Elvie gave birth to the Bogles’ first child, John, on December 8, 1921. The carnival had shut down for the winter in early November when it became too cold for crowds to come out. Elvie and Louis had gone back to Paris and rented a small, rickety, unpainted shotgun house close to the Paris and Mount Pleasant Railroad depot, right next to the tracks. A big, redbrick Speas Vinegar plant near their house cast a sour odor over the neighborhood. The Bogles had no running water or electricity. The house was in one of the city’s poorest sections, but it was all they could afford. The landlord, anxious not to let the house stand vacant, because a vacant house could not be insured, let them have it rent-free that first winter, on the condition that they keep it clean and tidy. On the front porches of nearby houses stood cast-off furnishings that once belonged inside, like an old settee, and in the weed-grown backyards the inhabitants threw bottles, old bedsprings and battered chamber pots. The smell of privies hung in the air, along with the whistle of the locomotives and the clanging of the trains’ iron wheels on the tracks. The Bogles and all the branches of the family that conjoined together in Elvie and Louis, like most Americans, had always been farmers, living in isolated rural villages. Now, as America rolled into the 1920s, the Bogles were living in a city, just as a majority of their fellow Americans were becoming urbanized. But the Bogles were not able to enjoy the blessings of this new city life. They were disadvantaged, much like Michael Harrington’s “urban hillbillies.”
Other children soon followed John’s arrival. Lloyd Douglas Bogle, quickly dubbed Dude within the family, was born in February 1924. Next came Charles Lindbergh Bogle, called Charlie, in 1928, the year after the famous aviator became the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic. Elvie and Louis were dreaming big with their choice of the name, but reality was much more down-to-earth.
Each new child meant a new mouth to feed and another body to clothe, requiring money that Elvie and Louis often didn’t have, especially when the carnival was closed for the winter. Elvie cooked the same food every day, corn bread and beans, the boys remembered later, though she varied the way she prepared the dishes. They had meat only on special occasions. As they got bigger, Dude and Charlie supplemented their meager diet by hunting in the woods and fishing in ponds. Dude was genuinely crazy about fishing, catching catfish and perch in his bare hands, sometimes selling a fish or two for a nickel or a dime to the African American families who lived nearby. Their father made no secret of his scorn for what he called “colored people,” but the boys, growing up in poverty and surrounded by black families, didn’t much care about a person’s race. At Christmas, there was not enough money for a tree or real presents, although their father usually managed to scrounge some candy or fruit, which he would put in one of his socks and hang from the fireplace mantel. The boys wore overalls that fastened in the back, the workingman’s outfit of the time, but they had no shoes. Family photographs that survive from the 1920s and 1930s show each of the children with bare feet well into their teens.
Not long after Charlie was born, the stock market crashed, followed by the Great Depression, but the Bogles hardly noticed. They had never seen a stock certificate, and they didn’t have a bank account. To them, Wall Street was a bunch of rich Yankees far away who deserved whatever happened to them. Businesses were laying people off, but at first that was mostly in Northern factories. Of greater concern was the dry spell that had begun and would turn into the Dust Bowl. It was not so much the parched lawns or the early shedding of the leaves from the trees, which made the streets of Paris shadeless by midsummer. It was the farmers’ problems that concerned them, as the cotton came up stunted and the summer’s corn looked just like the shriveled cornstalks left standing in the fields from the previous winter. This meant people were making less money and likely would skip coming to the carnival.
In 1914, the Texas legislature had passed a compulsory school attendance law, as part of a progressive effort to modernize the state. So Louis and Elvie registered the boys with the Paris school department, as required by law, but then when the carnival started back up again in the spring, the boys dropped out of school, if they were going at all. The surviving records of the Paris school district show members of the family registered every year from 1930, when John was eight, until 1941, when the family moved briefly to Wichita Falls and then to Amarillo, in the Texas Panhandle. John managed to make it to eighth grade; Dude dropped out in fourth grade. Charlie never went to school, even though he was registered as attending. He was born with a severe speech defect that he was embarrassed about, and remained illiterate all his life.
