Elvie’s friends also cautioned her about gypsies who were said to work in carnivals. Gypsies didn’t bathe, they drank too much and they stole, her friends said. Elvie, however, had already made several friends among gypsy women who worked in the carnival. They too were adventurous, outsiders who were living a little on the edge, and she enjoyed it when they told her her fortune. Early on, she let one of the women give her a tattoo, a crudely drawn butterfly on her right arm at a time when respectable people did not etch permanent markings on their bodies. Elvie said it was a gypsy moth. As the years passed, Elvie would tell her children, and then her grandchildren, that she herself was a gypsy. In fact, she confided, she was a queen of the gypsies. She too was now embellishing, but it suggests how she thought at the time. Life on its own was not glamorous. Therefore, make it up. Create your own present. Erase your past. Devise a fable that summoned your dreams.
Elvie and Louis began drinking heavily with their new gypsy friends and others working in the carnival, going to parties in their railroad-car homes and staying up all night. It was another form of emancipation, in Elvie’s eyes, freedom from the restrictive conventions of the small-town South in which she had been raised. Elvie had even more freedom because the carnival was always traveling, moving by rail once a week to other towns in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico or Louisiana, and as far away as Colorado and Utah. The carnival shut down only in the winter, when it was too cold to operate. Elvie and Louis would return to Paris then to visit their relatives and friends.
When she did go home, Elvie’s relatives began to worry about her. They noticed she was not keeping her hair combed or her clothes clean, and when she stayed in their houses, they saw she wasn’t keeping her room clean either. One of Elvie’s aunts described her as slovenly and lazy. Those were the polite words she used in public. In private, her aunt began to call Elvie “trash.” Working in the carnival was rapidly changing Elvie and Louis, making them coarser, putting them on the margins of society. Elvie had had the same kind of rudimentary education as Louis, though both could read and write. This, like being raised in poverty, didn’t separate them from their contemporaries. It was true, though, that their family life was not stable. Their parents and grandparents had gone through a tangle of divorces, desertions and bigamous relationships. Hence they did not have the strong social bonds, the human capital, to draw on when times got tough. Now, working in the carnival, they were in danger of slipping into a white underclass.
In 1920, the same year Louis arrived in Paris, Prohibition went into effect. Since Paris had been the center of the Temperance Movement in Texas, the police and officials in the city were under intense pressure to enforce the wildly unpopular new law. Many Texans, including wealthy people in their new country clubs and poor white tenant farmers, would not obey the law against the production, sale and consumption of alcohol. As Randolph B. Campbell, a leading historian of Texas, has written, Prohibition was “surely one of the greatest incentives to lawbreaking in the history of the United States.” Suddenly stills were everywhere in this big state with lots of empty space to hide illegal activity, and there was good money to be made in running a still, driving moonshine into towns and selling it to thirsty customers. Elvie used her driving skills to transport moonshine from stills in the countryside into Paris. Several times she was stopped by suspicious sheriffs’ deputies, but she always managed to toss the mason jars full of home-brewed whiskey on the road, breaking them and scattering the whiskey so there was no evidence of a crime.
Louis was less fortunate. On January 13, 1923, he was arrested and charged with making and selling “spirituous, vinous and malt liquors and medicated bitters capable of producing intoxication” to three farmers outside Paris. Testimony at his trial in the Lamar County courthouse indicated he had a pretty good business going. Louis was found guilty of a felony on May 3. The jury sentenced him to two years in the state penitentiary in Huntsville. But because so many people were being convicted on similar charges and the state’s prisons were overflowing with inmates at what Texans thought was an exorbitant cost to taxpayers, the district attorney gave the jury an option: if Louis had no previous convictions, they could suspend his sentence. The foreman filled in a slip for the judge. “We further find that the defendant has not been convicted of a felony in this state or any other state and we do recommend that his sentence be suspended.” Louis was the first member of the Bogle family convicted of a felony, but he was free to go.
That same May, a grand jury in Paris handed down seventy-two other indictments for felonies and forty-five for misdemeanors, many of them for liquor being served in private homes or for illegal home poker games involving both men and women. The grand jury concluded with a warning: “There seems to be an unmistakable drift toward making the home an incubator of crime, when it should be the cleanest and holiest place on earth. After a while it will be as common to raid a private house as it has been to raid a bootlegging joint. God save us from the day, but it is on the way.”
Elvie and Louis were too busy trying to eke out a living to worry about where society was headed. The income they earned from the carnival was small, and unreliable, and when the show closed for the winter there was no money at all, so they were becoming dependent on what they could make from selling moonshine or other petty crime. On July 20, 1925, Louis was arrested and indicted for a second felony, stealing a large quantity of brass from a house in Paris. He was taken to the county jail by the sheriff and released after posting bail of $800. Where he or Elvie got the money is unknown. Trial was set for October 20, but on that very day the trial was canceled when the victim suddenly recanted his earlier statements to the police and said he would not testify that the brass was “taken without his consent.” For a second time, Louis had narrowly escaped.
