by Owen J. Hurd
Weeks later, when the opportunity to take down George “Baby Face” Nelson arose, Sam Cowley told Purvis to sit tight in the office, so that he could personally dispatch the next big crook on the list. He and another agent cornered Nelson in Barrington, Illinois, halfway between Chicago and Nelson’s Wisconsin hideout. In the ensuing gun battle, Cowley and Nelson shot each other. Each died of his wounds shortly after.
Hoover, in the meantime, officially demoted Purvis, stripping him of his duties as special agent in charge of the Chicago office and relegating his star agent to routine tasks, like interviewing potential recruits and doing paperwork. Clearly, Hoover did not want Purvis to get anywhere near the action. Receiving Hoover’s message loud and clear, Purvis quit the FBI, less than one year after bringing down Dillinger.
As disappointing as it was to resign from his dream job, Purvis made up for it by living the high life for a while. No longer restricted by a jealous boss, Purvis could do as he pleased. Publishers, movie studios, and advertising agencies all bombarded the famed agent with offers. He moved to California and dated Jean Harlow for a time, followed by rising starlet Janice Jarrett to whom he became engaged. Purvis wrote a book about his FBI exploits, American Agent. He was also the star of a new board game and comic strip.
Purvis may not have worked for Hoover any longer, but he never managed to escape his former employer’s surveillance. Hoover assigned agents to monitor Purvis’s business and social activities, even conducting covert operations designed to scuttle business opportunities.
Ultimately, though, the superficial, media-centric lifestyle did not agree with the sensibilities of a small-town, southern gentleman. Purvis closed his San Francisco law office and broke off his engagement to Jarrett. He moved back to South Carolina, where he eventually married his high school sweetheart, Rosanne Willcox, a mere month after she secured a divorce from her first husband. The couple had three boys and settled into a middle-class lifestyle.
World War II intervened, and Purvis enlisted as an officer. Despite more behind-the-scenes interference from Hoover, Purvis managed to wrangle a position in a unit tasked with ferreting out war criminals. At the end of the war, Purvis helped establish legal procedures for trying Nazis at Nuremberg. He had an awkward reunion with his old hunting pal, Hermann Göring, who appealed to Purvis for leniency. Purvis, of course, offered none. Rather than face sentencing, Göring committed suicide.
Back in the States, Purvis vied for several high-profile government jobs, but Hoover managed to influence people behind the scenes, preventing Purvis from attaining a federal judgeship as well as other positions in the federal courts.
Things went downhill quickly for the former crime fighter. Suffering from ill health and depression, Purvis resorted to heavy drinking and developed a dependency on morphine. On February 29, 1960, Melvin Purvis shot himself in the head with a gun that once belonged to a Chicago thug named Gus Winkler. Before any official ruling was reached about the death, the FBI rushed out a press release calling the death a suicide. Hoover did not attend the funeral. In fact, he never even sent a letter of condolence to the family. The Purvis family, however, did send Hoover a telegram, which read, “We are honored that you ignored Melvin’s death. Your jealousy hurt him very much but until the end I think he loved you.”
A handwritten note recorded on a copy of the telegram in FBI files states, “It was well we didn’t write as she would no doubt have distorted it.”
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Dillinger’s bullet-riddled body was taken first to the hospital and then to the morgue. Although he was supposedly carrying thousands of dollars in cash when he left for the movies that night, investigators found less than $10 on him when they searched his pockets at the morgue. Without permission from the FBI, the Cook County Coroner permitted reporters and curiosity seekers to view Dillinger’s corpse. By some estimates, more than fifteen thousand spectators streamed through the morgue, getting one last glimpse of the infamous bank robber.
Evelyn “Billie” Frechette, Dillinger’s sweetheart, was sentenced to two years in jail for harboring a fugitive. According to FBI files, Miss Frechette later joined a traveling circus, appearing in a sideshow called “Crime Doesn’t Pay.”
Anna Sage, the Woman in Red, who betrayed John Dillinger outside the Biograph Theater, received reward money totaling $5,000, but she was denied her second condition, U.S. citizenship. She was told she could stay in the country as long as she stayed out of trouble and away from Chicago. Having blown all her money she returned to Chicago and was summarily deported to Romania, where she died of liver disease in 1947.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
GAMES OVER
WITH their astronomical salaries, today’s superstar athletes can usually expect to enjoy comfortable retirements—and endless rounds of golf. But it wasn’t always that way. Unfortunately, the ability to run fast, hit a baseball, or field grounders is poor preparation for life after sports. Jesse Owens, Lou Gehrig, and Jackie Robinson each faced major challenges in their retirement years, but all three yearned to make a difference in the lives of others.
Jesse Owens’s Race to His Finish
In 1942, during World War II, a German soldier stationed in North Africa penned what he feared to be the last letter he would ever write. He addressed it to U.S. Olympic sprinter and long jumper Jesse Owens, the man who had won four gold medals in the 1936 Summer Olympics held in Berlin.
I beg one thing from you. When the war is over, please go to Germany, find my son and tell him about his father. Tell him about the times when war did not separate us and tell him that things can be different between men in this world. Your brother, Luz.
