The outlaws had risen with the sun and devoured a home-cooked breakfast. Plenty of fire stirred in their bellies. It was Tuesday, November 1, 1932, one week before the historical election day that would usher in Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. It was also All Saint’s Day in the wild Cookson Hills of Oklahoma, and not a single saint was in sight—only three fallen angels with tommy guns and pistols. They were crammed inside a shiny black sedan that looked like a pissed-on bug as it scooted down the two-lane country road.
Inside the car were Choc Floyd, George Birdwell, and the latest kid they had recruited as a driver. Out at the rural home of his sister Mary and her bootlegger husband, where the three bandits had spent Halloween night, Charley had managed to get Birdwell to lay off the moonshine. It proved to be a wise move. As they drove through the Sequoyah County countryside, their heads were as clear as the morning air.
It was going to be an important day for Choc and his two accomplices. They were off to rob the Sallisaw State Bank. Charley Floyd was indeed coming home.
After looting Birdwell’s hometown bank in Earlsboro on two earlier occasions, George and Charley determined it was time they paid a call on a banking establishment in Floyd’s neck of the woods. State Bank, a redbrick edifice located in downtown Sallisaw at the corner of Cherokee and Oak Street, was selected.
The men were mostly silent as the automobile passed the clumps of sumac and sassafras standing along the fence rows. The mitten-shaped leaves had already turned orange and red, and the vines and weeds poking through the strands of barbed wire were the color of aged tobacco.
Behind the wheel of the car was Aussie Elliott, an eighteen-year-old from Sapulpa whom Choc had enlisted to drive getaway on this bank job. Elliott was a sparkling minor league shortstop, but had given up a chance at a professional baseball career to go on the scout as a bandit. He was still a little green but had already done some hard time behind bars. Ten weeks before, on August 14, as a crowd of close to 95,000 at the Los Angeles Coliseum watched the closing ceremonies of the 1932 Olympics, he was busily escaping from the reformatory at Granite, Oklahoma. Immediately after he got loose, Elliott took off in search of Choc Floyd. He wished to join up with the one desperado whom law officers and the bank detectives could not kill or capture.
Like so many others in the nation, Elliot was well versed on Floyd’s exploits. That past summer, Floyd’s name had been on the lips of gossipy housewives counting their pennies at the market. Children at play had vied to take the role of Pretty Boy during games of cops and robbers. Frazzled men killing time in relief lines had discussed Floyd’s most recent caper. It was said by reporters that even when Mother Sadie Ash died a bitter old woman at her home in Kansas City that summer, her final thoughts were about Pretty Boy, whom she continued to loathe with a vengeance for his suspected role in the killing of her two sons. She had had a vested interest in seeing Choc Floyd brought to justice. Most people, however, including middle-class churchgoers who dared not publicly admit it, quietly cheered him on.
The nation had grown hungry for exciting characters to take their minds off their troubles. That is why during the decade of the thirties, the public showed a strong preference for gangster films, which linked vice and disobedience with the ordinary lives of the audiences. Newspapermen who had covered crime for years were imported to Hollywood to churn out scripts punctuated with the chatter of machine guns and sinister tough-guy dialogue. Films such as Little Caesar and Public Enemy became enormously successful, and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and Scarface were two of the biggest box-office attractions in 1932.
As had been the case during early economic depressions in the late 1800s, the country’s condition in the early years of the 1930s was conducive to the emergence of social bandits. To some, mostly the disenfranchised, this breed of outlaw symbolized justice in a nation perceived by many as being quite unjust. During this period of social ferment and discontent, when, in an attempt to scare off bidders, symbolic hangmen’s nooses decorated farms being foreclosed, Choc Floyd was a logical antihero.
Except for bankers, detectives, and the next of kin of Choc’s victims, many citizens harbored no ill will against Charles Arthur Floyd. Among his many romantic nicknames was the Sagebrush Robin Hood. It was frequently used to describe Choc because of his generous nature when it came to paying farmers for meals and giving small portions of his stolen loot to the poor. Some folks even suggested that when Charley robbed banks, he sometimes ripped up mortgages in shreds before the banker had an opportunity to get the papers recorded.
Elmer Steele, who had known the Floyds since he was a boy in Sallisaw, emphatically stated that many of the stories were true. Like Aussie Elliott and some other tough youngsters, Steele sometimes acted as a driver for Choc on bank jobs.
“It was no joke. Choc would destroy mortgages and, more than once, I saw him give money to people who needed a boost,” reminisced Steele five decades after his own outlaw days were over.
Pretty Boy was the stuff of legends. More than one reporter knew it. Finding a nation enamored of bank bandits, many hack writers and journalists responded with sensational coverage of the criminals and their activities.
Hubert Dail, a writer for the pulp magazine True Detective, visited Oklahoma during the summer of 1932 and rode with some of the frustrated posses who tracked Pretty Boy and Birdwell. Dail described how the country people clammed up whenever law-enforcement officers came snooping around.
“In each case, the inhabitants of the hillbilly country didn’t know where the famous bandit was at that particular moment,” wrote Dail. “At one house, in a hollow, about two miles off the road, a posse advanced in a semicircle to confront a woman chopping wood. She paused, stared at the officers with hostile eyes. ‘Whatdya want?’ she demanded.
“The deputies said they were looking for ‘Pretty Boy.’ A crafty glint came into the woman’s eyes. ‘I reckon he’s been here a hundred times,’ she said, ‘but I ain’t seen him recently.’ She brought her ax down with a crash.”
