Jeff Guinn Read online

  Cumie didn’t want that to be the case with the Barrows. For the time being, Bud was safer, better off, on the farm in Corsicana, where he couldn’t fall into the cesspool of big-city sin.

  Buck, unfortunately, was already swimming in it. Every troublesome trait he’d exhibited in the country found full flower in West Dallas.

  When he arrived in the city, Buck didn’t go to work for Jack as promised. Instead, he began making a living from vague pursuits that didn’t bear close inspection. Cumie said he “bought and sold poultry,” a sugarcoated description of chicken theft that even she certainly didn’t believe. He got married, too, to Margaret Heneger, and the couple somehow had the money to rent an apartment. The chicken business, illicit or not, didn’t provide the income Buck and Margaret required, so Buck moved into the same scrap metal business as his father, but on a more sophisticated scale. He and some partners only described by Cumie as “other boys” got their hands on a car and began driving the Dallas streets in search of booty. One day they filled up the car with a load of brass, valuable metal that attracted the attention of the police. Buck swore he’d been told it was scrap; the cops said it was stolen. Buck held up well enough during questioning that “the laws” let him go after they’d confiscated his haul. But now he had come to the attention of the police, and they’d noted him as a likely suspect in future theft investigations.

  Things went poorly between Buck and Margaret. They became the parents of twin boys, but one died after only five months. They divorced, and Buck temporarily rejoined his parents, Flop, and Marie at the West Dallas camp. He brought with him a new means of income: a vicious pit bull he was entering in dog fights. The pit bull hated everyone but its master. After it ripped little Marie’s dress right off her, Cumie insisted the dog or Buck had to go. The dog went and Buck stayed, but not for long. He fell in love again, and married Pearl Churchley, a name Pearl’s new mother-in-law undoubtedly admired. But Buck’s second marriage ended much the same way as his first. Pearl gave birth to a daughter, and then the couple divorced. As with the surviving twin boy, after the divorce the child lived with her mother. Buck took up with other West Dallas undesirables, and it seemed inevitable that great trouble loomed in his future.

  Then Henry had another of his spells, but this time he wasn’t alone. Bud was spending some time in West Dallas when he, his father, and little sister all became so ill they had to be admitted to a local hospital as charity patients. Marie said later that they suffered from either malaria or yellow fever, common enough diseases among residents of the musty West Dallas camp. She also swore that Bud was so cheerful, all the nurses considered him their favorite patient. The three Barrows were still shaky when they were allowed to go home—no records apparently still exist of how long they were hospitalized, or what treatment they received. Without Henry out picking up scrap metal every day, family finances must have been especially abysmal. But Cumie insisted that the invalids gulp down huge daily doses of foul-tasting Grove’s Chill Tonic, a questionable elixir in which she had considerable faith. Each bottle cost fifty cents, an enormous expenditure. Though the elder Barrows were determined to be self-sufficient, Cumie probably had to turn to Jack, Artie, and Nell for help until Henry recovered enough to resume working.

  Bud went back to Corsicana for a while, but he didn’t stay. His parents’ time in the West Dallas campground began to stretch out—one year, two, then three. Uncle Frank’s farm undoubtedly seemed backward compared to the city wonders Bud glimpsed on his visits to Henry and Cumie. Buck, Bud’s hero, was up to all kinds of interesting things. Pit bull fights, one romance after another, and even close calls with the law over contraband might have horrified Cumie, but to Bud they must have seemed exciting compared to his own dull country life of school and farm chores. On his visits to the campground, he would stand staring raptly over the river at the towering skyscrapers. No wonder, then, as he turned fifteen, that Bud decided he’d henceforth spend most of his time in Dallas. Country Bud would become City Clyde.

  CHAPTER 3

  Clyde

  Everything about Dallas excited fifteen-year-old Clyde Barrow.

  The city dazzled him with its endless stream of possibilities. Unlike tiny Telico, if you wanted to go to the picture show, you could choose between dozens of films instead of just one. Some Dallas theaters changed features four times a week, and not long after Clyde arrived for good in 1925, silent movies began gradually giving way to talkies. Fair Park had its carnival rides, exhibit buildings, picture-taking booths, and a skating rink with real ice. Skyscrapers beat farm silos any day, and in downtown Dallas every store window displayed the kinds of treasures Clyde knew he had to have, clothes and musical instruments especially. Clyde still wanted to make his living as a musician. He spent hours gazing through plate glass at the guitars.

