In My Father's House

by Fox Butterfield

  For many years, Charlie kept on the living-room wall of his double-wide trailer home a fading nineteenth-century black-and-white photograph of a slender, handsome young man who he believed was his uncle. The caption under the picture, written by one of Charlie’s nieces, describes the man as “John Hardin, mom’s uncle,” meaning Elvie’s uncle. In fact, Elvie did have an uncle named Hardin, her father’s half brother, whom Charlie would later visit from time to time as he grew up. But the uncle was Will Hardin. The man in the photograph was John Wesley Hardin, the most notorious nineteenth-century outlaw and gunfighter in Texas. Hardin nearly stabbed a schoolmate to death as a boy, and shot and killed his first victim at age fifteen. He later murdered the city marshal of Waco, Texas, escaped repeatedly from local jails, stole horses and, by the time he was captured and sent to prison in 1878, claimed to have killed forty-two men. After serving seventeen years in the new state prison at Huntsville, Hardin was pardoned, became a lawyer and moved to El Paso. There, on August, 19, 1895, after having an affair with the wife of one of his clients, Hardin was shot dead by a gunman he himself had hired to kill the jilted husband. Hardin made the mistake of failing to give him the promised payment.

  Charlie’s favorite part of all the stories about the man he thought was his uncle took place in Abilene during a cattle drive. Hardin was staying in a hotel and got mad at a man in the room next door who kept him awake by snoring. So Hardin fired a number of shots through the wall. The snoring stopped; he had killed the man. Wild Bill Hickock was marshal of Abilene at the time and came rushing over to the hotel to see what the gunfire was about. Hardin, realizing he would be in trouble and being only half-dressed, ran onto the roof of the hotel and jumped into a haystack, where he hid for the rest of the night. The next day he stole a horse and made his escape out of town.

  Charlie loved to hear his parents tell stories about these outlaws, and he began to identify with them. For the Bogle family, it became part of their mythology. It didn’t matter to Charlie and his brothers whether John Wesley Hardin was actually their uncle. In his later teenage years and his early twenties, after Charlie left home, he always dressed like a Western badman, with a black Stetson hat, black shirt and black pants. “I liked to look that way, like an outlaw,” Charlie said.

  * * *

  —

  Consciously or unconsciously, Charlie was imitating the risky behavior of his parents, their friends and their supposed relative. This was the same kind of imitation that Tracey Bogle would later identify in himself, copying the actions of his father, Rooster. In fact, imitation forms the basis for social learning theory, one of the main schools of modern criminology. It holds that delinquent behavior is learned through the same psychological processes as any other behavior. Children learn how to behave by fashioning their behavior after examples that they have seen around them, starting at home with their family. Behavior is also learned when it is reinforced or rewarded. It is not learned when it is not reinforced.

  This sociological theory of criminal activity traces its origins to a French judge in the nineteenth century, Gabriel Tarde, who served fifteen years as a provincial judge and then was put in charge of France’s national statistics. After a careful analysis of these numbers, he came to the conclusion that “the majority of murderers and notorious thieves began as children,” often because of a lack of education and food in their homes. Tarde came to believe that criminals were normal people who learned crime much like others learned legitimate occupations. At the center of his theory was what he called “the laws of imitation.” In his view, individuals copy patterns of behavior much the same way they copy styles of dress.

  Tarde was a pioneer in the then new field of criminology. The discipline “criminology” was given its name by an Italian professor of law, Raffaele Garofalo, in 1885. The study grew out of a reaction against the vaguely defined system of law, justice and punishments that existed in Europe before the French Revolution. Some crimes were specified; some were not. Those criminal laws that were written often did not indicate the punishment. Due process, in the modern sense, did not yet exist. In this vacuum, an Italian legal scholar, Cesare Beccaria, undertook a study of European prison systems, which he published in 1764 under the title On Crimes and Punishments. In his small book, Beccaria offered a blueprint for an enlightened justice system and concluded that the crime problem could be traced not to bad people but to bad laws. The book earned Beccaria the reputation of being the “father of modern criminology.” There would be many other theories on the causes of crime and schools of criminology.