Floyd’s reputation by the summer of 1932 had become so legendary that hoaxes became frequent. One of the most celebrated stories occurred on August 3. Choc had reportedly kidnapped H. W. Nave, an out-of-work salesman from Blackwell, Oklahoma. Nave, who had also served as a private policeman in Tulsa, told investigators that he was driving near Edmond, not far from Oklahoma City, when three men in a Chrysler sedan forced him to stop along the highway. According to Nave, a man he recognized as Pretty Boy Floyd pushed him into the backseat of their car while another bandit drove off in the victim’s vehicle. He said the other two captors drove to a secluded area near a creek southwest of Tulsa. They forced him to drink a pint of whiskey and stripped off all his clothing. To add insult to injury, Floyd stole thirty-four dollars from Nave’s wallet.
Nave told sheriff deputies that he passed out from the liquor. When he regained consciousness several hours later, he ran nude as a jaybird to the highway but was unable to flag down any passing cars. Finally, a laborer took pity on him and pulled over. The Good Samaritan gave Nave a raincoat to wear and took him to a telephone to contact the sheriff’s office.
Nave’s story was one of the more acclaimed frauds, however. The day after his highly publicized brush with Choc, police officers in Oklahoma City discovered that instead of being stolen by Pretty Boy Floyd and his friends, Nave’s auto had been sold to a used-car dealer in Oklahoma City for $250. The seller was described by the salesman at the car lot as scarred and wrapped in bandages. Officers deduced that Nave and a confederate perpetrated the fraud in order to cover the disposal of his mortgaged automobile. A warrant was issued for Nave’s arrest, charging him with obtaining money under false pretenses.
Nevertheless, for years to come the incident involving the unemployed salesman who had tried to scam the mortgage company was continually listed in newspapers and books as yet another one of the high crimes of Pretty Boy Floyd. This episode was magnified even more because the “kidnap victim” was said to have been an active-duty Tulsa police officer, which was yet another falsehood.
Floyd relatives recalled that Choc had a good laugh about the Nave story. He and Aussie Elliott pictured the motorists coming upon a naked man flailing his arms on the side of the road. Money was as scarce as Herbert Hoover campaign buttons in most parts of the land, but there were better ways of getting through the tough times than resorting to preposterous tricks.
Straightforward bank robbery was Charley’s preferred line of work, even if he was constantly being credited with far more bank jobs than he actually pulled, such as the October 28 theft of one thousand dollars from a bank in the oil-patch town of Maud, where a robber in overalls tried to convince his victims that he was Pretty Boy Floyd.
Most folks knew better. Pretty Boy didn’t wear rough clothes, and he was better mannered. Charley took the crimes being blamed on him in stride, but after a hiatus of several months, he also decided it was time to emerge from hiding and grab some more loot.
That is precisely when the bank in Sallisaw became a prime candidate for the bandits. On that first day of November, Choc and his two colleagues saw no naked men on the road leading to Sallisaw, only some crows, and an occasional hawk eying the fields from atop a fence post. A few farmers in their tired-out Fords automatically waved at the sedan as they passed. Aussie Elliott and Charley cheerfully waved back.
Elliott handled the automobile well. He had seen to it that the gas tank was topped off, the radiator was filled with well water, and the tires were sound. Next to him sat Charley, dressed to the nines in a clean shirt, necktie, and pressed suit, and wearing a cap his brother–in-law, Perry Lattimore, had given him as a gift the night before.
In the backseat, Birdwell was in good spirits. Sometimes George, who toted around a well-used Bible, read Scripture out loud to Charley as they traveled together on the dirt back roads. A few of the folks who knew that about Birdwell even thought he had been a preacher or a brush-arbor revivalist at one time and had lost the call over liquor or women, but that wasn’t true.
On this day, as they drove toward their objective, Birdwell stroked a rag up and down the barrel of a Thompson submachine gun. The odor of pomade and bay rum blended with the smell of Cosmoline and gun oil.
It was not as if their planned holdup of the bank at Sallisaw was a well-guarded secret. Several of Choc’s friends, and practically the entire Floyd clan, including various in-laws and cousins, knew it was going to take place on November 1. Choc’s grandfather, Charles Murphy Floyd, who had just turned seventy-five the past September, got duded up in fresh overalls. He came into town from Akins that morning just to watch the proceedings. The old man took up a place of honor near the train station, directly across the street from the bank. Several of his cronies also gathered there. While they waited for Charley and his two friends to arrive, the men chewed tobacco and talked drought, the Depression, and politics—especially politics. These ancient Democrats were confident that their chosen candidate—Franklin Delano Roosevelt—was going to give Herbert Hoover a proper ass kicking at the polls in just seven days.
“Just need to count them votes, that’s all,” said one of the grizzled men to some Floyd relatives who recalled coming by to shake hands. “Maybe ol’ FDR will get the country out of the mess it’s in.” The others nodded in agreement and spit long streams of tobacco juice into the dust.
The boy driver and Choc later told friends that, as the car carrying them sailed down the dirt road across patches of sunshine sifted out of clouds that looked like mountains of mashed potatoes, they heard Birdwell softly humming. They could not quite make out the song but it sounded sweet. They said it may have been an old Sunday school favorite.
Shortly before noon, the car entered Sallisaw with the hometown celebrity in the front passenger seat. The car drove directly to the two-story bank. Aussie Elliott parked right in front, on the wrong side of the street, only a few steps from the bank’s door. Charley and George quickly got out of the car, leaving Elliott behind with the engine running. As usual, they wore no masks or disguises. Choc held a submachine gun in the crook of his left arm. He rubbed his shoes on the backs of his trousers as he looked up and down the streets. Choc wanted to look his very best.
Since it was close to the noon hour, there were several people, including some students from the Liberty School, hurrying to their homes or a cafe. The many eye-witnesses would later recollect snatches of conversation for newspaper reporters. One of those present, Bob Fitzsimmons, leaned against the bank door, minding his own business. He recognized Charley as soon as the bandits got out of the car. Birdwell growled at Fitzsimmons and ordered him into the bank.
