief to help me.” Clyde Barrow, letter to Raymond Hamilton, April 27, 1934. Also, some have indicated that Blanche Caldwell Barrow was so petite, almost like a doll, that men would often feel compelled to try and protect her. Linder and Weiser, interviews, October 5, 2002.

  21. Regarding her “disabled father,” later in the memoir Blanche mentions that he suffered poor eyesight, a substantial loss of hearing, and possibly tuberculosis. See Chapter 9.

  22. This ia a curious complaint, for it was Buck’s older sister, Artie, who gave Blanche a job and a place to stay in Denison. And Blanche was living with the Barrows in West Dallas and presumably not working outside the house at least through the middle of April 1932. And Buck Barrow would have known this. However, Blanche may have indeed felt tension from the Barrows, especially from Buck’s mother who was known to have been a formidable character, to say the least. But for Blanche to write that Buck’s “people forgot the wife he had left behind” is not entirely accurate. Although it might not have been to Buck’s liking, his older sister had given Blanche a job, something few had the ability to give during the Great Depression. Moreover, others distinctly remember Blanche living with the Barrows at least for a while in their tiny house behind the filling station in West Dallas. According to Cumie Barrow’s unpublished manuscript. “Blanche lived most of the time with me, although occasionally she spent some time with one of my daughters in Denison, Texas.” Ralph Fults remembered Blanche in West Dallas as well. He and Clyde Barrow borrowed a gun from her to use in the Simms Oil Refinery robbery of March 25, 1932, something Blanche herself confirmed. Fults interviews, November 12 and December 10, 1980; Blanche Barrow interview, November 18, 1984.

  In a letter to her mother, Blanche did describe an apparently pleasant Christmas in 1932 at the Barrows’ place in West Dallas. She mentions baking a goose with Artie and receiving gifts from the Barrows, from her father, and even from a co-worker at the beauty shop in Denison. She mentions no gift from her mother, however, and she laments that her mother did not join her at the Barrows’ for Christmas. Blanche Barrow, letter to her mother, January 14, 1933, quoted in Baker, Blanche Barrow, 25–26.

  23. The Barrows, particularly Cumie, may have indeed been jealous of Blanche, but it was no doubt equally true that Blanche was just as jealous of them. It is known that she had a penchant for compartmentalizing her close friends and keeping them apart from one another. It was not until Blanche was seriously ill late in life that Bonnie Parker’s niece and sister, who had lived next door to Blanche for a number of years, ever met Esther Weiser, who first met Blanche in 1951 and visited her sometimes daily. Weiser interviews, September 8, 2001, and October 5, 2002.

  24. There is a photograph of the Barrows’ youngest daughter, Marie, playing with the dog in front of the family business, the Star Service Station, which was attached to the Barrow home on Eagle Ford Road in West Dallas.

  25. William Daniel Jones was most often referred to simply by the initials, W. D., but he was also known as “Deacon” and “Dub.” Born in East Texas in 1916, Jones was only five or six when he moved to West Dallas with his parents, sister, and four brothers. Not long after the move, Jones’s father and sister died during a flu epidemic. Jones quit school after the first grade to sell newspapers to help support the family. Because he was illiterate, he had to ask others to read the headlines for him so he’d know what to shout from his post on a downtown Dallas street corner. Jones first remembered seeing Clyde Barrow under the Houston Street viaduct. His family was camped next to the Barrows in a free campground located there. By the time he arrived at Blanche’s mother’s house near Wilmer, Texas, Jones had been with Barrow and Parker for three months and had been involved with Clyde in at least two murders—that of Doyle Johnson in Temple, Texas, on December 25, 1932, and of Deputy Sheriff Malcolm Davis in West Dallas on January 6, 1933. Jones, “Riding with Bonnie and Clyde”; Jones, interview by Kent Biffle, June 1969.

  26. Clyde was granted a general parole on February 2, 1932. U. S. Department of Justice, Division of Investigation, Identification Order No. 1211, October 24, 1933; Woods, letter to Phillips, March 19, 1985.

  27. Cumie Barrow says as much in her unpublished memoir.

  28. This last statement is revealing, considering Blanche’s later statements about accompanying Buck on robberies during that period. Blanche Barrow interview November 18, 1984. Moreover, Cumie Barrow states, “When Buck escaped from the pen, he came by here and got Blanche (who was staying here) and they went off someplace in a car. I think it was in a rooming house someplace, where they hid for awhile.” Cumie Barrow, unpublished manuscript.