  In Paris, Texas, while Charlie and his brother Dude were still boys, they began copying their parents and the outlaws they heard about by embarking on their own petty criminal acts, often as a way to make money and survive. “In East Texas in those days there wasn’t no jobs,” Charlie said decades later. “You just went out and did things. If you got caught, you got caught.” Sometimes the brothers climbed aboard parked trains loaded with coal and took a bucket or two back home, or to sell. Charlie loved to go to the motion-picture shows in the ornate theaters downtown but usually didn’t have the dime it took to buy a ticket. So one of the brothers would climb a tree to get on the roof of the theater, then open a trapdoor and come down and open the back door to let the rest of them inside. “If we didn’t like the show, we’d leave and sneak back in later, just to have something to do, and to show we could do it,” Charlie said. Their favorite movies were Westerns, with the Cisco Kid or later John Wayne. Since Charlie could not read, the movies were not just entertainment; they were his form of education.

  Dude went fishing almost every day they were in Paris, often in ponds that belonged to farmers where it was illegal to take fish. Eventually some of the farmers reported him to the sheriff. He got caught and arrested and tried in the county courthouse downtown in 1939, when he was fifteen. He was sentenced to ten days in the Lamar County jail, where adult criminals were kept, exposing him to more hardened offenders.

  Charlie had begun stealing money left out for the milkman on his daily rounds, and he too was arrested, at age thirteen, and sent to court. He was sentenced to work for a farmer outside Paris for a year, for a dollar a day. Charlie had to live in the farmer’s house and help with the corn and cotton crops. Charlie had not grown up on a farm, so he hated the hard, hot work. One night, after Charlie had lived there for six months, the farmer went into Paris in his truck and his wife climbed into bed with Charlie. “She said, ‘It’s cold. I’ll get into bed with you to keep you from getting cold,’ ” Charlie recalled. Charlie was disgusted. “She must have been sixty years old,” he said. It was her age that put him off, not the thought of having sex. So Charlie got up and walked out the door. The farmer was too embarrassed to report Charlie’s escape to the sheriff, and that was the end of his punishment for stealing the milkman’s money.

  About this same time, in the mid-1930s, Louis decided to take his wife and children for a visit to Daylight to see his mother and relatives. Louis and Elvie must have sold a lot of moonshine, because they bought a big touring car with an open canvas top for the trip. That didn’t mean they weren’t still poor. Along the way, they stopped more than once to eat at a soup kitchen. It was what they could afford. In Daylight, they stayed in an old house with Narcissa, Louis’s grandmother, and Mattie, his mother. Louis and his boys made a lasting impression on his relatives in Tennessee, one that offered a glimpse into how badly they had been living and how far they had sunk since joining the carnival.

  “To me, they were heathen,” said one of Louis’s nieces, Mae Smotherman, who had lived on the same farm as Louis growing up and later moved to Nashville. “We all noticed how vulgar the children talked and how bad their table manners were,” the niece said. “They told dirty jokes and just wolfed their food down, like animals.” They slapped some of their older women relatives on the backside, which the relatives took as rude, offensive behavior. “We had always
been taught to avoid people like that, and now here they were in our house, and they were our relatives,” Smotherman added. “We wondered what went on in the carnival that made them like that.” Smotherman was also fascinated that Louis and Elvie had tattoos, something she had never seen before. Louis tried to recruit her to come back with them to Texas and join the carnival, but her mother, Lula, Louis’s sister, said no. After Louis and Elvie left, Lula told the others that something had happened to the boys to make them “mean.” It was the strongest language Lula would allow herself to speak. She also posed the question of what kind of parents Louis and Elvie had been to raise kids like that. It was as if they didn’t have parents at all, she suggested to her own children. They did have parents, of course, and the boys were simply copying them. They had no positive adult role models: no teachers, no sports coaches, no ministers.