“Luz” was Carl Ludwig Long, the German long jumper who took the silver medal in the 1936 Olympics. Though a blond-haired, blue-eyed incarnation of Hitler’s Aryan ideal, Long did not share Hitler’s ideology, and he showed that in part by befriending Owens at the 1936 Olympics. When Owens made his gold-medal-winning jump, silver-medalist Long was the first to congratulate Owens, throwing an arm around his shoulder. The two competitors became friends, corresponding in the years after the Olympics. But the war got between them and ultimately claimed the life of Luz Long, who died in an Allied prison hospital in 1943. Eight years later, Owens would make good on Long’s request, meeting up with his son, Kai Long, in Hamburg.
It was the first time Jesse Owens had returned to the site of his athletic triumphs. By winning four gold medals in the long jump, hundred meters, two hundred meters, and the four-by-hundred-meter relay, Owens dealt a dramatic blow to Hitler’s theories about Aryan superiority. Things had not gone so well for Jesse in the ensuing years. The celebrations over his Olympic performance were short lived. Right after the closing ceremonies, Owens and his teammates were schlepped across the Continent on a series of barnstorming track-and-field meets organized by the American Athletic Union (AAU). It was a grinding schedule. Just two days after winning the gold medal for the relay, Owens was obligated to compete in an exhibition meet in Cologne, Germany. After a lackluster performance, the exhausted Owens was put on a plane for Prague and expected to compete again the very next day. After stops in Bochun, Germany, and London, the AAU team competed in five meets in less than a week. It’s no wonder that Jesse became “pretty sick of running.”
In addition to the exhaustion, Owens was worried about missing opportunities to cash in on his fame. He had received telegrams with promises of big paydays for various gigs. The AAU insisted that Jesse had an obligation to run in these meets. If he refused, they would strip him of his amateur status. That might not seem like a big deal, but there was no professional track-and-field circuit. The AAU and National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) were essentially the only games in town. Without an international stage on which to perform, Owens would have to find creative ways to earn a living.
Still, Owens couldn’t escape the feeling that he was being exploited by the AAU. He decided to head back to the United States, while the rest of the team proce
eded to Stockholm, Sweden. The only problem was money. Jesse was so broke that he couldn’t afford passage back to the United States, so a previous employer arranged to wire him the cash to cover his ocean liner ticket.
Owens received a hero’s welcome in New York, where he met entertainer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and Robinson’s agent. After more homecoming parades in Cleveland and Columbus, Owens returned to New York to capitalize on his fame, but the outlandish offers of money turned out to be empty promises. Jesse’s biggest windfall came when Republican boosters paid him to publicly support Alf Landon in his presidential run against the incumbent, Franklin Roosevelt. Estimates on the fee Owens received varied from $10,00 to $15,000. Jesse would only say that it was “a lot.”
During the Depression, when a large population was out of work and when a decent workingman’s salary topped out at around $2,000, Jesse should have been set for a while. But his overly generous nature got the best of him. He bought a house for his parents as well as expensive gifts for friends. He squandered much of the money clothing and bejeweling his wife and spent the rest on fancy clothes and cars for himself.
It was common for successful white Olympic athletes, like Johnny Weissmuller and Buster Crabbe, to receive lucrative Hollywood contracts, but the only show-business opportunities open to a black man were on the so-called chitlin circuit, nightclubs catering to African American clientele. Jesse Owens—and those who paid to see him perform at nightclubs—quickly learned that athletic prowess does not necessarily endow one with the ability to sing and dance.
Dogged anew by financial pressures, Owens resorted to low-paying jobs, serving at various times as a bathhouse attendant, playground director, and clothing store salesman. Unlike other black teammates who competed in the Olympics with him, Jesse had never earned a college degree, so his opportunities were limited. But he still had his name, and he could still run. One of the gambits Owens fell back on periodically was to run a footrace against a horse. He needed a head start to win, and it didn’t hurt that the starter’s gun usually frightened the horse. Demeaning as these exhibitions may have been, Owens had no other choice. As he said, you “can’t eat gold medals,” and he had a family of five to support.
Offers to race horses were too few and far between, so Owens took it upon himself to create a platform for his talents. He sponsored a basketball team, the Olympians, that toured the nation, taking on local basketball teams. At halftime Jesse would speak and perform athletic exhibitions. In the summer months, Owens’s softball team, the Olympics, picked up the slack, with Jesse putting on long jump and sprinting clinics between innings. It was during these barnstorming tours that Owens and the other black athletes were reminded that their physical skills, though they could bring in paying customers, didn’t shield them from racial prejudice. They were often turned away from whites-only restaurants and hotels.
In an attempt to secure long-term financial stability, Owens opened a chain of dry cleaning stores in the Cleveland area. The enterprise quickly went belly-up, saddling Owens with huge debts. To make matters worse, the federal government charged him with failing to pay income taxes. Owens declared bankruptcy and worked hard over the next few years to pay off his debts, primarily by touring with the Indianapolis Clowns, an all-black baseball team modeled after the Harlem Globetrotters.