  Campground life in West Dallas didn’t dismay the short, skinny teenager—Clyde’s height topped out at just under five feet, six inches, and he weighed 125 pounds. The Barrows hadn’t exactly existed in luxury on their tenant farms, so living rough was natural for the teenager. Some nights, Clyde would go over to one of the many campfires and play his guitar and sing. He was a social sort of boy, so he made new friends easily among West Dallas kids. Two of the closest were Clarence Clay and Tookie Jones’s oldest son, who shared both Clyde’s age and first name.

  It was great fun for Clyde to be reunited with Buck, who had clearly found ways to live an exciting city life. Clyde’s sister Nell had just married a man named Leon, who supplemented his factory wages by leading a band at night and on weekends. The couple lived fairly close to the campground, on Pear Street in South Dallas. Clyde went over to see them all the time, and slept there as often as in his parents’ tent. Leon played the saxophone, and he was happy to give lessons to his new brother-in-law. It wasn’t long before Clyde’s sister Artie was telling everyone how she loved hearing her little brother tootling “Melancholy Baby” on the sax.

  Cumie Barrow still had her rules about school, and Clyde obeyed—sort of. His country schooling had reached approximately sixth-grade level, but he attended Sidney Lanier High in Dallas. It was a long walk from the campground, and he was expected to chaperone L.C. and Marie part of the way to Cedar Valley Elementary. Often Clyde and L.C. never made it to school. In nice weather, Dallas’s parks beckoned, or else window shopping downtown proved irresistible. Marie profited by their poor example. Young as she was, she developed a knack for blackmail. In return for not tattling to Cumie, Marie demanded use of L.C.’s bicycle, the only bike in the family. L.C. would always give in for the privilege of spending time with his brother. He hero-worshipped Clyde.

  And there was the other thing about Dallas that thrilled Clyde. Girls were everywhere, too many pretty ones to count, often dressed in the very latest fashions and fixed up fine with lipstick and rouge like the glamorous ladies in the movies. Cumie warned him about these “wayward women” in their sinful makeup, but it was the look modern girls wanted. Admiring swains like Clyde couldn’t agree more, and his obsession with fashion extended to his own wardrobe. He wanted to dress stylishly, too.

  That desire wasn’t unique to Clyde. Poor kids in West Dallas fixated on nice clothes above all else. How a person dressed was crucial to his or her public image. Everyone, even those in flat-broke families like the Barrows, had “Sunday clothes,” something nicer than overalls to wear to church. Males might have one dress shirt and a pair of cheap department store slacks. Women would have a single frock made of material that was store-bought rather than homespun.

  The unmistakable sign of success, the proof of being someone to respect, came when you wore your Sunday clothes all through the week. The vast majority of Texas men didn’t. The most desirable girls often sized up a prospective boyfriend by what he was wearing, and Clyde Barrow meant to impress them. That required decking himself out daily in a nice suit with a vest, and also a snowy dress shirt with a fashionably wide tie. Then he would clearly be someone special. His pride demand
ed it.

  To do that—to have the money for clothes, and dates, and the guitars and saxophones in shop windows—he needed a job. Country school hadn’t appealed to Clyde at all, and city school was worse. His new teachers, stuck in bad neighborhoods and with classes full of unruly poor kids, tolerated their students at best. If they had to teach in that part of Dallas, it was either their first job or, more likely, they weren’t very good teachers and these were the only jobs they could get. It wasn’t as though getting a high school diploma was going to make much difference in Clyde’s life. He was willing to work hard to get all the things he wanted. Sticking around school was just delaying his chance to get a job and start generating disposable income.

  So when Clyde was around sixteen he quit school forever, and Cumie really couldn’t object. For West Dallas kids, the object of going to school was to learn to read and write decently. They were expected to leave school in their midteens and then go to work to help support their families until they married, moved out, and started the cycle again with their own offspring. Across the country, only about 40 percent of all students during Clyde’s lifetime ever went beyond the eighth grade.