The records also show that the Bogles were renting a different house, on a different street, every year during the 1920s and 1930s. When they could not meet the rent, they moved. Life was chaotic for the children. All these moves, and all the time spent away from Paris in the carnival, might help explain why the city truant officers never took action against the boys—or against Louis and Elvie—for their poor school attendance, but the family suspected the local officials just didn’t care about poor people. The federal census taker did manage to find the Bogles in 1930 in Paris. As was often true, they had a little embellishment for him. Louis said he was a veteran of the Great War, though the war had ended before Louis was drafted.
Despite their lack of education and the lack of books in their houses, the boys were growing up fast. Elvie and Louis remained “on the show,” as the boys termed it, working in carnivals until the mid-1930s, when still more children arrived. Until then, each spring Elvie found a carnival that would hire them, but with the Depression and fewer customers the carnivals got smaller, paying even less. During the carnival season, from March to October, the family now lived out of a truck and a trailer they pulled behind them; big railroad cars were too expensive for the smaller carnivals.
Elvie continued to ride in the motordrome, on her own motorcycle, an Indian brand machine with what people termed a suicide clutch, meaning she had to take her hands off the handlebars to switch gears. Both Dude and Charlie thought of their mother as a daredevil and tomboy, which were good things in their young eyes. “She got so good at riding that she could get to the top of the open drome and reach up and take a customer’s hat away on one pass and then put it back on his head when she came around again,” Charlie told me, smiling at the recollection. The thrill of riding so fast and dangerously seemed to offer a sense of fulfillment to his mother, he thought. It was providing relief from their impoverished lives. “Mom liked the carnival pretty good,” Charlie said. Elvie also worked in a sideshow called “the Hot Chair,” designed to look like an electric chair, in which sparks of electric current appeared to come out of her hands and arms. “You could see it, and I imagine she could feel it,” Charlie said. For a period Elvie also worked as a snake charmer, until one day several boys stuck a pin in the snake wrapped around her chest and the creature began squeezing her hard. It took four men to kill the snake and free Elvie.
Elvie and Louis continued to augment their tiny pay by making and selling moonshine, despite their earlier close calls with the law. Louis ran the still somewhere out in the woods; it was practically in his blood, the family said, because Daylight was in the middle of Tennessee corn whiskey country, near where the modern Jack Daniel’s headquarters would be built. Elvie was in charge of driving the home brew into town and selling the mason jars to carnival customers or, in the off-season, to people in Paris. The boys didn’t see anything wrong with their parents’ activities. “It was the Depression” was how Charlie figured it. “People did whatever they could.”
Elvie and Louis also continued to drink heavily, with a big party in someone’s quarters at least once a week. Louis supplied the whiskey and played the banjo for dancing, a talent he had learned at home in Daylight. The favorite topic of conversation was outlaws, the heavily armed and homegrown gangsters who were robbing the banks that foreclosed on plain folks’ homes. Texans were not that long removed from the violence of the frontier or the Lost Cause of the Civil War, and they still believed that the dictates of honor required a personal, physical response to insult, no matter how slight. Dispossessed by the Depression and driven from their land or homes, many men felt helpless when there was no work, and they turned to their guns. As William Humphrey wrote in his memoir, the times “turned desperate men into desperadoes and a sympathetic public followed their exploits in the papers and secretly cheered them on.” Jesse James was the archetype, but Elvie and Louis particularly admired Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, their contemporaries, who had grown up on small cotton sharecropper farms east of Dallas, not far from Paris. One time Pretty Boy Floyd stopped by their house in Paris and asked if he could hide out for a few days, Charlie and Dude recalled later. Floyd, officially Charles Arthur Floyd, who lived in Oklahoma, robbed as many as thirty banks over a twelve-year period, and in 1933 reportedly shot five men, including an FBI agent, in a massacre in Kansas City. After he was killed by the police in Ohio in 1934, twenty thousand people turned out for his funeral in Sallisaw, Oklahoma. Charlie remembered that when Floyd left the Bogles’ home, he gave Elvie money to buy shoes and food for her boys, the first shoes he ever had. “Maybe us kids thought he was so good, that’s why we turned out the way we did,” Charlie said many years later, after his own series of crimes and prison sentences.
