Alcatraz (67 page)

I could be taken from here secretly, placed on a boat in the Bay and transported with what supplies I would need. This could be managed in such a way that the crew need never know who I was or even that I was a prisoner from Alcatraz. Some kind of arrangements could be made for a boat to stop say every year or two, leave supplies, and take back what data I had accumulated. By this method I would be doing some useful work, serving
my sentence and I believe by the time I was eligible for parole I would be shown some consideration.

His proposal was denied on the grounds that it was too radical, but his writing indicated a high level of literacy, which became more and more evident in his letters as the years rolled by.

The most acute problem for George Kelly in adjusting to life at Alcatraz was the pain of missing his wife, Kathryn. Unlike Bates and Bailey and most of the rest of the Alcatraz convicts, who had severed any connections they had to the women in their lives, Kelly remained deeply attached to Kathryn. He was acutely aware of her anguish over the consequences her mother and stepfather had to suffer for their minor involvement in the detention of Charles Urschel. Before his transfer to Alcatraz, Kelly had written a letter to Kathryn (which was not delivered but forwarded instead to the Bureau of Prisons headquarters and then to the FBI) in which he disavowed any involvement by Ora and R. G. “Boss” Shannon in kidnapping Urschel.

When George arrived at Alcatraz in 1934, he was informed that for the first three months, he could have no mail contact with Kathryn. After that he would be allowed to send her only two letters a year, written on one side each of three sheets of paper, and subject to censorship. When asked by Warden Johnston to accept this special arrangement, Kelly refused, objecting on the grounds that this restriction was not imposed on any other Alcatraz inmates. Johnston and Bureau headquarters did not ease the restriction until November 1935, when the director authorized the four men at Alcatraz whose wives were serving time in federal prison (Kelly, Waley, and Dillinger associates Arthur Cherrington and Welton Spark) to write to their wives and receive letters from them every two months. A year later, this privilege was increased to one letter a month, and two years later the men were allowed to write and receive two letters per month. In 1939 Kelly was allowed to increase the amount of space available in each letter—he was permitted to write on both sides of two of the three sheets of paper allowed.

In July 1940 Kelly wrote to Ora Shannon explaining that he would no longer be writing to her because his letters had been reduced by the mail censor to “senseless drivel.” He noted that he would try to continue writing to Kathryn, although the letters would consist of “some kind of foolishness just so we can keep in touch.” But a week later, when Kelly had two of the letters he wrote returned to him by the censor, he decided that the interference in his correspondence with Kathryn had become intolerable;
he wrote to her, proposing that they discontinue writing. “To me, writing has become an aggravation instead of a pleasure, and I firmly believe that when anything becomes a burden it is time to discontinue the practice.” Though he worried about hurting Kathryn’s feelings and hastened to assure her, “I love you entirely too much for that,” he admitted that when parts of the letters were deleted he “was mad at everyone for days.” He also complained that there was so little to tell from one letter to the next. He suggested: “Suppose we discontinue our correspondence until we can write under more favorable conditions; or until you get out and can visit me and we can talk things over. Of course that may be years and then again it may be a matter of only eighteen months or so.” He then went into a reverie about their earlier correspondence:

Do you remember the twelve and fourteen page letters you used to write me daily when I was serving that other “bit.” I even recall one that was twenty pages long, and every page as sweet as you are.

Kelly closed the letter saying that if he did not receive a reply, he will know that she agreed. And then he wrote of his love for Kathryn:

It is almost needless for me to repeat how much I love you. To me you are the grandest girl in the world, and I will love and adore you if I live to be a hundred. I hope you get transferred this month and have a pleasant trip. Give Ora my love and don’t forget the one who worships you. All my heart will always be yours angel. Lots of hugs and kisses. As ever, your very own, Geo.