  There were jobs in Dallas factories for dropout boys like Clyde. His ability to read and write made no difference at all. But he was good with his hands. The same fingers that could race along guitar frets or saxophone keys were nimble enough for the most intricate shop piecework. Clyde didn’t like the idea of having bosses—he always wanted to be the one giving orders—but he needed a paycheck.

  So Clyde took a job at the Brown Cracker & Candy Company for a dollar a day. Some biographers would later claim he worked at Western Union as a messenger boy instead, but L.C. had the only bike among the Barrows, and the Western Union messengers had to supply their own. Clyde was glad to have the job at Brown, right up to the time he got his first few pay envelopes and realized that most of what he wanted, he still couldn’t have.

  Clyde Barrow might love all the fine things in Dallas, but Dallas didn’t love him back. As a useful worker bee he was tolerated, but that was the extent of it. In Dallas and all across America, the mid-1920s was a time when social and economic standing was rigid: you stayed where you were born. That was certainly true in Clyde’s new job. Almost as soon as he figured out a dollar a day didn’t go all that far, he also realized he had nearly reached the peak of his earning potential. The rich men he worked for were glad to have him as a line employee, but he would never be a manager. That was for his social superiors. People from Dallas owned and ran the factories. People from West Dallas worked in them, and were expected to be grateful for the opportunity. Unlike the East, where postwar industry was often affected by strikes called to win workers higher pay, in Dallas labor unions were virtually nonexistent. Those holding factory jobs there averaged less than $7 a week. Would-be union organizers claimed prostitution was common among female workers because they earned so little in Dallas’s factories, dime stores, and restaurants.

  During his leisure hours, no one could keep Clyde from visiting downtown Dallas. But it became frustrating to go there. The nice suits on display in store windows cost $20 or more. A saxophone was twice as much. When Clyde went to the movies—he could at least afford the dime admission for that—he saw actors wearing the latest fashions, dining in swanky restaurants, driving flashy cars, living the kind of life he wanted for himself. Around downtown, or in the leafy expanse of Fair Park with all its exhibits and attractions, if he happened to meet teenagers from the nicer parts of town, he was snubbed. Jim Wright, who spent some of his teenage years in Dallas and grew up to become speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, recalled that even among Dallas middle-class youth, “I would not say West Dallas residents were considered subhuman, but they certainly were thought to be less than everybody else in every way. You wouldn’t want to be friends with, let alone date, a kid from West Dallas.”

  It was bad enough on the east side of the Trinity, but to Clyde’s dismay he found he was also at the bottom of the West Dallas social pecking order. Families there didn’t have much, but some still had more than others, and it mattered. The Barrows lived in the campgrounds and showed no signs of ever being able to leave. Henry Barrow was a junk man. Clyde was the son of the lowest of the low. Many West Dallas fathers would not allow their daughters to go out with him. Decades later, Louise Barrett’s family would tease her about a “double date” with Clyde. Louise’s grandfather, who sold milk and vegetables, was several West Dallas social rungs higher than Henry Barrow, and he would not have permitted Clyde to court Louise. The kids got around that by going out as part of a group to Fair Park. It was one of the most popular destinations for West Dallas teenagers. Walking in the park was free, as was admission to many of the car and animal exhibits. But the main attraction, when they could afford it, was posing for silly pictures in the photo booths. The girls donned huge hats and flourished frilly parasols. The boys decked themselves out in goofy cowboy gear. They pointed fake guns at each other, brandished “cigarettes” in long holders, and struck exaggerated poses behind rubber prison bars. The photos came in strips of three for a nickel. The girl would take one, the boy another, and the third might be given to a parent or friend. The daily lives of West Dallas kids were hard and essentially hopeless. They savored these few moments of make-believe.

  Clyde Barrow wouldn’t settle for make-believe. The teenager who always had to be in charge wouldn’t accept that in Dallas he had no control over his own destiny. He was willing to work hard to have a better life in the city. He’d grown up in the country, where there was minimal social stratification. In rural farm communities, everybody wore the same clothes, went to the same dances, interacted on a more even basis. Now he was locked into a system intended to permanently separate the haves and have-nots. There was no doubt which category he belonged to, and Clyde’s frustration gradually festered into anger.

