My Life with Bonnie and Clyde (7 page)

Texas State Penitentiary, Huntsville, Texas, prior to its 1943 remodeling. “I hardly knew how I could bear to send him back to that horrible place.” (Texas Department of Criminal Justice)

Soon after Buck’s return to prison, I went to work at a beauty shop in a town about one hundred miles from Dallas. I will not give the name of the town, or of the people for whom I worked for fear of embarrassing them. I don’t want to hurt them by connecting their names with my story. They were very kind and understanding.
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I sold the car Buck left me and spent most of the money trying to get Buck a parole or pardon. I thought that a lawyer would do him some good. The one I hired only took my money and gave me many false promises, which did me no good.

Days and weeks went by, which seemed like years to me. In February 1932, I visited Buck and his brother Clyde, who was serving a fourteen-year sentence for several minor crimes. Mrs. Barrow was still working trying to get Clyde paroled and was sure he would be free soon. She had asked me to see him, Clyde, while I was visiting Buck. I was to tell him to be good because she was sure he would be free soon. Clyde was walking on crutches because he had cut off two of his toes with an ax while cutting wood at Eastham prison farm. He did it so he would be sent to the Walls where Buck was.
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Before Buck returned to prison, I met many of his friends and most of his people, including his younger brother Clyde. So I already knew him. Buck and I visited Clyde at a Texas prison farm called Eastham No. One. Buck also sent me to see him several times alone. Clyde told me many things that happened in prison. He also wanted to escape. He said he couldn’t do fourteen years.
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On the outside, Buck had been working on Clyde’s case. He supplied money to Mrs. Barrow to pay for lawyers.
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We were sure Clyde would be given a parole when he had been in prison two years, but Clyde couldn’t believe it. He begged me to bring a gun to him, but I refused. I wouldn’t help him escape. But I would do anything else I could to help Buck’s brother win a parole, but only if he wanted to reform and not go back to the same old law-breaking game. Clyde said if he could get out he would go straight, but he couldn’t take fourteen years at Eastham. He said if he didn’t make a parole soon he was going to get out of there anyway he could. He was really doing hard time.

Buck went with me twice to see Clyde. I was very worried during both those trips because Buck had escaped from another prison farm just across the river from Eastham.
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I was afraid some one would recognize Buck and arrest him. We were about the only ones who visited Clyde, sent him
money, or tried to do anything for him. His sister Nell visited him twice. His mother visited once or twice. Although Clyde knew Bonnie Parker at the time and had been keeping company with her before he went to prison, he said he only received a few letters from her while he was at Eastham.
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Then on December 27, 1931, Buck went back to prison.

Eastham Camp 1, 1930. “Buck and I visited Clyde at a Texas prison farm called Eastham No. One.” (Texas Department of Criminal Justice)

Eastham Camp 1, interior, 2001. Clyde Barrow killed his first man, Ed Crowder, behind the farthest column. “Clyde told me many things that happened in prison.” (Photograph by John Neal Phillips)

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Buck Makes a Pardon

Editor's Note: 1932–1933

While she waited for her husband's return from prison, Blanche Barrow worked part of the time as a licensed beautician for Buck's older sister, Artie Winkler, at the Cinderella Beauty Shoppe in Denison, Texas. She also lived for a while with Buck's parents in their cramped, three-room quarters behind the Star Service Station in West Dallas
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On February 2, 1932, Buck's younger brother Clyde was released from prison where he had been serving time for burglary and auto theft. Seething with hatred, the younger Barrow began almost immediately to finalize plans he and a fellow inmate named Ralph Fults had initiated while still incarcerated together. They were going to form a gang with the specific intention of raiding the Eastham prison farm, where both men had been held and where guards and inmates alike had viciously brutalized Barrow. By early 1933, owing to a number of circumstances, Clyde Barrow had not yet staged the raid, but as we shall see, it remained foremost in his mind. Vowing never to be taken alive, he was wanted for five murders before the first anniversary of his release from prison. And more deaths would follow
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Nationally throughout 1932, the economy continued its downward spiral. Although people could escape for a while with movies like
A Farewell to Arms
with Gary Cooper or
Red Dust
with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow, the mood of the average citizen was probably best summarized by Bing Crosby's hit song, “Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime?” Despite his support of a farm relief bill, President Herbert
Hoover's image remained that of an ineffectual leader. “There is nothing more we can do,” he said, but a growing number of Americans refused to believe it
.
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On March 7, 1932, three thousand demonstrators demanding jobs marched on the Ford Motor Company's River Rouge plant in Michigan. Dearborn police stopped the march with tear gas, but the demonstrators pelted police with rocks and frozen mud in the zero-degree weather and then rushed Gate No. 3. Machine gun fire erupted. Four marchers were killed and sixty wounded in what has since been called “the River Rouge massacre.”
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On May 11, three hundred World War I veterans stopped an eastbound freight train in Oregon and commandeered several boxcars so they could travel to Washington, D.C., in support of a congressional bill authorizing the early payment of a veterans' bonus, requisitioned in 1924 but not payable until 1945. The veterans wanted the money. Like most Americans at the time, they really needed it—an average of $1,000 per qualified applicant amounted to roughly the equivalent of a year's wages at an auto plant. By the time the original three hundred arrived in Washington, twenty thousand other veterans and their families had joined them. Carrying signs that read “Hard Times Are Still ‘Hoovering’ Over Us” and calling themselves “The Bonus Expeditionary Force,” these activists camped out in a number of places throughout the capital, including along the Anacostia River flats. There they settled in to await the outcome of the congressional debate over the bill
.