Kathryn responded several weeks later, chastising George for not accepting the reality of prison life, obviously disappointed that her letters had not done more to cheer him:

I have thought in vain of how to word a reply to you that would express exactly how I feel about “us.” And I find that it is most difficult to do. Your letter touched my heart. In fact I cried when I read it as I expected quite a different wording. I shrink from hurting you. That is the farthest desire of my heart. . . . I suppose the best thing I can do is to simply speak plainly and exactly how I feel. First, please understand that I am not “cracking up”; neither is prison getting me down, and in dismissing the love angle, which I admit is hard to do, I feel like this: that to help you in any manner I would gladly give my life, but I can’t feel that I have added to you, in any manner, by consistently trying to encourage you, by writing you the long cheerful letters that I have, these years. I tried my level best to help you in doing your time; but it seems I failed miserably. Don’t think
that I even considered you less strong than myself. I haven’t—but I always feel that if either of us needed encouragement, I should attempt to give it to you because my surroundings have no doubt been more pleasing than yours. I longed for you to avoid trouble, to stand on your own feet for what you know is right and minutely be the man you really are. Well it seems to me you fell down on the job.

She then threatened divorce, stating that she was done with the criminal life, and blamed her marriage to George for getting her in such trouble:

Unless you have changed a lot darling, even if we two were free tomorrow we should be forced to say goodbye. Why? Well, because I’m happy to say that I know I shall never place myself nor permit myself to be placed in a position to ever re-enter prison. I shall be just a “little fish” so to speak if I am fortunate enough to get that one chance and like it. No more “big dough” for me in any place. In other words I find that I am completely cured of any craving for un-legitimate luxuries and my sincere hopes and plans for the future are of a sane, balanced mode in living. I’ll never change that viewpoint. I have gone through hell and still am plainly speaking, seeing mother as a daily reminder of my own mistake. The mistake was in my love, and marriage to you. Not that I censure you, I don’t. I blame myself. However, I “woke up.” I hoped you would but I’m not sure of what goes on in your mind. As you know I like to finish things immediately and I feel if our goodbye is to come, why not now. The hurt will at least be dimmed in the years of incarceration yet ahead of both of us.

But then Kathryn exhorted Kelly to give up his criminal identity:

What you need to do is forget “Machine Gun” Kelly and what he stood for and interest yourself in being plain, kind George, who is just another “con” like myself . . . and if it’s impossible for you to make yourself into a man who “thinks straight”—who will go straight when the opportunity presents itself, then I don’t want you for a companion.

Having heard about a food strike at Alcatraz, Kathryn stated, “I’m fed up with worries, and god knows I have plenty of my own, so I do think I’d perhaps be happier, in placing you in the background and coasting along with just my own problems.” But then she seemed to change her mind and closed the letter as follows:

Let’s do this bit of time with the best grace and cheerfully . . . if you really love me as you say, you should be able to keep smiling with me and keep your mind free to a degree of prison non-essentials, and small annoyances,
and instead look forward to at some future date, creating with me, the life together that I desire. I do love you, you know mister. . . . Wish I could see you, I do, I do. . . . Now settle down and be happy heart of my heart. Devotedly, your Katrinka

Despite her recriminations and threats of divorce in early September, Kathryn’s appeal succeeded at encouraging George to resume their correspondence, although there were periodic misunderstandings when letters were returned to the sender by new or substitute mail censors, who were confused by the changing rules governing their communication. Since letters to and from Alcatraz inmates were censored and retyped, inmates and their correspondents could only guess at what had been removed from sentences that did not end logically or make sense. Both Kellys were well aware that they were also writing for the Bureau of Prisons, FBI officials, and especially the U.S. Parole Board.

During a spring 1940 visit to Alcatraz, Director James Bennett stopped on his walk through the prison to chat with Kelly. He commented that he had had occasion to talk with Charles Urschel (Kelly’s kidnap victim) and that Urschel did not seem “hostile” toward Kelly. Bennett then asked Kelly if he had ever thought about writing to Urschel. In this suggestion was implied an extraordinary exception to the prohibition on prisoners corresponding with anyone in the free world other than family members—especially kidnap victims.