“He’s a friend of mine; he’s all right,” Charley told his partner.
Choc then walked into the barbershop next door to the bank. Otis Shipman was waiting to get a haircut, and Tom Trotter sat in the chair, getting his weekly trim.
“Hello, Tom, we’re going into this bank here and you lay off that telephone,” Charley said, smiling, casually holding his weapon as if he was walking through the woods on a squirrel hunt.
“You bet we will,” assured Trotter. Shipman nodded his head in agreement.
“Good to see you fellas,” said Choc. He touched two fingers to his cap in a quick salute and left. Out on the street, he greeted other friends.
“Howdy, what you doin’ in town, Choc?” asked a farmer in overalls.
“How you, Newt?” answered Charley, “We’re gonna rob the bank.”
“Give ’em hell!” cried the man.
Charley and Birdwell entered the bank and found that Bob Riggs, an assistant cashier, was the only person there. Everyone else was still on their lunch break.
“You can keep your hands down but keep quiet,” Charley calmly told Riggs. “We don’t want to kill anybody.”
The two bandits went to work. They stuffed handfuls of currency and coins into money sacks. While they gathered the money, several customers entered the bank. Charley greeted each of them with a big smile and shook their hands. He politely asked everyone to keep quiet and to do as they were told. Within five minutes, nine persons herded together behind the tellers’ cages.
“It’s a holdup, all right,” Charley told the customers. “Don’t hurt ’em, Bird, they’re friends of mine.”
After they had scooped up $2,530, Choc and Birdwell were ready to leave. As was the normal procedure, they took a hostage. This time, it was the lone employee.
“You’re comin’ with us, banker,” Birdwell told Riggs as he gave him a nudge toward the door.
Outside the bank, Charley explained to Riggs that he would have to go with them so no one would try to block their escape from town. “We won’t hurt you, Bob,” said Charley. “This is the way we always do it. Just hop up on the runnin’ board and hold on tight.”
Without another word, Riggs took his place on the left running board. Aussie Elliott gave the bank cashier a grin and a wink from inside the car. He gunned the idling engine. As Choc and Birdwell got into the automobile, the car door jammed and they dropped part of their take. A half-dozen packages of nickels and half-dollars broke open and scattered over the sidewalk.
“Forget it,” said Charley, “some kids will come along and get that spilled change. Let’s get goin’.”
As soon as he and Birdwell were safely inside, Choc yelled out, “All right, hike out!” Elliott screeched from the curb. He headed west down Cherokee for one block, then turned the wheel hard to the left in a U-turn and circled back to the east and pressed the gas pedal. The car sped due east as if they were going to Arkansas and then came to a halt at the edge of town, only five blocks from the bank, so Riggs could jump off the running board.
“Goodbye, old man, take care of yourself,” Charley shouted to Riggs as they drove away.
All the time Choc and Birdwell were looting the bank, Chief of Police Bert Cotton was only seventy-five feet from the bank’s front door. Cotton, who knew Choc Floyd as well as anyone and had been one of the officers who had arrested him in Sallisaw in 1925 for the St. Louis highway robbery, sat in his parked police car just around the corner. Cotton later said that he did not become aware that anything was amiss until the robbers were long gone and he heard some of the commotion on the street.
Grandpa Floyd also missed seeing his grandson rob the bank. He was so busy chewing the fat with his friends outside the train depot that the bandits were speeding away down the road before the old man looked up and realized that everything was over.
Sheriff George Cheek rushed to the scene and then took off in hot pursuit. He said that he lost them only about five miles east of Sallisaw. Some of the people on the street told Cheek and Cotton that they thought the driver of the car was Fred Barker, the fugitive killer. The most dependable witnesses, however, identified him as Aussie Elliott. There was no doubt about the identity of the other two, especially Charley Floyd.
Fred Green, described by the press as a “militant young Sequoyah County attorney,” was a graduate of the University of Oklahoma and was set to begin his second term as prosecutor in January. Green vowed that even though he had grown up at Akins and was Charley’s former schoolmate, he would prosecute Choc to the full extent of the law, that is if Charley Floyd was ever captured.
It may not have been the largest amount ever taken in a robbery, but there were few who could deny that it was one of the most audacious bank jobs anyone ever pulled. One of the many reporters who came to Sallisaw afterward put it this way: “It was like the hometown performance of a great actor who has made it good on Broadway.”
There were no encores, but Charley later confided to friends that he almost heard the applause ringing in his ears as he and his two sidekicks divided up the stolen money at the rural home of one of his relatives. Around Sallisaw, the townspeople believed the widely spread story that Charley robbed the bank in order to help pay the doctor bills of two of his friends who had been wounded in a fight with law officers. Through intermediaries, Charley got a portion of his share to Ruby. She and Dempsey were now living with her family near Bixby, where the boy attended the Central School and helped his Grandpa Hardgraves and his young uncles with the farm chores.
Once again, Pretty Boy had taken the public’s mind off farm foreclosures and bank failures. His life was a continuous gangster movie for the disenfranchised to relish. The little people of the land fed vicariously from his exploits. Through Floyd, they were able to punch back.
Just two days after the Sallisaw bank robbery, Charley met with Vivian Brown, the purposeful newspaper reporter and the only journalist ever to interview Pretty Boy Floyd. As Brown explained it:
“The papers were full of Floyd. The depression was having its demoralizing effect upon society and many of the destitute admired the boy who could go out and take money from the bankers. When banks in our territory began failing, when industry slowed down and farm prices dropped near nothing, public temper was ripe for Floyd to catch the public fancy.”
Brown was having dinner with some friends at the Sugar Bowl tearoom in Muskogee in the early spring of 1932 when she had first made up her mind that she wanted to write a book about Pretty Boy Floyd. She decided that the best way to tell Floyd’s story was to meet face-to-face with the outlaw.
