THE ROCK IS ten years gone.
The escaped trio, eleven. And no more a maybe. Morris, the quiet loner, could slip into obscurity and stay there. Not the Anglins. Born braggarts, they could hardly be expected to sit forever on that feat. Silence seems evidence their cleaned bones lie beyond the Golden Gate, down among the whiter bones of Roe and Cole, first off The Rock.
On that present tense: the book was written in 1962. Alcatraz still had a family neighborhood, and some lad a paper route; guards still kept a wary eye in the gun towers; convicts still lived the long hours plotting; the warden still gave newsmen only the time of day, if asked. In a New York Herald Tribune review, John K. Hutchens took note of that tense, and the obvious reason, saying it imparted “the immediacy of the historical present tense.” By then that’s what it had become. (Publication date was announced for April 5, 1963. Two weeks earlier the last felons filed off Alcatraz, in handcuffs only, while television cameras rolled. And next day The Rock was a thing of the past.)
Now it can be told: how those convicts in D Block (see this page) came by the razor blades to send down by the sewer-pipe dumb-waiter to the tendon cutters in the dark cells. Mr. Bennett, head of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Prisons, had said in 1962 he could not shut down The Rock until he had a secure place to store the men—and the super-superbastille in Southern Illinois was far from ready. (It was completed in 1964.) That being so (presumably), Escape from Alcatraz would appear well before The Rock went out of business. My informant had my assurance the book would not reveal the secret of the smuggled blades, for disclosure would obviously halt the traffic—and deprive others of the opportunity to slice their heels. But the unkindest cut of all would be dealt the dealer in used blades, readily identifiable by the method of delivery. Within minutes after the warden’s eye landed on the page, the smuggler would land in the Dark Hole—a candidate for his own, and now unobtainable, contraband.
How was it done? Quite slyly. With the easing of the D Block regimen went reading privileges for the men in the gate-front cells. The inmate on library duty made deliveries there—except to those in solitary. That meant close scrutiny—even closer after the cuttings began. The guard in D Block inspected the cart’s contents, then tagged along. He could testify under oath, without perjury, that he saw only books or magazines passed through. Yet there was something else. A wink. It went with a book at a certain cell. And the bibliophile within, once they had moved on, opened the volume wide and shook well—and out of its spine fell a piece of blade. (One thin blade, broken lengthwise and the halves snapped in two, could supply four dark cells.)
The empty island was turned over to the General Services Administration for disposal as surplus property. John Hart, a big amiable man who had been a guard for fifteen years, and his wife Marie stayed on as caretakers. Their four children grew up on Alcatraz, and two daughters were married there. The Harts continued to get the San Francisco Chronicle every morning—dropped at their door (or thereabouts) by a helicopter on a commuter-hour traffic check for a radio station. They retired after the Indian invasion in the fall of 1969.
These were not the first Indians to scoff at the ancient myth that evil spirits dwelled on the island. In March of 1964 five Sioux, doubtless believing the evil dwellers had departed two years earlier, landed and staked a claim under an 1868 treaty giving their tribe the right to claim federal property “not used for specific purpose.” This was not a seizure. They offered $5.64 for Alcatraz—47 cents an acre, the same price the Federal Government had agreed to pay California Indians for lands seized by the whites after the Gold Rush. The GSA ignored the claim, and they went away.
During the Sioux stay two men (white) planted a marker on the shore, then filed a placer mining claim to the island, calling it the Embarrassing Mine. The Sioux said: “Let them remember General Custer.” They remembered. But they had a day of limelight, for only $2.80, the filing fee.
The second invasion was in greater force (several hundred braves); of longer duration (a year and a half), and far more successful: it focused national attention on the plight of the Indian, who did hold rightful claim to the title of American Original. The GSA let time and hardship handle the situation. The Indians left a year later. They did spare the government the expense of wrecking many of the buildings, but some felt they might have spared the warden’s big house on the cliff’s edge across the road from the prison. A spectacular midnight blaze left it a charred shell, and destroyed the nearby living quarters of the Coast Guard lightkeepers. (An automatic light was later installed.)
Closing the problem island created a new problem: what to do with it? In the American bureaucratic tradition, studies were launched, even a $20,000 one to fix its worth. (Its worth: $2,178,000—$178,000 for the twelve acres, $2 million for the buildings. This was in 1964, when the place was still intact.) A President’s Alcatraz Study Commission called for suggestions, and was almost blown away by the hurricane. Just about every use conceivable (and inconceivable) was proposed, except the one thing it finally became: part of a park.
Among the more notable proposals: a Statue of Liberty West; an anchor for a bridge to the north; a pleasure park after Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens; a gambling casino; a cathedral; a college; an observatory; a round Parthenon, fifty feet high, with shops and restaurants in a wing-like roof; a refuge for seagulls (from the school children of Bird City, Kansas, pop. 678); a Sin City (no minors ashore); give it back to the pelicans (the pelicans weren’t interested); a “nudist metropolis”; let tourists be “a convict for a day,” for a fee (a Walt Disney thought); a 364-foot tower, Apollon, honoring the space program; an 800-foot parabolic arch of stainless steel, honoring the peoples of the world; a great globe of the world, 250 feet in diameter, circled by an olive wreath and resting on a pedestal of highrise buildings (by Buckminster Fuller of the geodesic dome); a vast hotel shaped like a horseshoe; a vaster hotel and convention center accommodating 12,000 people; a shopping center. And the inevitable wag: “I think it’d make a good federal prison.”
The Commission recommended a monument to commemorate the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco, which would serve “untold generations as an ennobling inspiration …” (They would raze the prison, though not as one person proposed; gradually, by the falling water of a jet roaring 500 feet above the fog.)
The studies, in the American bureaucratic tradition, went into the archives. Left to brood in its summer fogs, this isle of infamy, this American Devil’s Island held ever greater fascination for sightseers, feeding dimes into binoculars at Fisherman’s Wharf and up on Telegraph Hill. Then, last year, Congress created the 36,000-acre Golden Gate National Recreation Area—its smallest playground.
When Alcatraz was a pet project of the Department of Justice, people were threatened with machine-gun fire if they came too near. Now the National Park Service is in charge, and they can take a walking tour of the island, then a gawking tour of the silent cellhouse—even step into a cell of the Dark Hole, pull the steel door shut, and feel the skin prickle in the blackness.
J.C.B.
Berkeley
September 1973