  * * *

  —

  Back in Paris after their trip, John, the eldest boy, was arrested one evening in 1938 and charged with stealing a truck. He had been “fooling around downtown too much,” Charlie said, so the police had become aware of him. John insisted he was not the driver who took the truck, that it was another boy, and that he had been framed. John was taken to the county jail and then put on trial. As a Southern and conservative state, Texas had been slow to adopt the system of separate courts for juveniles that had been pioneered in Chicago in 1899 and then spread rapidly across much of the nation. In these progressive family courts, the accused were to be defined less by their offenses than by their age. It was the children’s welfare that the new courts were to protect. This paternalism brought a whole new set of courtroom practices. The key figure was the judge, who was tasked with getting the whole story about the child in the same way that a doctor tries to discover the nature of a patient’s illness. Punishments were deliberately kept mild, since children’s personalities were thought to still be in the process of formation, making them more open to rehabilitation. Judges were required to be lenient in sentencing, handing out only the least restrictive alternative. Texas, however, did not establish a full juvenile justice system until 1943, after John’s trial, so he appeared before a regular judge. The only special protection for juveniles in Texas at the time was that the proceedings were confidential; the records of his case were sealed, and remain so even to this day. According to Dude and Charlie, John was not given a lawyer to defend him. That reform too would come later. The judge sentenced John, at seventeen, to what amounted to a maximum-security facility: two years in the Gatesville State School for Boys.

  Gatesville is in the scrubby, arid plains of central Texas, not far from Waco and today close to the huge Army base at Fort Hood. When it was opened in 1887, with 767 boys, Gatesville was considered a humanitarian triumph, the first state reform school anywhere in the South. Reformers at the time believed that separating delinquent boys from hardened adult criminals would help them change their lives. A combination of schooling and light farmwork was seen as contributing to their improvement. Gatesville was supposed to be different from the state’s prison system, which had grown up after the Civil War largely as a series of big, tough work camps where convicts were routinely whipped and sometimes worked to death raising cotton, corn and sugarcane in settings like those of slavery. Unfortunately, Gatesville itself soon developed a reputation for ruthlessness. Given its size—twelve hundred acres of sandy cropland—and the small sum of money the legislature appropriated for it, the facility’s officials felt it necessary to make a profit on the crops the youthful inmates grew. Some boys went to school for part of the day and then went out to the fields; others labored from sunup to sundown. Idleness wasn’t tolerated. Beatings by guards, sexual assaults and long stretches in solitary confinement were normal. In 1974 a federal judge finally ordered Gatesville closed after finding its operations constituted cruel and unusual punishment that violated the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution.

  When John arrived, an assistant warden told the new inmates that they stood a 90 percent chance of later being sent to the state’s adult penitentiary. It was not an auspicious beginning. The yards were well manicured, and the white-painted offices, classrooms and living quarters were uniformly positioned around a pristine parade field. Life at the school was conducted in strict military style. Each morning, John discovered, the boys were mustered onto the parade ground for inspection, followed by calisthenics and then drill practice. The guards enforced discipline through use of a thick leather strap called “the bat.” John was the tallest of all the Bogles, six feet two inches, but he was gentle in disposition and, unlike his brothers, did not relish fighting. Still, a guard called him out one morning and administered twenty-five lashes with the heavy strap. It tore the flesh off his back and his haunches. John wanted to get up, but several other guards held him down. He screamed, but the beating continued, until, bleeding profusely, he passed out. John never found out why he was beaten, but it seemed to be a warning to him and the other boys, who were required to watch. Escape was impossible, John learned from his fellow inmates: the land around Gatesville was too vast, with few trees for cover to hide, and the guards had a stable of hunting dogs to track down any would-be escapee. John served twenty-one months.