“The waiter brought the evening paper and we read in it of Floyd’s miraculous escape from the Tulsa residence. All of us at the table had been hit by the depression. We had a natural sympathy for the underdog, although we didn’t condone crime, and we fell to discussing the chances of Floyd’s capture and what he had actually done.”
The meeting with Choc was a long time in the making. After many weeks of talking to various parties who knew Charley Floyd, the young woman was finally taken to the “shotgun” home of Jess Ring near Boynton. Jess’s wife, Tempie, was Ruby’s aunt, and Choc spent much of his time on the lam hiding at their home. Brown sat down for a meal with the Ring family and explained her reasons for wanting to interview Choc.
The Rings politely listened to the persuasive reporter, but they offered little comment and made no promises. Finally, several months later, Brown was again contacted and told to put her request for an interview in writing. In early October, she wrote a letter in which she explained that she believed Choc’s life would make a provocative book.
“I told him I was interested in him, not as a hunted criminal, but as an individual, and that he had many friends…who were interested in finding out his own version of his life,” said Brown. “His exploits were on every tongue, and in the eastern Oklahoma hill country, he was something of a hero-villain. I told him I would not ask him anything or publish anything then that would incriminate him at the time.”
A few days before the Sallisaw bank robbery, a response from Charley, scrawled in pencil, was delivered to Brown.
Dear Madam:
I have been informed that you wanted an interview with me or had some questions you would like to ask me. I am sorry that I can’t meet you in person. I will send this through a friend and you can publish it if you like but I would ask you not to publish my picture cause as you know I have too much publicity now. In fact, I can’t be hurt much or I wouldn’t be doing this but I haven’t much to say as it is only a few words for Mr. Burns (C. A. Burns of the State Crime Bureau), the man that seems to know me so well and say so much. I can’t say anything about him as I don’t know him but I do know him better than he knows me and I would like him better if he’d never abused my little boy (Jackie). As low down as he says I am (maybe I am) but I would have been different with a child of his or any other child because they are all innocent regardless of who their father may be.
In his well-written letter, Charley denied any association with George Birdwell, but Brown knew that was a bald-faced lie and that he was only protecting his friend. Charley also apologized for his penmanship and signed it with his usual, “Yours Truly, Chas Floyd.” Then, about 4:00 P.M. on November 3, the young woman returned to her home in Muskogee from a nearby business school where she took shorthand lessons. She found a stranger sitting in a car in front of her house.
“Are you Vivian Brown?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I’m from Jess,” he said without introducing himself. “Are you ready to go?”
Brown was elated and apprehensive at the same time. She realized she was going to get her exclusive interview with Floyd himself.
“Hurriedly, I dropped my books, grabbed my pencil and paper, and climbed in the car with him,” said Brown.
They drove in complete silence westward out of Muskogee. They snaked down more than thirty miles of back country roads through cotton and cornfields and pastures. Finally, they stopped where some thick underbrush and a grove of large pecan trees rimmed a deep gully. Parked under the shade of the trees was a tan Ford V-8. A bareheaded young man with slicked-back hair stepped out of the car. He was smartly dressed in a tailored suit, white shirt, and tie. Vivian Brown recognized him the instant she saw him walking toward her. His photograph had been published hundreds of times in newspapers and magazines. It was Pretty Boy. There was not a doubt.
“I’m Charley Floyd.” He was grinning and seemed nonchalant. Behind him was Jess Ring, in his overalls as always, and he also had a smile on his face.
“I’m Vivian Brown.”
The young woman and her subject started out much like strange dogs act when they first meet. They sniffed around each other until both of them were comfortable.
“There oughta be some good quail huntin’ over there,” said Charley as he pointed to an adjoining cornfield. When all conversation about the weather and crops was exhausted, Ring and the stranger, who had delivered Brown to the rendezvous, slipped away and gave the writer and Charley some privacy.
“I think I made it clear in my letter just what I want,” said Brown, “and no doubt these good friends of yours have told you. I am really quite glad to meet you, for you name will live in the history of these country folk for generations.”
Charley ducked his head as if embarrassed.
“I guess that’s true,” he replied. “I do have a lot of friends and have tried to help them like they helped me. I always tried to treat them square and they treated me that way.”
Putting her newfound skill at shorthand to use, Brown wrote down every word Charley uttered. He looked her square in the eye and did not duck any of her queries.
“Suppose you tell me just how and when you decided that a life of crime was the only thing you could do?” asked Brown.
“Well, that’s a fair question, but now listen, you ain’t gonna print anything that will lay a job on me as long as it’s gonna hurt me,” responded Charley. “There may be a time when it won’t do me no hurt to have my friends tell some of the things I have done—they’ve been aplenty—but not near as many as they say I done.”
Charley proceeded to open his heart to the young lady in her prim dress and heels. He told her of his early years, and how he first got into real trouble because of the theft of pennies from the Akins post office. He talked of the payroll robbery in St. Louis and getting sent to the penitentiary at Jefferson City.
“Nothing much happened to me while I was there, but I was thrown together with several fellows who knew a lot more about doing things than I had ever heard of,” explained Charley. “I was just a green country kid that got caught on a job that I didn’t know much about but I guess that was the job that put its mark on me and I could never shake it off. I tried.”
Charley provided details about his criminal career after he was released from prison, including his escapades with Bill Miller and others in Ohio. He also opened up about other adventures that had not made the newspapers, such as the time when he, Birdwell, and Ruby were driving from Tulsa to Sallisaw and a tire blew out on their automobile. The car turned over, caught on fire, and was destroyed. Charley managed to grab his weapons from the backseat, and he and Ruby pulled an unconscious Birdwell from the flaming wreckage. The Floyds hailed a passing car and went to Muskogee, where a taxi was hired to take them to Boynton and on to the Rings’ home.