Elvie and Louis were living such a precarious existence that they ultimately could not take care of the person closest to Elvie, her mother, Florence. From a surviving family photo, it is clear that after Elvie and Louis joined the carnival in 1921, Florence had gone back to Wichita Falls, where she had earlier lived after she deserted her husband; there is no explanation why. One photo, dated 1925, shows Elvie in a middy-style sailor’s dress, with a jaunty scarf knotted around her neck, standing next to her mother and Louis in Wichita Falls. Louis is wearing a black stovepipe hat and a small bow tie. It looks like a normal family reunion, all their expressions benign, but Florence had begun to suffer from peculiar behavior that became increasingly severe, and somebody, presumably her daughter, had her committed to the new Texas state mental hospital in Wichita Falls. Elvie later told her children that Florence had gone insane.
Under Texas law, Florence’s official diagnosis cannot be released, even to members of her family. But her death certificate, issued by the Vital Statistics Unit of the Texas Department of State Health Services, records that Florence died on April 22, 1927. She was only fifty-one years old. Dr. Liza Gold, a clinical and forensic psychiatrist who is a professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University and specializes in the history of psychiatry, believes Florence likely had an underlying mental disorder that today might be diagnosed as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
Louis and Elvie were too poor, or too busy, to take care of funeral arrangements for Florence. She was buried by the state hospital’s staff in the potter’s field on its grounds. The grave was unmarked.
By the time Florence died, Louis and Elvie had begun raising a family. All of their eventual offspring would be exposed to a host of risk factors for falling into a life of crime themselves—poverty, neglect, alcoholic parents, little education and parental involvement in crime—and Louis and Elvie would now become the role models for their children. In what may have been a coincidence, or perhaps was a sign of something more fateful, Louis’s mother, Mattie, would later also be committed to the North Texas State Asylum in Wichita Falls. She died there in 1960. Her diagnosis also is not known. But the major mental illnesses, parti
cularly bipolar disorder—what used to be called manic depression—can be heritable, so later generations of the Bogles may well have been at risk for emotional disorders as well as criminality.
[ 2 ]
Charlie and Dude
Growing Up Criminal
Elvie gave birth to the Bogles’ first child, John, on December 8, 1921. The carnival had shut down for the winter in early November when it became too cold for crowds to come out. Elvie and Louis had gone back to Paris and rented a small, rickety, unpainted shotgun house close to the Paris and Mount Pleasant Railroad depot, right next to the tracks. A big, redbrick Speas Vinegar plant near their house cast a sour odor over the neighborhood. The Bogles had no running water or electricity. The house was in one of the city’s poorest sections, but it was all they could afford. The landlord, anxious not to let the house stand vacant, because a vacant house could not be insured, let them have it rent-free that first winter, on the condition that they keep it clean and tidy. On the front porches of nearby houses stood cast-off furnishings that once belonged inside, like an old settee, and in the weed-grown backyards the inhabitants threw bottles, old bedsprings and battered chamber pots. The smell of privies hung in the air, along with the whistle of the locomotives and the clanging of the trains’ iron wheels on the tracks. The Bogles and all the branches of the family that conjoined together in Elvie and Louis, like most Americans, had always been farmers, living in isolated rural villages. Now, as America rolled into the 1920s, the Bogles were living in a city, just as a majority of their fellow Americans were becoming urbanized. But the Bogles were not able to enjoy the blessings of this new city life. They were disadvantaged, much like Michael Harrington’s “urban hillbillies.”
Other children soon followed John’s arrival. Lloyd Douglas Bogle, quickly dubbed Dude within the family, was born in February 1924. Next came Charles Lindbergh Bogle, called Charlie, in 1928, the year after the famous aviator became the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic. Elvie and Louis were dreaming big with their choice of the name, but reality was much more down-to-earth.
Each new child meant a new mouth to feed and another body to clothe, requiring money that Elvie and Louis often didn’t have, especially when the carnival was closed for the winter. Elvie cooked the same food every day, corn bread and beans, the boys remembered later, though she varied the way she prepared the dishes. They had meat only on special occasions. As they got bigger, Dude and Charlie supplemented their meager diet by hunting in the woods and fishing in ponds. Dude was genuinely crazy about fishing, catching catfish and perch in his bare hands, sometimes selling a fish or two for a nickel or a dime to the African American families who lived nearby. Their father made no secret of his scorn for what he called “colored people,” but the boys, growing up in poverty and surrounded by black families, didn’t much care about a person’s race. At Christmas, there was not enough money for a tree or real presents, although their father usually managed to scrounge some candy or fruit, which he would put in one of his socks and hang from the fireplace mantel. The boys wore overalls that fastened in the back, the workingman’s outfit of the time, but they had no shoes. Family photographs that survive from the 1920s and 1930s show each of the children with bare feet well into their teens.
Not long after Charlie was born, the stock market crashed, followed by the Great Depression, but the Bogles hardly noticed. They had never seen a stock certificate, and they didn’t have a bank account. To them, Wall Street was a bunch of rich Yankees far away who deserved whatever happened to them. Businesses were laying people off, but at first that was mostly in Northern factories. Of greater concern was the dry spell that had begun and would turn into the Dust Bowl. It was not so much the parched lawns or the early shedding of the leaves from the trees, which made the streets of Paris shadeless by midsummer. It was the farmers’ problems that concerned them, as the cotton came up stunted and the summer’s corn looked just like the shriveled cornstalks left standing in the fields from the previous winter. This meant people were making less money and likely would skip coming to the carnival.
