by Earley, Pete
Johnny was furious when Arthur broke the news, but there was little he could do. Peggy was certain that Arthur would be killed. Arthur listened to them complain for nearly an hour, then went over to Rita’s. To Arthur’s irritation, it was nearly a year before he was called to active duty. Rita saw him off.
By the time that Arthur left, John, too, had found a means of escape from the family. He had used some of the money he had saved from working various jobs to buy a baby blue 1949 Ford for $590, a hefty sum in 1954. Johnny had hoped that his son would use the money for college tuition, but John showed even less interest in a college degree than Arthur had.
John loved his car, in the way that only teenage boys can. He washed and waxed it faithfully, shampooed its interior, and fidgeted with its engine. On May 27, 1955, John was sitting in a soda shop on Jackson Street with a boy nicknamed Smiley, who suggested that if John needed money for new tires, they could break into a gasoline station and either steal some money or tires for his car. John agreed, but the first station they broke into didn’t have anything worth stealing. The next few hits also turned up little. Frustrated, they decided to go after a bigger score – Cuozz & Gavigan’s, a men’s clothing store.
John and Smiley removed the cover from a ventilator and lowered themselves inside the rear of the building, but found the door into the main store barred. After several minutes, the two boys began climbing out of the store, only to be met by Patrolman William Shygelski, who had heard noises from the rear of the clothing store while walking his beat.
Shygelski ordered John and Smiley to stop, but neither did, and the foot patrolman drew his revolver and began firing at them. John ran to his car and sped away. Undeterred, Shygelski flagged down a passing car and gave chase. It never occurred to John that Shygelski might commandeer a car, so he assumed he was home free. Slowing down to avoid attention, he stopped at a red light at North Hyde Park and Jackson. Before the light turned green, Shygelski’s car sped up, and he jumped out, gun in hand.
“Stop! Police!” he yelled.
John jammed the gas pedal to the floor as Shygelski dropped to his knee and fired twice more. He had taken aim at the Ford’s gas tank, but his shots hit the bumper. Shygelski chased John at speeds up to eighty-five mph until John finally lost him.
A few days later, the police captured John on the basis of a tip from his mother. During several hours of questioning, John confessed to the attempted burglary and told about Smiley. The police called Johnny Walker to see if he wished to post his son’s bail. “No, he might learn something if you keep him in jail a few nights,” Johnny replied. John was taken to the Lackawanna County Jail and locked in a cell with adults. The next morning, Johnny Walker took Jimmy to see John.
“Now you take a good look at your brother,” Johnny told Jimmy. “See what happens to bad boys?”
John begged his father to post bail, but Johnny declined. John Walker, Jr., claimed years later that an adult in the jail attempted to rape him that night. The attack was stopped by others in the cell. “I hated my father so much that night,” John said. “He had left me there knowing something like that might happen.”
One week later, John appeared before Judge Otto P. Robinson. The Reverend John W. Casey, pastor of the Walkers’ church, spoke on John’s behalf. “John Walker,” he said, “is an exceptional student and, it is hard to say this under the circumstances, but in school he has been a fine student.”
Mother Vincent, principal of St. Patrick’s High School, was not quite as enthusiastic. John had missed fifteen out of 180 days of school, she reported. His conduct was “generally good” and his scholarship was “fair.”
The judge was unmoved by statements of the pastor and the principal. John and Smiley were sentenced to indefinite terms at the state correctional institution at Camp Hill.
“I can’t see anything in favor of either one of you. You are just two crooks,” Robinson said. But because this was the first time that either boy had been to court, Robinson suspended the sentences and put the boys on probation. “This is a chance for you fellows to go straight,” Robinson lectured. “Don’t make another mistake. You’ve got to be honest or you go to Camp Hill. Learn the Ten Commandments and obey them and you won’t be in further trouble.”