For many years, Charlie kept on the living-room wall of his double-wide trailer home a fading nineteenth-century black-and-white photograph of a slender, handsome young man who he believed was his uncle. The caption under the picture, written by one of Charlie’s nieces, describes the man as “John Hardin, mom’s uncle,” meaning Elvie’s uncle. In fact, Elvie did have an uncle named Hardin, her father’s half brother, whom Charlie would later visit from time to time as he grew up. But the uncle was Will Hardin. The man in the photograph was John Wesley Hardin, the most notorious nineteenth-century outlaw and gunfighter in Texas. Hardin nearly stabbed a schoolmate to death as a boy, and shot and killed his first victim at age fifteen. He later murdered the city marshal of Waco, Texas, escaped repeatedly from local jails, stole horses and, by the time he was captured and sent to prison in 1878, claimed to have killed forty-two men. After serving seventeen years in the new state prison at Huntsville, Hardin was pardoned, became a lawyer and moved to El Paso. There, on August, 19, 1895, after having an affair with the wife of one of his clients, Hardin was shot dead by a gunman he himself had hired to kill the jilted husband. Hardin made the mistake of failing to give him the promised payment.
Charlie’s favorite part of all the stories about the man he thought was his uncle took place in Abilene during a cattle drive. Hardin was staying in a hotel and got mad at a man in the room next door who kept him awake by snoring. So Hardin fired a number of shots through the wall. The snoring stopped; he had killed the man. Wild Bill Hickock was marshal of Abilene at the time and came rushing over to the hotel to see what the gunfire was about. Hardin, realizing he would be in trouble and being only half-dressed, ran onto the roof of the hotel and jumped into a haystack, where he hid for the rest of the night. The next day he stole a horse and made his escape out of town.
Charlie loved to hear his parents tell stories about these outlaws, and he began to identify with them. For the Bogle family, it became part of their mythology. It didn’t matter to Charlie and his brothers whether John Wesley Hardin was actually their uncle. In his later teenage years and his early twenties, after Charlie left home, he always dressed like a Western badman, with a black Stetson hat, black shirt and black pants. “I liked to look that way, like an outlaw,” Charlie said.
Consciously or unconsciously, Charlie was imitating the risky behavior of his parents, their friends and their supposed relative. This was the same kind of imitation that Tracey Bogle would later identify in himself, copying the actions of his father, Rooster. In fact, imitation forms the basis for social learning theory, one of the main schools of modern criminology. It holds that delinquent behavior is learned through the same psychological processes as any other behavior. Children learn how to behave by fashioning their behavior after examples that they have seen around them, starting at home with their family. Behavior is also learned when it is reinforced or rewarded. It is not learned when it is not reinforced.
This sociological theory of criminal activity traces its origins to a French judge in the nineteenth century, Gabriel Tarde, who served fifteen years as a provincial judge and then was put in charge of France’s national statistics. After a careful analysis of these numbers, he came to the conclusion that “the majority of murderers and notorious thieves began as children,” often because of a lack of education and food in their homes. Tarde came to believe that criminals were normal people who learned crime much like others learned legitimate occupations. At the center of his theory was what he called “the laws of imitation.” In his view, individuals copy patterns of behavior much the same way they copy styles of dress.
