THE COUNTRY’S MOST VICIOUS and desperate criminals share The Rock with children of all ages, infants to teenagers. Most of the custodial and clerical staff commute from San Francisco, but about a third, bachelors and fifty-seven families, dwell below the prison heights on four acres terraced into the island’s southeastern tip—the slope blasted by the Army Engineers in the 1850s to provide a protective cliff on that side. Theirs is a strange sort of village life, in the shadow of gun towers, under the brow of a brooding prison that once did, and might again at any moment, explode into murderous mutiny. Ever present is the menace of being taken hostage by armed escapees; but they live a normal life, just as other San Franciscans go about their daily affairs without a neurotic fear that the San Andreas Fault underfoot might at any moment slip a bit and shake the city’s cornices loose.
In some respects, the Rock dwellers can boast the choicest residential site in the Bay Area, as picturesque as any isle in the Mediterranean. To awe-struck tourists, purchasing an intimate glimpse at rows of binoculars on Telegraph Hill and the end of a pier near Fisherman’s Wharf, the island, much of the year a vivid splash of ice-plant pink, bears the deceptive appearance of a precipitous Capri minus castellated villas and bikinis. Weathered, red-roofed cottages set in flower gardens line one edge of this terrace or middle level; and on the south side two modern apartment houses with picture windows and balconies stand above the rocky shore, not so magnificent as the apartment towers along Rio’s Copacabana but offering an unsurpassed panoramic vista: the Golden Gate span and its after-dark strands of sodium-vapor lights, the serrated skyline of San Francisco, the Bay Bridge and Treasure Island, the landmark Campanile of the University of California and the cities crawling up the surrounding hills, the verdant mass of nearby Angel Island. Only a section of the Marin County coast to the north is invisible, blocked off by the prison crest.
A path leads down through a grove of eucalyptus trees to an esplanade along the leeward shore, a few feet above the surf, with benches to enjoy the flat marine view or wait for a striped bass to strike. Color abounds on all sides: the greens of a few hardy scrub pines on the windward, and the eucalypti on the leeward; the rosy blossoms of the creeping ice plant; the bright yellow flowers of oxalis, related to the sour grass family; even the dull red faces of the arid cliffs. Many succulents, such as the century plant, border footpaths. These trees, shrubs, and flowers—planted in soil brought over from the mainland—thrive on the moisture of the summer fogs. Water is barged over by Army tugs, 170,000 gallons at a time, two or three loads a week.
Some of the seventy-five children were born here, knowing no other home than The Rock. Daughter of the guards grow up to be wives of guards. The island once had a kindergarten class; now all the children go to public or private schools in the city. Pupils caught up by a favorite television program at night catch up on their homework on the twelve-minute ride to the mainland on the prison launch, the Warden Johnston. Before dashing down to the wharf, one lad delivers the morning papers. Occasionally, on the return trip after school, there may be a convict aboard, but he is shackled and out of sight in a sealed-off cabin.
The youngsters of Alcatraz lead a life very much like that of their urban classmates, even to a curfew that sends them home at nine o’clock week nights, eleven o’clock Saturday and Sunday. They play ball beneath the frowning prison cliff, fish off the shore, shoot billiards or bowl at the Officers’ Club, where teenagers gather at a replica of a drugstore fountain.
Only in one regard is a boy’s life different on Alcatraz: he cannot own a rifle to hunt or sieve tin cans on a fence post. Nor a cap pistol. Nor a rubber knife. When they play cops-and-robbers, forefingers serve as revolvers and lusty “Bang! Bang!” for shots. And they must never step outside the fenced-in limits of the family acres.
Humor resides here with grimness, and the personnel christened the new staff dining room up at the prison The Top o’ The Rock. The Officers’ Club down below is the social and cultural center of the civilian colony: here old-fashioned square dances make The Rock sing on Saturday night; here the Alcatraz Women’s Club holds meetings, bridge parties, an annual Yule bazaar; here too the Alcatraz Ballet—girls four to fourteen, taught by a guard’s wife who had been reared on the island—stages performances.