No one bothered to tell Arthur about John’s brush with the law. “I came home on leave on my birthday and when I found out, I took John outside and said, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ I could see that he was really getting screwed up because of the situation at home, my dad’s drinking and such, and I felt that the Navy was really taking care of me. I was already a petty officer and I really loved submarine duty, so I said, ‘John, you got to go into the Navy, man! You got to get out of this house.’ “
It took Arthur only thirty minutes to convince John. He marched his brother straight down to the recruiting office. “We walked in,” Arthur recalled, “and I was in my Navy blues and I said, ‘I got my brother here and he wants to join up,’ and this recruiter starts going crazy because he is so happy. Well, John went through the basic questions and when the recruiter came to the one about having committed any criminal acts.
John said that he had been arrested and the recruiter slowed down a bit, and then the recruiter says, ‘What did you do?’ and John tells him, and this guy flips out and says, ‘Sorry, we can’t take you unless you get the judge to lift your probation.’ So John and I walked across the street to the courthouse and went up and I found the judge and said, ‘Your Honor, my brother wants to join the Navy and I think it would really help him out.’ Well, we talked for a while and the judge agreed and called the recruiter, and the next thing you know, John is in the Navy. I went back to submarine duty and John went off to boot camp.”
Years later, I asked John about his troubled childhood. At first, he claimed that the only crimes that he committed were the failed burglaries that he and Smiley attempted. When I told him about Charles Bennett’s statements, John grudgingly acknowledged that he had been involved in some childish pranks, but considered them examples of “typical fifteen-year-old behavior.”
“I’m not saying that I didn’t do things that I shouldn’t have done,” he explained.
“Breaking into those places was wrong, but you got to remember that I didn’t have anything because my oId man was a drunk and that was really the big factor.
“Look, I bought the family car, not him. Talk about role reversal. He used to come to me to borrow the keys and then he never would bring it back when he promised, and when he did the back seat was filled with beer cans and whiskey bottles.
“The reason that I was breaking into a clothing store was not because I needed money, it was because I needed clothes. We didn’t have any money because my father drank it up. The same was true about glasses. One reason I did lousy in school was because I couldn’t see. I would borrow Chas Bennett’s glasses to look at the blackboard and write down the next assignment. We’d be standing on the street corner and he’d say, ‘Hey Jack, here comes a girl,’ and I’d say, ‘Quick, give me your glasses so I can see. Is she cute?’
“So I know what I did was wrong,” John concluded, “but I was just a kid and I didn’t want to ask my mother for money, and those burglaries, if you call them that, were the entire extent of my criminal career. That was it. I made a mistake and broke into those stores, but I was hardly a criminal. I don’t think most people would even call what I did a crime if they knew the facts. I was just a kid trying to support himself.”
Interviews with John’s teenage friends, as well as police and court records, give a rather different picture of John’s past. During questioning in June 1955 by Scranton detectives James Walsh and Leo Marcus, John confessed to six other burglaries besides the four that he and Smiley committed on May 27.
There is reason to believe John was involved in other crimes as well that until now have not been revealed. Three months before his arrest, on February 11, 1955, a teenage armed bandit held up a Scranton Transit Company bus at 11:25 P.M.
, escaping with $38 in cash. The gun-toting robber was never caught. John bragged about committing the robbery to his brother, Jimmy, and showed him a money changer that he took from the bus driver and the gun that he had used. John also showed up at Chas Bennett’s house the morning after the stickup.
“I asked him what was going on,” Bennett recalled, “and Jack said to me, ‘I robbed a bus last night. I put a mask on and I waited until it got to the end of the line and then I robbed everyone.’ “
Another person also knew that John was a thief.
“I used to come home on leave and find John peddling things,” Arthur Walker told me one afternoon during a reflective moment. “John would be selling things really cheap, like brand new Arrow shirts for one dollar, and whenever anyone asked him, he’d grin that grin of his and say they’d fallen off a truck. I knew, but I honestly thought the Navy would straighten him up.