Tarde was a pioneer in the then new field of criminology. The discipline “criminology” was given its name by an Italian professor of law, Raffaele Garofalo, in 1885. The study grew out of a reaction against the vaguely defined system of law, justice and punishments that existed in Europe before the French Revolution. Some crimes were specified; some were not. Those criminal laws that were written often did not indicate the punishment. Due process, in the modern sense, did not yet exist. In this vacuum, an Italian legal scholar, Cesare Beccaria, undertook a study of European prison systems, which he published in 1764 under the title On Crimes and Punishments. In his small book, Beccaria offered a blueprint for an enlightened justice system and concluded that the crime problem could be traced not to bad people but to bad laws. The book earned Beccaria the reputation of being the “father of modern criminology.” There would be many other theories on the causes of crime and schools of criminology.
In Paris, Texas, while Charlie and his brother Dude were still boys, they began copying their parents and the outlaws they heard about by embarking on their own petty criminal acts, often as a way to make money and survive. “In East Texas in those days there wasn’t no jobs,” Charlie said decades later. “You just went out and did things. If you got caught, you got caught.” Sometimes the brothers climbed aboard parked trains loaded with coal and took a bucket or two back home, or to sell. Charlie loved to go to the motion-picture shows in the ornate theaters downtown but usually didn’t have the dime it took to buy a ticket. So one of the brothers would climb a tree to get on the roof of the theater, then open a trapdoor and come down and open the back door to let the rest of them inside. “If we didn’t like the show, we’d leave and sneak back in later, just to have something to do, and to show we could do it,” Charlie said. Their favorite movies were Westerns, with the Cisco Kid or later John Wayne. Since Charlie could not read, the movies were not just entertainment; they were his form of education.
Dude went fishing almost every day they were in Paris, often in ponds that belonged to farmers where it was illegal to take fish. Eventually some of the farmers reported him to the sheriff. He got caught and arrested and tried in the county courthouse downtown in 1939, when he was fifteen. He was sentenced to ten days in the Lamar County jail, where adult criminals were kept, exposing him to more hardened offenders.
Charlie had begun stealing money left out for the milkman on his daily rounds, and he too was arrested, at age thirteen, and sent to court. He was sentenced to work for a farmer outside Paris for a year, for a dollar a day. Charlie had to live in the farmer’s house and help with the corn and cotton crops. Charlie had not grown up on a farm, so he hated the hard, hot work. One night, after Charlie had lived there for six months, the farmer went into Paris in his truck and his wife climbed into bed with Charlie. “She said, ‘It’s cold. I’ll get into bed with you to keep you from getting cold,’ ” Charlie recalled. Charlie was disgusted. “She must have been sixty years old,” he said. It was her age that put him off, not the thought of having sex. So Charlie got up and walked out the door. The farmer was too embarrassed to report Charlie’s escape to the sheriff, and that was the end of his punishment for stealing the milkman’s money.
About this same time, in the mid-1930s, Louis decided to take his wife and children for a visit to Daylight to see his mother and relatives. Louis and Elvie must have sold a lot of moonshine, because they bought a big touring car with an open canvas top for the trip. That didn’t mean they weren’t still poor. Along the way, they stopped more than once to eat at a soup kitchen. It was what they could afford. In Daylight, they stayed in an old house with Narcissa, Louis’s grandmother, and Mattie, his mother. Louis and his boys made a lasting impression on his relatives in Tennessee, one that offered a glimpse into how badly they had been living and how far they had sunk since joining the carnival.