“There we were getting into the taxi,” Charley laughed. “Me, with a machine gun under my right arm, and Ruby with luggage and George’s gun, and both of us holding George between us.”
As time passed, Choc became even more comfortable with the young woman. He hitched his foot up on the car bumper and watched in obvious amusement while she wrote as fast as he spoke.
“What about your life here?” asked Brown. “You have been accused of so many things, I don’t see how you do half those things and get by with them.”
Choc’s smile broadened.
“I guess I’ve been accused of everything that has happened except the kidnapping of the Lindbergh child last spring.” He sighed. “It ain’t the names that they call me that makes me sore. I may be an alley rat or skunk or even worse, but that didn’t give them a right to tell that kid [Dempsey] that he could never amount to anything as long as he had a father like me. That kid can’t help who his father is or what he does, but he does think the world of me and I sure think he’s all right, too.
“Another thing, that talk of me giving up is all baloney. I know what would happen if I did. They would frame me and I’m not getting caught like that. I guess I’ve done more bank holdups than anything else. It was all bonded money and no one ever lost anything except the big boys. I never shot at a fellow in my life unless I was forced into it by some trap being thrown to catch me and then it was that or else.”
Throughout the lengthy interview, Choc was courteous and never contradicted himself except when Brown pressed him about the exact number of banks he had robbed during his busy career. First, he admitted to thirty-two, but later he told her it was more like sixty, a figure she disputed.
“What did you do with all the money?” she questioned.
“It wasn’t all mine,” said Charley. “I split it, and in this game it ain’t the money that counts but it’s the safety that money can help you get.”
After what seemed to her like several hours, Brown knew the interview had to end. It was now as dark as the inside of a wolf’s mouth. She thanked Choc for allowing her to meet with him and told him that she hoped his life story would be published someday.
“Goodbye,” said Choc.
He walked back to his car and disappeared in the darkness. In the shadows near the gully, Brown made out the silhouette of another man, and she guessed it was George Birdwell. Then Jess Ring and the stranger reappeared and they took her back to Muskogee.
Vivian Brown carefully transcribed her notes and added them to her burgeoning Pretty Boy file. Although she would never develop the Floyd book she fully intended to write, Brown would one day prepare a detailed newspaper series about the desperado.
In those articles published in the Oklahoma News in 1934, it became evident that her encounter with Charley under the pecan trees that autumn afternoon left an indelible impression on the journalist.
“There is much to support the picture of Floyd as a modern Robin Hood,” Brown wrote. “Like the famed marauder of the English forests, he took money from those who had it—the banks—and divided the proceeds of his raids with the poor. The penniless tenant farmers kept their mouths shut; they had no scruples about taking contraband wrested from bankers.”
On November 7, only a few days after Brown’s meeting with Floyd, two more Oklahoma bank robberies occurred. At Marlow, in the south-central part of the state, not far from where Texas cowboys once herded cattle up the historic Chisholm Trail, four men toting machine guns burst into the State National Bank. After scooping up about $5,500 from the tills, the bandits locked the two bank officers and five customers in the vault and fled town.
On the other side of the state in Okmulgee County, two robbers strode into the American State Bank and took $11,352 while a third man stayed at the wheel in their car. Immediately, the blame for this crime was laid on Pretty Boy. The bank bandits were tentatively identified as Floyd, George Birdwell, and young Aussie Elliott. In a huge spread, the Kansas City Star implicated the three Oklahomans in the Henryetta holdup and wrote of the desperation of the bankers.
“Floyd could not have robbed both of those banks [Marlow and Henryetta], for the robberies were only five minutes apart, while the towns were more than 100 miles apart,” wrote A. B. McDonald in the Star. “But the robbery in Henryetta was done in such true ‘Pretty Boy’ style that the authorities believed it was done by Floyd and Birdwell and their new recruit, Aussie Elliott.
“Once inside they sprang into action. They drew revolvers and one, supposed to be Birdwell, using the muzzle of his revolver as a prod, lined up the three persons in the bank face in against the wall, while the other, thought to be Floyd, handed a sack to A. D. Diamond, Jr., the bookkeeper, and said: ‘If any of you give an alarm I’ll kill you. Put all the money into that sack.’”
Twelve days after the bank robbery, six alleged accomplices in the Henryetta heist were behind bars in Okmulgee. Two of them had confessed to the crime, naming Ford Bradshaw, Newton Clayton, and Jim Benge, all wanted murderers, as the actual robbers. Subsequent news stories concerning the arrest of those accused with harboring the desperadoes and the manhunt in the Cookson Hills for the three wanted bandits made no further mention of Floyd or his colleagues. Still, the Henryetta robbery was consistently listed in detective magazines as one of Pretty Boy’s major crimes.
However, Floyd relatives recounted that on November 7, Charley Floyd was out of the state. More than likely, he was in Kansas City, they had guessed, in the arms of his girlfriend, Beulah. That same day, at the Hardgraves’s small home near Bixby, Ruby suffered severe abdominal pains. At first, she thought it was a recurrence of an intestinal disorder that had first struck when Dempsey was born. Ruby’s father rushed her to a Tulsa doctor. Late that afternoon, she underwent an appendectomy and was ordered by her physician to remain hospitalized for more than two weeks.
The next day, Roosevelt thrashed the incumbent Herbert Hoover in a stunning landslide victory. The Democratic candidate was committed “to restore this country to prosperity.” The 1929 hit tune “Happy Days Are Here Again” was revived and became the anthem for voters desperate for a jolt of optimism. Roosevelt easily carried all but six of the forty-eight states.