Chapter 7
John’s first letter from boot camp was dated October 28, 1955, three days after he left Scranton. Addressed to Jimmy, it had $10 tucked inside for Peggy. Before John left, he and Peggy had agreed that if he wanted to write both parents, he would address his letters to Peggy and Johnny, but if he wanted to tell his mother something without his father knowing or if he was sending Peggy cash, he would send the letter to Jimmy.
Peggy put John’s letter in an empty shoebox along with a second one, which came a week later. She still has them.
“I loved the Navy and it quickly became my home,” John recalled. “I had an inferiority complex at first because I hadn’t graduated from high school and I had gotten into trouble. But everything went right for me from day one. Just excellent! I couldn’t believe it, and then I realized that I was obviously sharper than most of the others.”
His letters to Peggy support John’s recollection. “Today, as we were marching along,” John wrote, “the CO could no longer stand the second platoon leader, so he kicked him out. Everyone knew he was about to pick a new man for the job. Well, it didn’t take him long to decide I was the best man.”
John liked the role of leader and worked hard to keep it. “I wanted to be the best.” After boot camp he went to radio operators’ school in Norfolk and immediately applied for submarine duty. Arthur, who had been assigned to the submarine U.S.S. Torsk for two years, had convinced John that there was no better assignment. Most sailors considered duty on diesel submarines arduous and dangerous because they were cramped, noisy, and unpredictable. When a diesel submarine submerged in icy waters, it got so chilly inside that crew members joked they could see each other’s breath. In the tropics, the temperature inside the boat could soar to over a hundred degrees. The air inside tasted thick and viscous, as if you had an oily film on your tongue. There was no privacy in the tight quarters.
But Arthur loved submarines.
“A submarine crew is a special breed,” he told John. “Each man has a specific responsibility and if he doesn’t perform it, he not only jeopardizes the mission, but also the lives of every man aboard. There is no room on a submarine for someone who is second best.”
John wanted to follow in his brother’s footsteps, but a Navy doctor ruled that John was unfit for submarine service because of poor eyesight, so he was assigned to the U.S.S. Johnnie Hutchins, a destroyer anchored in Boston harbor. John was upset, but Arthur buoyed his spirits. “We’ll find a way to get you on a sub,” he promised.
John reported to the Hutchins early one morning in June 1956. By dusk, he had investigated every part of the antiquated training vessel and learned its history. The boat had been named to honor the son of a Texas tenant farmer who had been killed in 1943 during a battle off New Guinea. When a Japanese bomb exploded and killed the helmsman, Johnnie Hutchins, despite the fact that he was severely wounded, pulled himself to his feet just in time to spot a torpedo headed directly toward his ship. He turned the craft away from the torpedo and died.
The men aboard the Johnnie Hutchins had also served their country well in the war. The Hutchins had single-handedly sunk three Japanese midget submarines off the coast of Okinawa in 1945. The heroism of both sailor and ship inspired young recruits, even cynical, street smart ones like John. Late at night, he fantasized about taking charge of the Johnnie Hutchins during some future sea battle and leading its crew to victory.
The destroyer made two training cruises in 1956. Hugging the coastline, it moved slowly north to Quebec, Halifax, and Newfoundland. Later, the fifty-seven trainees and officers on board headed south to the Caribbean and Cuba. Both trips were considered routine by the Navy, but not by John. During liberty in Canada, John and a throng of other sailors went to a whorehouse. John had lost his virginity in the backseat of a car before he joined the Navy, but this experience was his first with a skilled partner and it marked the start of what became an addiction. John paid to have sex with scores of prostitutes during his twenty-year naval career. There was something alluring about the murky underbelly of life that drew John like a siren’s song. Bleak harbor hotels, lurid bars, and crude hookers fascinated him. The inherent danger of these places only added to his excitement. He felt comfortable in a cheap bar with his hand on a hooker’s thigh.
“I’m not the kind of person who confuses love and sex,” John explained. “Sex is not love. Sex is a muscle spasm that you have with someone, and that’s all. It’s entertainment. Love is something else.”