“To me, they were heathen,” said one of Louis’s nieces, Mae Smotherman, who had lived on the same farm as Louis growing up and later moved to Nashville. “We all noticed how vulgar the children talked and how bad their table manners were,” the niece said. “They told dirty jokes and just wolfed their food down, like animals.” They slapped some of their older women relatives on the backside, which the relatives took as rude, offensive behavior. “We had always been taught to avoid people like that, and now here they were in our house, and they were our relatives,” Smotherman added. “We wondered what went on in the carnival that made them like that.” Smotherman was also fascinated that Louis and Elvie had tattoos, something she had never seen before. Louis tried to recruit her to come back with them to Texas and join the carnival, but her mother, Lula, Louis’s sister, said no. After Louis and Elvie left, Lula told the others that something had happened to the boys to make them “mean.” It was the strongest language Lula would allow herself to speak. She also posed the question of what kind of parents Louis and Elvie had been to raise kids like that. It was as if they didn’t have parents at all, she suggested to her own children. They did have parents, of course, and the boys were simply copying them. They had no positive adult role models: no teachers, no sports coaches, no ministers.
Back in Paris after their trip, John, the eldest boy, was arrested one evening in 1938 and charged with stealing a truck. He had been “fooling around downtown too much,” Charlie said, so the police had become aware of him. John insisted he was not the driver who took the truck, that it was another boy, and that he had been framed. John was taken to the county jail and then put on trial. As a Southern and conservative state, Texas had been slow to adopt the system of separate courts for juveniles that had been pioneered in Chicago in 1899 and then spread rapidly across much of the nation. In these progressive family courts, the accused were to be defined less by their offenses than by their age. It was the children’s welfare that the new courts were to protect. This paternalism brought a whole new set of courtroom practices. The key figure was the judge, who was tasked with getting the whole story about the child in the same way that a doctor tries to discover the nature of a patient’s illness. Punishments were deliberately kept mild, since children’s personalities were thought to still be in the process of formation, making them more open to rehabilitation. Judges were required to be lenient in sentencing, handing out only the least restrictive alternative. Texas, however, did not establish a full juvenile justice system until 1943, after John’s trial, so he appeared before a regular judge. The only special protection for juveniles in Texas at the time was that the proceedings were confidential; the records of his case were sealed, and remain so even to this day. According to Dude and Charlie, John was not given a lawyer to defend him. That reform too would come later. The judge sentenced John, at seventeen, to what amounted to a maximum-security facility: two years in the Gatesville State School for Boys.
Gatesville is in the scrubby, arid plains of central Texas, not far from Waco and today close to the huge Army base at Fort Hood. When it was opened in 1887, with 767 boys, Gatesville was considered a humanitarian triumph, the first state reform school anywhere in the South. Reformers at the time believed that separating delinquent boys from hardened adult criminals would help them change their lives. A combination of schooling and light farmwork was seen as contributing to their improvement. Gatesville was supposed to be different from the state’s prison system, which had grown up after the Civil War largely as a series of big, tough work camps where convicts were routinely whipped and sometimes worked to death raising cotton, corn and sugarcane in settings like those of slavery. Unfortunately, Gatesville itself soon developed a reputation for ruthlessness. Given its size—twelve hundred acres of sandy cropland—and the small sum of money the legislature appropriated for it, the facility’s officials felt it necessary to make a profit on the crops the youthful inmates grew. Some boys went to school for part of the day and then went out to the fields; others labored from sunup to sundown. Idleness wasn’t tolerated. Beatings by guards, sexual assaults and long stretches in solitary confinement were normal. In 1974 a federal judge finally ordered Gatesville closed after finding its operations constituted cruel and unusual punishment that violated the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution.
When John arrived, an assistant warden told the new inmates that they stood a 90 percent chance of later being sent to the state’s adult penitentiary. It was not an auspicious beginning. The yards were well manicured, and the white-painted offices, classrooms and living quarters were uniformly positioned around a pristine parade field. Life at the school was conducted in strict military style. Each morning, John discovered, the boys were mustered onto the parade ground for inspection, followed by calisthenics and then drill practice. The guards enforced discipline through use of a thick leather strap called “the bat.” John was the tallest of all the Bogles, six feet two inches, but he was gentle in disposition and, unlike his brothers, did not relish fighting. Still, a guard called him out one morning and administered twenty-five lashes with the heavy strap. It tore the flesh off his back and his haunches. John wanted to get up, but several other guards held him down. He screamed, but the beating continued, until, bleeding profusely, he passed out. John never found out why he was beaten, but it seemed to be a warning to him and the other boys, who were required to watch. Escape was impossible, John learned from his fellow inmates: the land around Gatesville was too vast, with few trees for cover to hide, and the guards had a stable of hunting dogs to track down any would-be escapee. John served twenty-one months.