Alcatraz was once the setting for nuptials, when a light-keeper’s daughter married a classmate at Utah Agricultural College. The Coast Guard still operates the light, a new light mounted on an octagonal column towering 214 feet above sea level, with a flashing beacon visible twenty-one miles at sea. While on duty the Coast Guardsmen—a married man and a bachelor, who occupy two of the three apartments in the lighthouse—are under the control of the prison authorities.
Rock families enjoy all the freedoms of the mainland. They can have guests at any hour of the day or night, and parties till dawn, subject to the same rules as party-givers anywhere: if they get too rowdy, they are told to pipe down. Residents are responsible for what their guests carry onto the island.
“We hope they’re sensible enough not to bring any firearms,” says Warden Olin D. Blackwell. “We’re particularly anxious about ammunition. The inmates can make guns, but it’s harder to make cartridges.”
Blackwell, fourth and current warden of The Rock, is a rangy, amiable, middle-aged, onetime Texas rancher who still wears an imprint of the open range: a western Stetson; on occasion, a bolo or cowpoke’s string tie; a tooled leather belt with an outsized buckle of Navajo Indian silver, turquoise adorned; a Navajo open bracelet on the left wrist, silver inlaid with turquoise stones. He feels that The Rock is an ideal place to live: “We have more privacy than people in the city. A lot safer at night, too. We never lock our doors.”
Like the islanders, guests need not pass through the metal detector. They reach the four-acre settlement by a private stairway to a footbridge over the dock area, then through a gate controlled by the tower guard. On departing, they stand at the gate until the guard opens it—after prison visitors are aboard the boat, after the five convicts on the dock detail line up in his sight, and after he has been assured that all the other prisoners are accounted for.
When the doorbell rings, an Alcatraz wife knows for a certainty it will not be a salesman, for this is one territory even the Fuller Brush man cannot penetrate. Rock wives do their shopping at their own “co-op” on the island or at markets in the city, either in person or by phone. They are no farther from downtown San Francisco department stores than women in residential areas such as the ocean-fronting Sunset district—perhaps closer, with no traffic lights on the bay segment of their trip to town. Normally, it’s a twelve-minute run from the island to the Fort Mason dock, where the Alcatraz wife takes either a bus downtown or the family car, parked in the huge pier shed. Rock residents can have a jolly night in town and catch a late, or early, boat back. The boat makes twenty-two trips a day, the first at 5 A.M., the last at 2 A.M.
Although the children share this tiny island with about 260 convicts, they seldom see any at close range except those who collect the garbage or tend the gardens and the sharp-spiked century plants along the paths. The older children ignore the inmates, but the tots sometimes grow curious, such as the preschool child who once asked her mother why a playmate’s daddy (a guard) watched over the gardeners so closely. After a moment’s perplexity, the mother answered: “They’re bad men—they’re being punished for not eating their spinach.” Later the child hop-skipped up to a domesticated gunman kneeling at a shrub and scolded, “Shame on you! Aren’t you sorry now you didn’t eat your spinach?”
The penal concept that created Alcatraz ruled out the trusty, the model prisoner trusted to perform duties outside the walls. Associate Warden Lawrence Delmore once explained: “Trusties get the idea they are privileged characters and expect the run of the place. Besides, guards are apt to turn their backs on them because they think they are safe. You can’t do that here.”
Warden Blackwell, who occupies a three-story, eighteen-room house on the edge of the bluff a few steps from the prison building, voiced a regret on that score: “It’s hard to find a prisoner to work in the house because if they can be trusted to do that, they don’t belong on the island.”
During the regime of Warden Johnston, in a day when the felons were regarded as far less trustworthy, a dinner guest at the mansion, aware of the reasoning that gangsters made unreliable trusties, was astonished to discover the butler was a convict. He was even more astonished to learn the chef was an armed robber.
“We’ll soon be losing our cook,” the warden said. “He’s coming up for parole.”
Barbara, the warden’s eighteen-year-old daughter, protested: “Oh, Daddy, you can’t let him out—he’s the only cook we ever had who could make Bar de Luc!”