  When he came home to Paris, he told his parents and brothers about the harsh and violent discipline at Gatesville and swore he would go straight, which he did. Dude and Charlie scoffed at his stories and said they would not be deterred. In early 1942, just a few months after Pearl Harbor, the Army began building a large new training base on the north side of Paris, Camp Maxey, in honor of a local Confederate hero, General Samuel Bell Maxey. Newly drafted soldiers began to flood into Paris on weekend passes, by bus or taxi, heading for a host of recently opened bars downtown. The soldiers, who ultimately became members of the 99th or 102nd Divisions that fought in the Battle of the Bulge and in Germany, were a good source of income for Charlie. He would carry his shoeshine box into a bar, offer to shine a soldier’s shoes and then pull out a pint jar of moonshine. He would buy the homemade brew for fifty cents and resell it for a dollar. Charlie didn’t see anything wrong with what he was doing. He was very fatalistic for a fourteen-year-old.

  Charlie was also aware that he was following in his parents’ footsteps by selling moonshine. “I was taking after my daddy and mommy,” he said. “They’d done it, so I did it.”

  There were prostitutes in the bars, and pimps, and Charlie got to know them too. Charlie was tall for his age, and ruggedly built; eventually he would fill out to six feet tall and two hundred pounds, with broad shoulders. He had blue eyes, dark wavy hair and prominent, almost menacing eyebrows. He looked at least five years older than he was. “I knew about gals from when I was fourteen, shining shoes in the bars for those GIs,” he said. “The gals would fool with me, and take me home with them.

  “My friends then were all gangsters who were also selling and drinking moonshine,” Charlie recalled. One friend, Jay, worked in a small carnival and took Charlie into bars to drink. Jay was much older than Charlie, about thirty-five, and worked as a pimp when he was in Paris. Charlie looked up to him. “He was smart,” Charlie said, and “I learned a lot from him.” If someone said something to Jay to which he took offense, he would “hit that man down.” More than ten years later, when Charlie ended up at the state penitentiary at Huntsville, Jay was there too, serving a life sentence for murder.

  About this time, in 1942, Charlie and Dude began going into bars “to clean them out,” Charlie said. They both enjoyed fistfights and had quick, nasty tempers. Both brothers ended up with lumpy noses caused by too many punches and broken bones. By now Paris was getting too small for Charlie, and he was restless. “I wanted to get away,” he said. During his fourteenth year he left home, “hanging freight trains,” in his expression, sleeping in boxcars. “I was booming around.” He went first to Tennessee and then to New York, and soon after that headed for California, where his goal was to join other poor, jobless
Americans picking fruit. But the train he was riding stopped one night in Amarillo, where he found work for a while as a salesman in the Panhandle Fruit Company. Charlie was part hobo and part outlaw, only fifteen years old, too young to join the military and fight in World War II.

  His brother and closest friend, Dude, was already eighteen and enlisted in the Army in Paris in October 1942. He was assigned to the Army Air Corps, the precursor of the Air Force, but his upbringing quickly caught up with him when he was sent to Kansas for basic training. The very first week, he got into a fight with another recruit, using his fists and a knife. This was the start of a pattern. After basic training, Dude was sent to India and Burma to fight the Japanese and was wounded by Japanese shrapnel. He served until the end of the war, though he was never promoted above the rank of buck private.

  “I loved to fight,” Dude remembered. “I was always fighting. So they wrote me up each time I had a fight, and they had a record on me.” Dude, who, like Charlie, had dark curly hair and prominent eyebrows, was not bitter about the lack of promotions. He took it as a matter of pride. All those fights showed how tough he was. In his later years, he always kept wartime photos of himself in the trailers where he lived. One picture showed him standing next to a B-24 bomber, dubbed the “Yellow Fever,” with sharks’ teeth painted on the nose of the plane to make it more fearsome-looking to the Japanese. In another photo Dude was shirtless next to some palm trees, his arms raised and fists extended in a boxer’s pose. That was the man he was—the fighter.