When he came home to Paris, he told his parents and brothers about the harsh and violent discipline at Gatesville and swore he would go straight, which he did. Dude and Charlie scoffed at his stories and said they would not be deterred. In early 1942, just a few months after Pearl Harbor, the Army began building a large new training base on the north side of Paris, Camp Maxey, in honor of a local Confederate hero, General Samuel Bell Maxey. Newly drafted soldiers began to flood into Paris on weekend passes, by bus or taxi, heading for a host of recently opened bars downtown. The soldiers, who ultimately became members of the 99th or 102nd Divisions that fought in the Battle of the Bulge and in Germany, were a good source of income for Charlie. He would carry his shoeshine box into a bar, offer to shine a soldier’s shoes and then pull out a pint jar of moonshine. He would buy the homemade brew for fifty cents and resell it for a dollar. Charlie didn’t see anything wrong with what he was doing. He was very fatalistic for a fourteen-year-old.
Charlie was also aware that he was following in his parents’ footsteps by selling moonshine. “I was taking after my daddy and mommy,” he said. “They’d done it, so I did it.”
There were prostitutes in the bars, and pimps, and Charlie got to know them too. Charlie was tall for his age, and ruggedly built; eventually he would fill out to six feet tall and two hundred pounds, with broad shoulders. He had blue eyes, dark wavy hair and prominent, almost menacing eyebrows. He looked at least five years older than he was. “I knew about gals from when I was fourteen, shining shoes in the bars for those GIs,” he said. “The gals would fool with me, and take me home with them.
“My friends then were all gangsters who were also selling and drinking moonshine,” Charlie recalled. One friend, Jay, worked in a small carnival and took Charlie into bars to drink. Jay was much older than Charlie, about thirty-five, and worked as a pimp when he was in Paris. Charlie looked up to him. “He was smart,” Charlie said, and “I learned a lot from him.” If someone said something to Jay to which he took offense, he would “hit that man down.” More than ten years later, when Charlie ended up at the state penitentiary at Huntsville, Jay was there too, serving a life sentence for murder.
About this time, in 1942, Charlie and Dude began going into bars “to clean them out,” Charlie said. They both enjoyed fistfights and had quick, nasty tempers. Both brothers ended up with lumpy noses caused by too many punches and broken bones. By now Paris was getting too small for Charlie, and he was restless. “I wanted to get away,” he said. During his fourteenth year he left home, “hanging freight trains,” in his expression, sleeping in boxcars. “I was booming around.” He went first to Tennessee and then to New York, and soon after that headed for California, where his goal was to join other poor, jobless Americans picking fruit. But the train he was riding stopped one night in Amarillo, where he found work for a while as a salesman in the Panhandle Fruit Company. Charlie was part hobo and part outlaw, only fifteen years old, too young to join the military and fight in World War II.
His brother and closest friend, Dude, was already eighteen and enlisted in the Army in Paris in October 1942. He was assigned to the Army Air Corps, the precursor of the Air Force, but his upbringing quickly caught up with him when he was sent to Kansas for basic training. The very first week, he got into a fight with another recruit, using his fists and a knife. This was the start of a pattern. After basic training, Dude was sent to India and Burma to fight the Japanese and was wounded by Japanese shrapnel. He served until the end of the war, though he was never promoted above the rank of buck private.