On June 17, the same day Bonnie Parker was “no-billed” by a Kaufman County, Texas, grand jury and released from the only jail that ever held her, the bonus bill was defeated in Congress. However, despite this, the Bonus Expeditionary Force refused to break camp and disperse. On July 28 after Washington police tried unsuccessfully to evict the veterans, violence flared. One veteran and one policeman were shot. That very afternoon President Hoover ordered the U.S. Army to remove the veterans and close their camps
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Under the command of future World War II hero General Douglass MacArthur, and against the advice of his aide, future World War II hero and future president Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower, the army swept over the veterans and set fire to the camps. Another future World War II hero, Colonel George S. Patton, led a cavalry charge with sabers drawn. Hoover then ordered MacArthur to withdraw. The orders were ignored, a portent of MacArthur's later dealings with his superiors. “The burning Anacostia camp,” wrote one reporter, “cast the city in a lurid glare that night as troops moved in to finish the job.”
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In the end fifty veterans were wounded, a number of others killed. It was political disaster for Hoover, the last in a long series of grievances that continued to breed
resentment and contempt in the average citizen. Groups like the Farmers' Holiday Association and the Dairyman's Revolt, both vowing to destroy farm products until wholesale prices rose to an equitable level, came to prominence in 1932. In addition, farm foreclosures were often forestalled by neighboring farmers, often heavily armed, who intimidated potential buyers to the point of silence and then offered pennies and nickels for the land and machinery being auctioned so that they could be restored to the original owner. That November, by a margin of nearly 58 percent, New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt was voted into the White House and both houses of Congress were packed with Democrats. The New Deal was about to commence
.
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March 1933, the month of Buck Barrow's release from the Texas penitentiary, began with the ongoing incursion into China by Japan, truckloads of milk being seized and dumped by angry dairy operators in Iowa, and unemployment figures reaching 24.9 percent nationally. On March 3, the new Texas governor, Miriam A. Ferguson, ordered all banks in the state to close for five days while inspectors reviewed the soundness of each institution. The following day forty-six of the remaining forty-seven states followed suit
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In addition, on that same day, March 4, 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sworn in as president of the United States. In his inaugural speech, Roosevelt asked for sweeping wartime powers to meet the economic crisis of the Great Depression. And although pointing out that the only thing to fear “is fear itself”, the new president added cautiously, “Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.” Roosevelt also indicated the direction his policies would take by stating, “[the] practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion.” The very next day Roosevelt asked Congress to convene in a special session; among other things, he declared a national bank moratorium similar to that already initiated in Texas and proposed a federal guarantee of up to 50 percent of bank deposits. The famous “Hundred Days” of broad legislation aimed first at relief and then at reform had begun
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On March 11, an earthquake killed 119 people in Long Beach, California. On March 15 a tornado ripped through Nashville, Tennessee, killing fifteen. By then banks had reopened nationwide, reporting record deposits following bank restructuring
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In Dallas, Texas, retail stores declared Saturday, March 18, their biggest sales day since the Christmas season. Moreover, the Dallas sheriff's department announced that a recent escapee from jail in nearby Waxahachie might be on the trail of Clyde Barrow. The escapee's name was Roy Thornton, Bonnie Parker's estranged husband
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The Cinderella Beauty Shoppe, 430 West Sears, Denison, Texas, 1932. “It was. . . almost closing time in the beauty shop where I was working.” (Courtesy of Rhea Leen Linder)

On March 20, the State of Florida executed Giuseppe Zangara for the murder of Chicago mayor Anton Cermak, who had been mortally wounded just a little more than a month earlier as he rode in a motorcade with then President-elect Roosevelt. On the same day the jury in the Hillsboro, Texas, murder trial of Clyde Barrow's companion Raymond Hamilton was declared irrevocably deadlocked by Judge W. L. Wray. Jurors had no problem convicting Hamilton of the killing of local businessman John N. Bucher but could not agree on the penalty. A new trial was ordered
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