In 1914, the Texas legislature had passed a compulsory school attendance law, as part of a progressive effort to modernize the state. So Louis and Elvie registered the boys with the Paris school department, as required by law, but then when the carnival started back up again in the spring, the boys dropped out of school, if they were going at all. The surviving records of the Paris school district show members of the family registered every year from 1930, when John was eight, until 1941, when the family moved briefly to Wichita Falls and then to Amarillo, in the Texas Panhandle. John managed to make it to eighth grade; Dude dropped out in fourth grade. Charlie never went to school, even though he was registered as attending. He was born with a severe speech defect that he was embarrassed about, and remained illiterate all his life.
The records also show that the Bogles were renting a different house, on a different street, every year during the 1920s and 1930s. When they could not meet the rent, they moved. Life was chaotic for the children. All these moves, and all the time spent away from Paris in the carnival, might help explain why the city truant officers never took action against the boys—or against Louis and Elvie—for their poor school attendance, but the family suspected the local officials just didn’t care about poor people. The federal census taker did manage to find the Bogles in 1930 in Paris. As was often true, they had a little embellishment for him. Louis said he was a veteran of the Great War, though the war had ended before Louis was drafted.
Despite their lack of education and the lack of books in their houses, the boys were growing up fast. Elvie and Louis remained “on the show,” as the boys termed it, working in carnivals until the mid-1930s, when still more children arrived. Until then, each spring Elvie found a carnival that would hire them, but with the Depression and fewer customers the carnivals got smaller, paying even less. During the carnival season, from March to October, the family now lived out of a truck and a trailer they pulled behind them; big railroad cars were too expensive for the smaller carnivals.
Elvie continued to ride in the motordrome, on her own motorcycle, an Indian brand machine with what people termed a suicide clutch, meaning she had to take her hands off the handlebars to switch gears. Both Dude and Charlie thought of their mother as a daredevil and tomboy, which were good things in their young eyes. “She got so good at riding that she could get to the top of the open drome and reach up and take a customer’s hat away on one pass and then put it back on his head when she came around again,” Charlie told me, smiling at the recollection. The thrill of riding so fast and dangerously seemed to offer a sense of fulfillment to his mother, he thought. It was providing relief from their impoverished lives. “Mom liked the carnival pretty good,” Charlie said. Elvie also worked in a sideshow called “the Hot Chair,” designed to look like an electric chair, in which sparks of electric current appeared to come out of her hands and arms. “You could see it, and I imagine she could feel it,” Charlie said. For a period Elvie also worked as a snake charmer, until one day several boys stuck a pin in the snake wrapped around her chest and the creature began squeezing her hard. It took four men to kill the snake and free Elvie.
Elvie and Louis continued to augment their tiny pay by making and selling moonshine, despite their earlier close calls with the law. Louis ran the still somewhere out in the woods; it was practically in his blood, the family said, because Daylight was in the middle of Tennessee corn whiskey country, near where the modern Jack Daniel’s headquarters would be built. Elvie was in charge of driving the home brew into town and selling the mason jars to carnival customers or, in the off-season, to people in Paris. The boys didn’t see anything wrong with their parents’ activities. “It was the Depression” was how Charlie figured it. “People did whatever they could.”
Elvie and Louis also continued to drink heavily, with a big party in someone’s quarters at least once a week.
Louis supplied the whiskey and played the banjo for dancing, a talent he had learned at home in Daylight. The favorite topic of conversation was outlaws, the heavily armed and homegrown gangsters who were robbing the banks that foreclosed on plain folks’ homes. Texans were not that long removed from the violence of the frontier or the Lost Cause of the Civil War, and they still believed that the dictates of honor required a personal, physical response to insult, no matter how slight. Dispossessed by the Depression and driven from their land or homes, many men felt helpless when there was no work, and they turned to their guns. As William Humphrey wrote in his memoir, the times “turned desperate men into desperadoes and a sympathetic public followed their exploits in the papers and secretly cheered them on.” Jesse James was the archetype, but Elvie and Louis particularly admired Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, their contemporaries, who had grown up on small cotton sharecropper farms east of Dallas, not far from Paris. One time Pretty Boy Floyd stopped by their house in Paris and asked if he could hide out for a few days, Charlie and Dude recalled later. Floyd, officially Charles Arthur Floyd, who lived in Oklahoma, robbed as many as thirty banks over a twelve-year period, and in 1933 reportedly shot five men, including an FBI agent, in a massacre in Kansas City. After he was killed by the police in Ohio in 1934, twenty thousand people turned out for his funeral in Sallisaw, Oklahoma. Charlie remembered that when Floyd left the Bogles’ home, he gave Elvie money to buy shoes and food for her boys, the first shoes he ever had. “Maybe us kids thought he was so good, that’s why we turned out the way we did,” Charlie said many years later, after his own series of crimes and prison sentences.
In My Father's House Page 4