When the Hutchins docked in Boston, John began frequenting the roller rink at Revere Beach near Broad Sound. On weekends, the owners of the rink stopped all skating at nine P.M. and held a dance on the huge wooden floor. John never had trouble finding a date. Although he looked scrawny beside his brawny sailor pals, he had a pleasing face. He wore his inky hair close-cropped and was clean-shaven; in fact, he could go without shaving for a day without anyone noticing. And he still had the same mischievous grin. But his greatest weapon seems to have been full-moon eyes underscored by dark shadows that gave him a melancholy look that girls described as “dreamy.” Most of the girls who attended the dances at the skating rink were looking for mates. They would gladly have quit their jobs as waitresses, carhops, or factory workers to marry a sailor and start a family.
In an October 7, 1956, letter to Jimmy, John handed out a lot of advice and then went on to boast about the action at the Revere rink. The letter was a mixture of genuine concern and cockiness. “How are you doing in school?” John wrote at one point. “Just remember those little nuns are real dumb. You can always pull the wool over their eyes.”
The letter also contained four bright red-and-white stickers marked CONFIDENTIAL. When John returned to Scranton for a weekend visit, his brother asked him how he had come by them.
John explained that the Navy used them to identify radio messages that were considered sensitive. Confidential was the lowest of these classifications and the only one that John had access to. Next was secret, followed by the highest classification, top secret.
“The Navy likes to classify everything,” John explained.
Even radio messages that he sent to shore for supplies such as toilet paper were classified confidential
“Can you believe that?” Jimmy seemed uneasy. “Look,” John said. “I put them on as a joke. It really isn’t any big deal.”
Chapter 8
Barbara Crowley didn’t want to go, but her friend Mary Ellen kept asking. There’s nothing wrong with two teenage girls attending a dance at the Revere rink, Mary Ellen had insisted. Most of the sailors who patronized the rink were respectable; many were away from home for the first time. It was the older sailors that a girl had to watch out for, and they prowled Boston’s seedy bars, not its roller rinks.
As far as Barbara was concerned, only “sleazy” girls went to the skating rink at Revere Beach. She wanted to attend the dance held each Saturday in the grand ballroom of an expensive downtown hotel. “It’s where all the college kids go!” she explained. But Mary Ellen protested that they weren’t college students, and besides, mingling with
fraternity boys made her uneasy.
“Everyone bleeds the same blood,” Barbara snapped.
The two girls continued to argue until Barbara gave in. “I’ll go, but I’m not interested in getting involved with any sailors,” she said.
Barbara had worked hard to pull herself up from a humble background, and she was adamant about marrying someone from a better social class than the one she had been born into. “My family was as poor as you can get,” Barbara told me years later. Born on November 23, 1937, she was one of seven children of George and Annie Crowley, native Bostonians. “As far back as I can remember, we were on some kind of welfare, and it’s hard to get poorer than that.”
When Barbara was a small child, her father worked as a welder for Bethlehem Steel in the vast Boston shipyards. Annie took in laundry and ironing to supplement George’s meager earnings. The family lived in a modest house in Chelsea, a working-class neighborhood in Boston. When Barbara was five, her father fell from a scaffold at the shipyards and injured his arm. Doctors discovered during an examination that he had multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease that impairs the muscles and damages the nervous system. A short time after the accident, he became bedridden.
“My mother went to work as a waitress,” said Barbara’s older sister, Annie Crowley Nelson. “My brothers sold newspapers and I baby-sat. Everyone had a job because my father was sick for a long time before he passed away.”
Barbara was just eight when her father died. A year later, her mother married another Boston laborer, Oscar Knight Smith, who moved the family to Mercer, an isolated hamlet in central Maine. Smith found a job at a local paper mill, but his meager salary was barely enough to keep the family fed, clothed, and sheltered. Shortly after the wedding, Smith got sick and doctors found a brain tumor. It was not the first. Years earlier, doctors had removed a section of his skull to extract another tumor. The surgery on this second tumor left Smith partially paralyzed. Once again, the family was in wretched financial shape.