“I loved to fight,” Dude remembered. “I was always fighting. So they wrote me up each time I had a fight, and they had a record on me.” Dude, who, like Charlie, had dark curly hair and prominent eyebrows, was not bitter about the lack of promotions. He took it as a matter of pride. All those fights showed how tough he was. In his later years, he always kept wartime photos of himself in the trailers where he lived. One picture showed him standing next to a B-24 bomber, dubbed the “Yellow Fever,” with sharks’ teeth painted on the nose of the plane to make it more fearsome-looking to the Japanese. In another photo Dude was shirtless next to some palm trees, his arms raised and fists extended in a boxer’s pose. That was the man he was—the fighter.
After Charlie and Dude were gone, Louis and Elvie left Paris for Amarillo. They were convinced by word from Charlie that there was work to be had on the construction of the new Amarillo Army Air Field. By now Elvie and Louis had three more children: a boy, improbably named Elvie, after his mother, but always called Babe; a daughter, Peggy; and the youngest, Dale Vincent Bogle, who was known in the family as Rooster. He was born in Wichita Falls in 1941 during a stopover his parents made on their way to Amarillo. The family may have been poor—in their last days in Paris and then during their sojourn in Wichita Falls and the beginning of their time in Amarillo they all lived in one big tent—but they had a strong sense of family loyalty, like a clan. Much as they may have looked dysfunctional to others, the Bogles held what amounted to mandatory family meetings every morning, wherever they lived. The family was like church for Louis and Elvie and their children: a place where they belonged, where they had something to believe in, a refuge where they all were accepted and forgiven, no matter what they did. They could tell one another about their latest escapade breaking the law, boast about it or laugh about it, and no one would report them to the police. Louis and Elvie never went to church. They were too busy “on the show,” Charlie explained. And, he said, “they didn’t agree with the church.” The churches in Texas, whether they were Baptist, Methodist or Church of Christ, would have made them feel uncomfortable, even disreputable. Holding on to one another was simpler and more satisfying for the Bogles. This closeness, though, had the unintended effect of reinforcing the examples that Louis and Elvie set. It meant that the children had a crimped sense of values and aspirations. Instead of picking up bad habits from what criminologists now call “deviant peers” at school—their classmates—the Bogles were their own deviant peers.
When Dude came home from the war at the end of 1945, with no additional education, job skills or self-discipline, he returned to his vagabond life of petty crime, which quickly began to escalate. He was arrested in Topeka, Kansas, in 1946 for vagrancy; arrested and jailed in Paris in 1947 for burglary; and indicted for carrying a gun and committing another burglary in Portland, Oregon, also in 1947. After the last incident, an Oregon judge sentenced him to a year on probation and ordered him to return to Texas. Instead, Dude went looking for Charlie, who was working in a logging camp on the Oregon coast near Tillamook. Charlie had picked up his own minor charges in the late 1940s: an arrest for being drunk, another for stealing a woman’s pocketbook and an assault. As time passed, Charlie was more and more frequently breaking into stores and bars in Oregon and in Washington State to get food or beer, though he wasn’t caught in these cases.
When the two brothers ultimately got together, they “hung” a freight train and then hitchhiked into the small town of Chelan in central Washington, in the Cascade Mountains. Chelan is in the Wenatchee Valley, the self-proclaimed apple capital of the world, with enormous orchards of apple and pear trees nestled between a deep blue lake and the high evergreen-covered mountains. The brothers stayed in a cabin for migrant farm laborers imported to pick the fruit trees, and on the evening of September 4, 1947, after getting drunk at a tavern with some local young women, found themselves in front of Weimer’s Jewelry Store in Chelan. In a later signed confession to the police, Charlie said he went to the back of the store and let himself in by pulling a fan out of the wall, thereby opening a hole to crawl through. “I was the only one that went in,” Charlie said. “I took about two watches and two charm bracelets and some lockets.”