Hoover had set himself up for defeat. There were a myriad of reasons. During his term of office, the nation’s industrial production was sliced in half. Breadlines and soup kitchens became common sights. Farm foreclosures and bank failures were everyday occurrences. Hoover served as the focus for a nation already weary of an economic depression that had run its course. Prohibition, called by Hoover the “experiment noble in purpose,” was clearly a failure, and the brutal treatment of the Bonus Expeditionary Force did not win the President any favor with veterans. Many of them were out of work. By 1932, the total number of unemployed in the country was well over 13 million.
Untold numbers of the jobless were forced to take to the streets. It was impossible even to estimate how many Depression migrants roamed the country in search of work. In 1932 alone, the Southern Pacific Railroad reported that more than seven hundred thousand vagrants were booted out of its boxcars. Hoover, who had been known as the “great humanitarian” because of his sterling record as a relief administrator for postwar Europe, paradoxically was reluctant to provide direct federal aid to America’s hungry masses.
From along the banks of the Hudson River, below posh Riverside Drive in Manhattan, to a North Canadian River bottom section of Oklahoma City sprang up hundreds of shantytowns. They became familiarly known as Hoovervilles. In the cities, some sad parents rummaged through garbage cans to feed their children. The critic Edmund Wilson wrote of families gathering rancid meat scraps out of refuse dumps in Chicago. Country folk in Oklahoma and Texas served roasted armadillos, derisively called Hoover Hogs.
In contrast to Hoover, Roosevelt represented change. He spoke of a “new deal” for Americans. He pledged to revive farms, revitalize railroads, and regulate banks. He promised that no American would starve.
Wealthy and well-educated, Roosevelt belonged to an aristocratic family. Nonetheless, Floyd relatives recalled that Choc always expressed his respect for the new President. They said Charley openly supported Roosevelt—long crippled from a bout with poliomyelitis—as a champion of the underdog. Charley was understandably never able to vote, but every Floyd who could, cast their ballot for Roosevelt.
As Americans began to adjust to the promise of a new leader who they hoped would lead them out of the wilderness, the homespun “Alfalfa Bill” Murray still reigned supreme in Oklahoma. In many ways, Murray and Roosevelt’s philosophies were similar, especially in their championing of the rights of the poor.
Some believed, however, that the state’s bankers were being victimized far more than anyone else. The Oklahoma Bankers’ Association beseeched Murray to help them, especially in rural counties, where 92 percent of all the robberies took place. Alfalfa Bill thought about the problem and came up with a remedy. Murray called for public punishment of the culprits.
“I am in favor of establishing the whipping post and the stocks for bandits in this state,” drawled Murray only a few days after the presidential election. “Criminals fear the whip worse than any other punishment. I would lay it on. I would whip a criminal in public before he goes into the penitentiary and whip him again when he comes out. That will cure it.
“For the first offense of any kind of banditry I would sentence the man to the penitentiary for a long term and also fifty lashes on the bare back in public. For the second offense, I would give him a longer term and sentence him to stand in the stocks, in a public place, for several hours. For the third offense I would send him to the electric chair.”
Bankers were not very interested in the first two of Murray’s imaginative solutions to the bandit problem. They wanted faster action. Across the country, the number of bank robberies had steadily increased since 1922. In Oklahoma alone by mid-November, there had been forty-seven bank robberies since January. Small-town merchants were trained to serve as vigilantes when the robbery alarms sounded. At the Bank of Commerce in Jenks, a town on the west bank of the Arkansas River near Tulsa, officials were weary of coughing up funds for armed desperadoes, so they fortified the bank with brick walls, sheets of steel, and bulletproof glass cashier windows. It served as a model for other small-town banks.
Reward posters appeared everywhere for the capture or, better yet, death of Pretty Boy and other thieves. Even the bounty on ordinary bank robbers was a lot of money for that time. The apprehension of a living bandit brought one hundred dollars, and the amount increased to five times that amount for a dead bandit. By November 1932, the OBA had paid rewards on 216 robbers convicted or killed. The larger rewards on Pretty Boy’s head remained unclaimed, however.
“‘Pretty Boy’ and his partner, Birdwell, have been able to go so long uncaught chiefly because they are protected and tipped off by officers of the law in the hilly country in which they operate,” theorized Charles Burns, superintendent of the State Crime Bureau and a former U.S. Marshal. “They have a host of relatives and friends and sympathizers all through there who shelter, protect, and warn them. This fellow Floyd is a shrewd fellow and slippery as an eel.”
In November, Governor Murray admitted to reporters: “Floyd has sent me word twice, by his near relatives, that if I would save him from the electric chair he would come in and surrender…. I sent word back to him that I would not do it, but that I had instructed Burns to get him.” And, when Murray chose the words get him, law officers and bankers interpreted that to mean annihilation.
“We are urging the bankers everywhere in the state to tell the people of their towns that we do not want bandits captured alive,” said Eugene Gum, the OBA secretary. “We want them dead. We want it known by anyone who is aiming to start into bank robbing as a business that we will pay $500 for him dead. The remedy is to kill them. Don’t ask them to surrender. We want no live bandits to go through that farce of trials before weak juries. Let’s exterminate them.
“Floyd has been the luckiest bandit that ever lived. It is marvelous how he got out of close corners when surrounded. He has had the ‘breaks’ for a long time, but he is just about due for a fall. So do not be surprised if you read, almost any day now, that Floyd and Birdwell have been slain. We are after them. More and more people are sending us tips about where they are, and they are bound to walk into a trap before long.”
Eugene Gum’s forecast proved only partially accurate. Just three days after his warning became public, part of the prediction actually happened.
George Birdwell met his end.
For some time, Birdwell had expressed his displeasure with all the attention Charley showered on Beulah Ash, the Kansas City woman who police labeled as Floyd’s moll. Although Birdwell had been known to conduct some skirt chases of his own, he largely believed Charley’s first obligation was to his former wife and their young son. Also, Birdwell never forgot that Beulah and her sister, Rose, had accompanied the late Billy Miller and Charley when Miller died in a gun battle in Bowling Green, Ohio. He felt the sisters brought bad luck.