  29. Raymond Hamilton was born in a tent in Oklahoma in 1913. He moved to West Dallas with his mother, brother, and sisters to join his father who’d abandoned the family briefly before turning up in Texas and sending for them. Shortly thereafter, Hamilton’s father disappeared again and Raymond took to the streets to try and raise money for his family. Raymond knew the Barrows because his family (and many others) bought water from them at their filling station. Blanche Barrow remembered Hamilton as very young and eager to travel with her and Buck when they were staging holdups in the months following Buck’s escape from the Ferguson prison farm. Buck didn’t like Hamilton. “We’d just drive off and leave him,” Blanche said. Blanche Barrow interviews September 24 and November 18, 1984. In 1932, Hamilton worked briefly with Clyde Barrow on at least two separate occasions, then struck out on his own. In December of that year he was arrested out of state and extradited to Texas. On his return he was sent on a statewide courtroom odyssey, receiving a total of 266 years in the state penitentiary for crimes ranging from auto theft to murder. See Underwood, Depression Desperado, and Hamilton, Public Enemy No. 1, for details about Raymond Hamilton. Indeed, Clyde Barrow had a plan to raid Eastham, one that he and Ralph Fults devised in 1930–1931 while both were still prisoners at Eastham, but initially it had nothing to do with Hamilton. Blanche’s assertion here is quite incorrect, for two reasons. The planned raid evolved purely as an act of revenge against Eastham, the place Barrow called “that hell-hole,” not to free Hamilton as so many have thought. Hamilton would eventually enter the picture, but not for some time. For the full account of the precise reasons for the raid on Eastham, see Phillips, Running with Bonnie and Clyde, and Phillips, “Raid on Eastham.” See also McConal, Over the Wall, for an excellent account of the actual 1934 raid. There is also another, more immediate reason why Blanche is incorrect here: Hamilton was not at Eastham. During the meeting she describes on the evening of March 25–26, 1933, Raymond Hamilton was in the Hill County jail in Hillsboro, Texas, facing murder charges. According to Hamilton biographer Sid Underwood, as well as numerous contemporary newspaper sources, Hamilton had escaped from the Hill County jail two days earlier but was recaptured less than an hour later. He was in Hillsboro on the night of March 25–26 and did not arrive at the Eastham prison farm until August 8, 1933, nearly five months later. By then, Buck Barrow was dead, Blanche Barrow was in jail, and W. D. Jones had left Bonnie and Clyde. Underwood, Depression Desperado, 32, 38–39; Dallas Morning News, March 18–25, 1933; Dallas Daily Times-Herald March 18–25, 1933; Dallas Evening Journal, August 9,
1933.

  30. Blanche had been to Eastham a number of times, sometimes in the company of Buck, who at the time was an escapee from another farm just across the Trinity River from Eastham. Clyde told her then, while he was still at Eastham, of his desire to raid Eastham. Blanche Barrow interview, November 3, 1984. In a letter to his mother, written three weeks before cutting two of his toes off with an ax, Clyde Barrow refers to such visits: “Make her [Blanche] bring you down here.” Clyde Barrow, quoted from a letter to his mother December 3, 1931, in Cumie Barrow’s unpublished manuscript.

  31. In 1935, the Texas prison system was named the worst in the nation by the Osborne Association, an independent organization founded by a former warden of New York state’s Auburn prison. The group, which still exists today, monitored and rated U.S. prisons and published its findings in annual reports. William Cox, Osborne Association secretary, specifically named Eastham as one of the most brutal prisons in the state system. Quoted in the Houston Press on April 10, 1935, he spoke of a “black picture of harsh and brutal treatment, particularly at Eastham. The methods of punishment now in force are unworthy of a prison system which claims to be taking advantage of modern methods of handling prisoners.” The announcement prompted a state investigation which ultimately led to the resignation of Colonel Lee Simmons, the general manager of the Texas prison system. See the Houston Press, April 3, 4, and 10 and September 2, 1935.

  32. “Bud” was a nickname frequently used by Clyde. There is a note from Barrow to his brother LC, signed “Bud.” When New Mexico lawman Joe Johns was released following his 1932 abduction, he reported the identities of the driver of the car and his girlfriend as “Bud” and “Honey.” Roswell Daily Record, August 15, 1932. W. D. Jones said Barrow and Parker insisted that he refer to them as “Bud” and “Sis.” Jones, interview by Biffle, June 1969.