The police did not catch him that fall, and he left town. But he made the mistake of coming back to Chelan in July 1948 in search of work. The police recognized him this time, or so they thought, and he was arrested and charged with second-degree burglary. On July 21, 1948, the Chelan County Court sentenced Charlie to fifteen years in prison. He was taken to the state prison at Monroe, Washington, where his sentence was later reduced to fifteen months for good behavior. In fact, Charlie and Dude both said later, it was really Dude who broke into the jewelry store, but Dude did not go back to Chelan in 1948, and the two brothers looked so much alike that the police arrested the one they found. “I had to take the rap for Dude; it saved him a trip to the pen,” Charlie said. He was following the Bogles’ code of family loyalty.
Charlie’s Washington State prison records reveal how tough life had been for him. Prison officials described him as illiterate, totally unable to read or write, with a serious speech impediment. The Washington authorities requested an investigation into Charlie’s circumstances at home in Amarillo before they considered whether to reduce his sentence. A long typed response came back from Mabel Ray, the director of the county welfare board in Amarillo. “The Bogles live in a very small shack-type house, built in one of the less desirable residential districts at the edge of the city,” Ray wrote. Louis worked in an automobile junkyard, and he had spent his time building their “low, squatty, little house” with what he could salvage from the junkyard, she said. It was made entirely from old battery crates, painted white. It was just about the poorest house she had ever seen in Amarillo, and it was her job to visit the homes of poor people. “Mrs. Bogle states that, for many years, they were show people,” Ray added. “Part of the time they lived in tents, sometimes they lived in converted boxcars, and occasionally, they stayed in hotels, but they were never any place very long and, as a consequence, none of the children have any education to speak of, and Charles has absolutely none. Mrs. Bogle stated that Charles had had this speech impediment since birth and that he had always been extremely sensitive about it. She stated that he had never been able to get away from the feeling that people were criticizing him and if they could not understand him the first time he became stubborn and refused to answer.”
Elvie also advised Ray that “her mother had died in a mental institution at Wichita Falls, Texas.” Lastly, Ray reported that “the Bogles have never belonged to any of the churches and do not attend church nor Sunday school here.” Because Charlie could not read, his entertainment had been mostly movies. But Louis told Ray that since “they were having quite a struggle, they could certainly use Charles’s additional contribution to the budget” if he was released from prison. Overall, it was a bleak but candid assessment.
Charlie was released after serving only eight months, and in April 1949 he made his way back to Amarillo. Meanwhile, Dude had drifted back to Kansas, where he had done his basic training. He met an attractive woman in Liberal, Kansas, and they went out together for a period of time. One day Dude gave her money to go shopping with him. At the store, the woman accused him of taking the money back and they argued. Perhaps Dude had been drinking. Pretty soon some of the people in the store came to her aid and called the police. She told the officers that she was only sixteen years old and that she and Dude had been sleeping together. By Kansas law, she was underage. Dude was arrested and charged with statutory rape. At trial, Dude pled not guilty. “I didn’t think I was guilty of anything—she was willing to have sex with me,” he said. “I didn’t know what statutory rape was. I was still a dumb kid.” Dude was found guilty in August 1950 and given an odd sentence, one to twenty-one years, in the state prison at Lawrence.
Out of all this, Dude found one consolation. In the days before handguns became so common and armed robbers and drug lords replaced burglars as big-time criminals, burglars were seen as the criminal elite in the eyes of convicts. It required impressive skill to break into a safe. Burglaries also tended to net large amounts of cash. Dude used his time in the Kansas prison to make friends with burglars, and they, in turn, taught him how to crack a safe. It was a craft he would soon put to use when he was released after serving just twenty-one months. Prisons are supposed to deter inmates from committing more crime by showing them the painful price of being locked up. Deterrence is the theory behind the whole criminal justice system. But neither Dude nor Charlie had been frightened by their first prison stays. “They didn’t show me anything,” Charlie said about his Washington State prison experience. And now Dude was heading back to Amarillo to rejoin Charlie and his family and whatever adventure they could find.