“Trouble hangs on to a woman’s skirt,” Birdwell often told friends around Earlsboro. They knew he was referring to the bewitching Beulah.
On November 21, the Tulsa police learned that Ruby Floyd had recovered from her recent operation and was due to be released from the hospital. Officers staked out her room around the clock, just in case her former husband showed up to visit. News about Ruby’s recuperation also trickled down to Earlsboro and reached Birdwell.
“My dad heard that Ruby needed to pay the medical bills before she could get released from the hospital,” related Jack Birdwell. “Choc was in Kansas City, so Dad went out to rob a bank and get some money for Ruby.”
Birdwell selected the Farmers and Merchants Bank in Boley, a small town just above the North Canadian River in Okfuskee County. It was a poor choice. Boley’s population was entirely black. Founded shortly after the turn of the century, Boley was one of twenty-nine all-black communities established in what was then Indian Territory. Situated in the heart of what was once a rich cotton-producing area, Boley was the most successful of the black towns, which had been established by southern blacks, including many freed slaves.
Even though Birdwell engaged a black bandit to help him and another white outlaw to rob the bank, the strange trio was conspicuous. They stuck out like whores at a church picnic.
“We were always told that Uncle Charley had already looked into robbing that bank at Boley long before and decided it was too risky,” explained Choc’s nephew Lawton Lessley. “He told Birdwell that he didn’t want anything to do with it.”
Birdwell, however, always faithful to Charley, was committed to the goal of getting Ruby Floyd out of the hospital and home to her family at Bixby in time for Thanksgiving. His loyalty to his friend Choc Floyd proved his downfall.
Birdwell’s chosen accomplices for the Boley job were C. C. Patterson, an outlaw from Kiowa who was due to go to trial in December in connection with the shooting of a Shawnee policeman, and Charles “Pete” Glass, a young black man from Earlsboro who was familiar with Boley from visits there to meet women and gamble. After spending the afternoon of November 22 lurking around town, mostly in a pool hall across the street from the bank, the three bandits went to the home of one of Glass’s sisters near Earlsboro to drink and finalize their robbery plans. They figured the holdup would be a snap. Later it was disclosed that Glass, an outlaw novice, openly bragged to his sister how he was “going to show the gang how to rob a colored bank.”
Early the following morning, November 23, Birdwell and his two accomplices ate breakfast at the house of Dock Hearn, a black farmer who lived not far from Birdwell’s own home. Then they took off for Boley in a brown sedan. En route to Boley, “Champ” Patterson stopped the car and Glass took over as the wheelman. Patterson later recalled that the three men were silent throughout the journey to Boley. This would be Birdwell’s first bank robbery without Choc Floyd. It would also be his last.
By 10:30 A.M., the bandit’s car turned off Highway 62, bumped over the railroad tracks, and cruised into Boley. It was Thanksgiving Eve. KVOO radio in Tulsa reported the coldest temperatures on record for that date. There was also a story about four former officials from the Farmers National Bank of Wewoka. The bank had shut its door months before. The bankers were to be indicted that day by a grand jury on a variety of charges, including embezzlement and misapplication of funds.
Because of the bitter north winds, the streets of Boley were empty except for some farmers in town shopping for Thanksgiving dinner extras and shotgun shells. Quail season would open the next day. Talk in the stores centered on the high school basketball game scheduled that evening between the Boley Bears and their rivals at Wewoka.
Glass parked on the opposite side of Main Street just south of the Farmers and Merchants Bank. He waited in the automobile as Birdwell and Patterson, a sawed-off shotgun under his overcoat, walked inside and went directly to a teller’s cage.
“We’re robbin’ this bank!” shouted Birdwell. “Hand over the dough! Don’t pull no alarm!”
D. J. Turner, the bank president, calmly began pushing paper money beneath the steel bars of the window. He also triggered the alarm.
“Did you pull that alarm?” screamed Birdwell.
“Please don’t hurt nobody! Please!” pleaded W. W. Riley, the bank treasurer.
“You bet I pulled it!” spat out a defiant Turner.
“I’ll kill you for that,” growled Birdwell as he squeezed the trigger of his .45 pistol. Shot at point-blank range, Turner was thrown backward, and he slumped to the floor. Birdwell continued to blaze away with his pistol.
Meanwhile, H. C. McCormick, the bookkeeper, whose suspicions were aroused as soon as he spied the two white men enter the bank, had slipped into the vault, where a Winchester rifle was stashed for just such emergencies. He had rehearsed this procedure many times. Seeing that Birdwell had mortally wounded the bank president, McCormick took aim from a crack in the vault door and cut loose with a shot that struck its target. Birdwell, shot in the back, staggered as blood spurted from his mouth and dripped off his chin.
“I’m shot,” gurgled Birdwell. He crashed on the hardwood floor at Riley’s feet.
Bedlam followed. Patterson, panicky when he saw Birdwell collapse, screamed at bank employees and customers to drag his body out to the car. Patterson grabbed up as much money as possible. Glass, who had heard the alarm and the shots, dashed into the bank with his pistol drawn. By that time, townspeople and city officers led by Sheriff Langston McCormick had gathered outside. Most of them carried rifles and shotguns. Bullets crashed through the bank windows.
“There was a regular war,” Riley related afterward to state agents.
The terrified men carrying Birdwell dropped his body on the sidewalk near the bank entrance and bolted for cover. Patterson bent over to pick up the wounded ringleader, but he was hit from behind by a blast of buckshot. Struggling to drag the unconscious Birdwell to safety, Patterson was struck several more times by shotgun pellets and bullets. Witnesses said he yelped like a dog.