Owens got back on his feet during and after World War II. Ineligible to fight, he was hired by the government to help improve physical fitness among the nation’s youth. He later landed a job at Ford Motor Company, as director of Negro personnel. In the 1950s, Owens was hired by the U.S. government to conduct a series of goodwill ambassador tours in Asia. But the tax man came calling again, and this time Owens was convicted of tax fraud in 1966. He received no prison term and was fined $3,000, a fraction of the maximum penalty.
In 1967, when there was talk among African American athletes of boycotting the upcoming summer Olympics to be held in Mexico City, Owens did his best to persuade U.S. athletes that “the Olympics should not be used as a battleground for civil rights.” Ultimately, a boycott was avoided and the games went on—but not without controversy.
Owens did his best to understand the younger athletes, but he found himself largely out of step with them, primarily because of his fundamentally conservative personality. He clearly sympathized with those who suffered racial injustice, but he was squeamish about the more radical elements of the civil rights movement—even deeming the relatively moderate Martin Luther King’s tactics overly confrontational. Though branded an Uncle Tom by the more radical wing of the civil rights movement, Owens remained a hero to many Americans. It’s not surprising that his stance on the Olympic boycott improved his reputation among white Americans, earning him lucrative arrangements with a number of prominent corporations.
Like too many athletes of yesteryear, Owens was a heavy smoker. It caught up to him in 1979, when he was diagnosed with lung cancer. Owens died three months later on March 31, 1980, at the age of sixty-six. Many of his Olympic teammates attended Owens’s funeral, including Marty Glickman, a Jewish sprinter from the Bronx.
Memories of the 1936 Olympics were not so positive for Marty Glickman or Sam Stoller, the only two Jewish sprinters on the team. Stoller and Glickman performed well enough to qualify for the U.S. Olympic four-by-one-hundred relay team, but they were pulled from the team at the last minute, replaced by Ralph Metcalfe and Jesse Owens—even though Glickman and Stoller each posted better trial times than the two other sprinters who retained their spots on the relay team. Avery Brundage, chairman of the U.S. Olympic Committee, allegedly caved in to Hitler’s wishes. It was bad enough, the theory went, that a black man threatened the superiority of the Aryan race. That two Jews would beat Germans at Berlin was unacceptable.
Glickman went on to play professional basketball and football, but he was best known as the sports announcer for the New York Knicks, where he coined terms like the swish shot. Stoller enjoyed minor success as a Hollywood actor. Avery Brundage would go on to become the president of the International Olympic Committee in 1952, a position he still held through the 1972 Summer Olympics, in which eleven Israeli Olympians were murdered by Palestinian terrorists.
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It’s surprising that a number of Jewish athletes—as well as others belonging to groups persecuted by the Nazis—competed for the German Olympic team in 1936. Helene Mayer won a silver medal in fencing and later emigrated to the United States, as did Gretel Bergmann, the Germans’ best high jumper, who was kicked off the team just before the Olympics. Werner Seelenbinder, a pro-Communist, anti-Nazi wrestler planned to protest the Nazi Party by making an obscene gesture on the medal podium, but his plans were foiled when he finished fourth. During World War II Seelenbinder was imprisoned in a concentration camp and later executed by beheading.
Sprinter Ralph Metcalfe, who took silver in the hundred meters, behind Owens, and a gold medal as part of the four-by-one-hundred relay team, later moved to Chicago where he was elected an alderman. He also served in the Illinois and U.S. Congress. Another member of the relay team, Foy Draper, died during World War II on a bombing mission to Tunisia.
The silver medal in the two-hundred-meter dash went to Matthew “Mack” Robinson, who finished just four tenths of a second behind gold-medal-winner Jesse Owens. Mack’s younger brother, Jackie, would challenge some of Jesse’s collegiate records during his years at the University of California at Los Angeles, before going on to break the color barrier in Major League Baseball with the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Lou Gehrig’s Luck Runs Out
Most people recollect Lou Gehrig in one of three ways: as the power-hitting first baseman who led the New York Yankees to seven championships between 1927 and 1939, in the process, setting the record for the most hits in Yankee history (until Derek Jeter came along), and for the longest uninterrupted streak of games played in the history of Major League Baseball (until Cal Ripken Jr. came along).
Or they remember him as the baseball hero s
tricken with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), whose “Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth” speech on July 4, 1939, represents the high watermark in grace and humility.
Yet few know how Gehrig spent the last two years of his life after he made that echo-suffused speech at Yankee Stadium on Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day. After splitting the doubleheader with the Washington Senators on July 4, the Yankees stood atop the American League standings with a record of 52–17. Though he never played another inning, Gehrig still suited up for almost every game, both home and away. From his usual dugout perch, he watched alongside his beloved manager, Joe McCarthy.
The Yankees went on to win the American League pennant and the World Series, too, in a four-game sweep of the Cincinnati Reds. But Gehrig was visibly withering as the season wore on. His hands shook and his gait was wobbly. Once considered the embodiment of strength and durability, Gehrig now had difficulty dressing himself. Before the year was out, he even had to surrender the only ceremonial responsibility he had been able to perform. As captain, it had been his job to deliver the day’s lineup card to the umpires, but the short walk from dugout to home plate became too much for him.