Several months later, acting on this suggestion, Kelly sent through Bennett’s office a letter to Urschel. From that point on, the Bureau of Prisons allowed Kelly (and his rap partner, Bates) to write to and receive letters from their kidnap victim, Charles Urschel, and E. E. Kirkpatrick, the man who had conveyed the ransom money from the victim’s family to them. This extraordinary deviation from a rule that was vigorously applied to other prisoners produced letters that were models of civility by all parties.

Kelly’s first letter to Urschel is one of the most sophisticated and artfully expressed descriptions of the pains of imprisonment written by any inmate at any prison. It began with the explanation that he was writing at Bennett’s suggestion. He asked Urschel to determine for him the truth of reports that oil had been struck in the vicinity of the Shannon property in Paradise, Texas, where Kelly still held title to a farm. Kelly hoped that Urschel was not feeling “too vindictive” about the threats made against him and explained that he had gotten caught up in “the Department of Justice’s love of the dramatic and the public’s desire for a good
free show.” The remarkable soliloquy that followed was Kelly’s answer to a question he thought might be in Urschel’s mind:

I feel that at times you wonder how I am standing up under my penal servitude, and what is my attitude of mind? It is natural that you should be infinitely curious. Incidentally, let me say that you’ve missed something in not having had the experience for yourself. No letter, no amount of talk, and no literary description in second-rate books—and books on crime cannot but be second rate—could ever give you the faintest idea of reality.

No one can know what it’s like to suffer from the sort of intellectual atrophy, the pernicious mental scurvy, that comes of long privation of all the things that make life real; because even the analogy of thirst can’t possibly give you an inkling of what it’s like to be tortured by the absence of everything that makes life worth living. . . .

Maybe you have asked yourself, “how can a man of even ordinary intelligence put up with this kind of life, day in, day out, week after week, month after month, year after year?” To put it more mildly still, what is this life of mine like, you might wonder, and whence do I draw sufficient courage to endure it. To begin with, these five words seem written in fire on the walls of my cell: “Nothing can be worth this—the kind of life I am leading.”

What helps me to carry on? Perhaps the thought that I might be worse off. You may laugh, but it’s probably true. I might be in a worse place where there is brutality or even bestiality. I might go blind. I might even be dead.

I feel splendid and am in perfect physical trim. My one obsession is the climate of the Island. I am constantly bothered with colds. My cell, made of steel and concrete, is always a trifle chilly; but I’ve even come to believe that man is so made that the presence of a small superficial irritation, provided the sensation is acute without being symptomatic of any serious trouble, is a definite aid to his mental equilibrium and serves to keep occupied the restless margin of his consciousness. He regards it too, as a sort of ring of Polycrates, for I suspect that there is in all of us, always, an obscure sense of fate, inherited from numberless ancestral misfortunes, which whispers: “We are not sent into this world to live too happily. Where there’s nothing to worry us, it’s not natural, it’s a bad sign.” A little misfortune gives us the assurance that we are paying our “residence tax” so far as this world is concerned—not much to be sure, but enough to ensure us against the jealousy and thunderbolts of Heaven.

I have found the secret of how to “do” easy time. I just let myself drift along; the tide of time picks me up and carries me with it. It will leave me high and dry precisely where it chooses and when it chooses; consequently, I have nothing to worry about.

But I must be fair. Being in prison has brought me one positive advantage.
It could hardly do less. It’s name is comradeship—a rough kindness of man to man; unselfishness, an absence, or a diminution, of the tendency to look ahead, at least very far ahead; a carelessness, though it is bred of despair; a clinging to life and the possible happiness it may offer at some future date.

A person in prison can’t keep from being haunted by a vision of life as it used to be, when it was real and lovely. At such times I pay, with a sense of delicious, overwhelming melancholy, my tribute to life as it once was. I don’t really believe it can ever be like that again.
²¹

No direct response to this letter was received from Charles Urschel; Urschel did respond in a letter to Albert Bates that no oil had been discovered near Kelly’s farm. Bates received the reply because of the relentless search for his part of the ransom that had never been recovered.