Glass bolted for the car and managed to drive off, but he quickly saw that vigilantes blocked his escape. Angry farmers poured withering gunfire into the car. Glass crashed into the curb. He slumped dead over the wheel, riddled with bullets.
At first, the stunned citizens thought they had brought down Pretty Boy Floyd himself, but State Crime Bureau operatives definitely identified the gravely wounded bandit as Patterson. They said the two men “greatly resemble one another,” and that Patterson had been mistaken for Floyd in recent robberies. Some officers changed their minds and said perhaps it had been Champ Patterson, and not Floyd, who had fought it out with a posse earlier that year at Stonewall. Critically wounded in the legs, knees, and hip, and tattooed with buckshot, Patterson was rushed to nearby Okemah for treatment. He survived. The wounded bank president, Turner, shot four times through the chest, died before reaching Okemah, however.
Birdwell also died en route.
“My dad was shot in the back, and the bullet passed through his lung and he bled to death,” recalled Jack Birdwell. “The day he died, I was just a teenaged kid, but I became a man. I knew all along he was going to die. We had talked about it. He told me that he never would go to the pen and just be a bird in a cage.
“That evening one of my cousins and me cried and cried. We got a hold of one of Dad’s friends there in Earlsboro and we begged him to take us to Boley. We were gonna take a bunch of guns and just tear that damn town apart. But the fella calmed us down and talked us out of it. He said enough had been done and to let it rest.”
Thousands of mourners and spectators turned out to honor Turner, the slain banker who had left behind a wife and five children. Governor Murray sent his condolences as well as a letter of congratulations to McCormick, the quick-thinking cashier who had gunned down Birdwell. Murray made McCormick an honorary major on his staff. The hero of the hour also received a five-hundred-dollar reward for slaying Birdwell. Another five hundred dollars in bounty was divided among the citizens who shot and killed Glass. Eugene Gum warned Boley officials to be on the alert in case Pretty Boy came to town seeking revenge. That never happened, although McCormick did receive dozens of hate letters, including one that read: “The man who killed my buddy, Birdwell, won’t live to see Christmas.” It was signed Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, but law officers said it was a fake. Nonetheless, McCormick strapped on the .45 pistol that Birdwell had left behind and wore it everywhere he went. Many years after the robbery, the pistol that McCormick kept as a souvenir accidentally discharged and the bullet tore into the old man’s leg. The wound never properly healed, and his family contended that it contributed directly to his death.
Bob Birdwell, the dead outlaw’s widow, went to Okemah and identified her husband from old scars on his head and the one on his leg that he had received many years before when an irate husband shot him. Officers gave Bob her husband’s ring. They sent his body home.
Shortly before the services, a representative of the Oklahoma Bankers’ Association asked the funeral home’s director to allow the presidents of the banks supposed to have been robbed by Birdwell and Floyd to view the body. He would not allow it. Then O. P. Ray of the State Crime Bureau asked that some agents be admitted to the mortuary in case Floyd came to pay his last respects. The request was referred to Bob Birdwell.
“I bear you no malice,” she told Ray. “You have hunted my husband while he was alive; in death he belongs to his loved ones.”
Ray disregarded her wishes. Recalling that Floyd and Birdwell had once dared law officers and had shown up at an Earlsboro funeral home when Birdwell’s father died, Ray decided not to take any chances. Six carloads of armed agents and local law officers appeared at the funeral conducted in Seminole on November 25. George Birdwell was buried beside his father and brother.
“As ye sow, so shall ye reap” was the text for Birdwell’s service, preached by Reverend Robert Hedrick of the Earlsboro Methodist Church. Six old friends of the dead outlaw, including Blackie Smalley, dug a grave. Still wearing overalls, they also acted as pallbearers and carried the plain gray casket to Birdwell’s final resting place. Ruby Floyd, just released from the hospital, stood at the grave next to Bob Birdwell and her children, and fifty other mourners. Ruby’s father had scrounged up the money to pay her medical bills, and she hurried down to be with Bob when she buried her husband.
A rumor rumbled through the countryside that Choc Floyd appeared in disguise at the graveyard. Perfectly sober men said they saw Pretty Boy in women’s clothing, with a veiled hat on his head. They said he was crying over Birdwell’s coffin. Several people even claimed he changed into his costume at their home. One woman from Morris, Oklahoma, later told her friends that Pretty Boy often stopped at her family’s place and always paid for his food and shelter. She said he borrowed some of her mother’s clothes to wear to the Birdwell funeral. The woman swore that she had a photograph of him dressed in drag but it had disappeared.
Talk of Choc in drag added to the Floyd mythology. Choc was saddened by Birdwell’s death, but he realized it would be foolhardy to go anywhere near the funeral. Floyd kinfolk knew Charley stayed in Tom’s Town, far from the crowd of lawmen who eyed the burial like vultures.
His relatives were confident that Choc would remember Birdwell in his own way. He told them he toasted his old pal with straight shots of first-rate bootleg whiskey in a smoky Kansas City den filled with small talk and music.
A mournful lament, written by Gorney and Harburg, that would remain a hit well into 1933 symbolized the leanest days of the Great Depression. It served as a fitting dirge for George Birdwell, the goat-roping bandit who remained ever loyal to Charley, and as a memorial to courageous men like D. J. Turner, the Boley banker who had not been afraid to pull the alarm. The song was a tribute to all sorts of men and women, of all ages and backgrounds, who waited all across the land for the good times to return.
They used to tell me I was building a dream.
And so I followed the mob—
When there was earth to plow or guns to bear
I was always there—right on the job,
They used to tell me I was building a dream
With peace and glory ahead—
Why should I be standing on line
Just waiting for bread?
Once I built a railroad, made it run,
Made it race against time.
Once I built a railroad,
Now it’s done—
Brother, can you spare a dime?