  He tried the most traditional means of legitimately earning more money by changing jobs, upgrading from Brown’s dollar a day to Procter & Gamble’s thirty cents an hour. One of his pay packets, signed for in a rounded schoolboy hand, held $18 for a sixty-hour workweek. Then Clyde moved on to the United Glass Company, where he worked as a glazier. Long afterward, his family would insist with pride that during this time he was never fired. Every job change came through Clyde’s own choice. He was trying to make something of himself. At one point he even tried to enlist in the navy. He was turned down because of lingering effects from the illness that hospitalized him soon after the Barrows had arrived in West Dallas. It was a major disappointment—in anticipation of military service, Clyde had adorned his left arm with a “USN” tattoo.

  Back in the West Dallas campground that was always soggy with river dampness and noisy from the rumble of freight trains passing nearby, Clyde looked at his father and saw his own socially mandated future. Every day Henry Barrow returned exhausted from picking up junk metal, and after a skimpy supper spent his last few waking hours tacking together a pathetic shack. His life would continue to be hard until he was released by death.

  But there were other potential role models for Clyde in the West Dallas slums, young men who hadn’t surrendered themselves to lives of impoverished drudgery. Their career choices usually didn’t involve working in factories like Clyde did. Instead, they took control of their own lives by breaking the law.

  Many West Dallas teenagers engaged in petty theft across the river, mostly small crimes of opportunity—a shop clerk being distracted by another customer, a rich woman momentarily leaving her purse unattended in a park. These weren’t instances of shoplifting or purse snatching for the thrill of it. The juvenile perpetrators were trying to acquire self-respect as well as loot. A take of even a few dollars meant multiple trips to the movies, bus rides instead of miles-long hikes to Fair Park, or a nice shirt to wear all during the week and not just on Sunday—the chance, for a few precious moments, to not be poor.

  Clyde didn’t give up his day job, but he di
d decide to illegally supplement his factory earnings. He started dipping his toe in the criminal waters. Stealing chickens that pecked and scratched their way around innumerable Dallas backyards was one of the most common types of minor local crime. Snatching a chicken was relatively easy, and if you somehow couldn’t sell it, the evidence could be disposed of with a satisfying family meal. Dallas County deputy Bob Alcorn told a reporter that his first encounter with Clyde Barrow came sometime around 1926, when he picked up the sixteen-year-old for poultry theft. In keeping with Dallas legal custom, Clyde wasn’t jailed. There weren’t enough cells in the county to hold all the poor boys caught heisting a hen or two. Instead, Clyde got a bawling out, and Henry and Cumie were probably summoned to pick up their wayward son. Whatever the light punishment, it wasn’t enough to discourage Clyde. He wasn’t just stealing for himself anymore. There was a girlfriend involved.

  Eleanor Bee Williams was a pretty high school student from the east side of the Trinity, and Clyde was completely smitten. Being with a classy girl like Eleanor gave him instant status. Amazingly, her parents didn’t forbid the teenagers to date. Clyde added an “EBW” tattoo to his arm, gave Eleanor a hand mirror he made at work with her initials engraved on the back, and according to his mother “in some way” always had money to buy the girl gifts. Soon, Clyde was telling friends they were engaged.

  Then Eleanor and Clyde quarreled in late 1926, and she left Dallas to stay for a while with relatives in the East Texas community of Broaddus. Clyde was distraught and decided to follow Eleanor and win her back. His plan involved renting a car—no train or bus for a sophisticated boyfriend like Clyde Barrow—and driving there. He not only came up with money for the car rental, he invited Eleanor’s mother to make the drive with him. A few days after they arrived in Broaddus, Eleanor and Clyde reconciled, but their rekindled romance was interrupted when the local sheriff arrived looking for Clyde. To save a few dollars on the fee, he hadn’t told the rental agency he was taking the car out of town. When he didn’t return the car on time, agency employees came looking for Clyde in West Dallas. His parents told them where he was supposed to be staying in Broaddus, and the agency contacted the sheriff there.