Elliot Michener

Transcript

Transcript

[First Tape – Side One]

Interview already in progress, abrupt start.

Michener:                    (looking at a picture) Jack Giles, and here’s Giles, Jack, and Karpavicz [Alvin Francis Karpavicz, AKA, Creepy Karpis], [Rufus] Franklin, Ripley Brant, I sat at the table with him one day and we were talking about national politicians and he was critizing and I said well don’t you think that maybe they’re a little smarter than you are?  And he was affronted. He says, ‘smarter than me?’ [Laughs]

[Lloyd] Barkdoll. Barkdoll is dead now. We knew him from up in Salem he was there when Jack and I was. He was a rough tough kid but, pretty vicious. Ray Stevenson, there’s a man that did a lot of legal work. He wasn’t as good at it as Jack was but he helped a lot of people. And [John Richard] Bayless, I remember, Earl, Bruce, a lot of these fellows I’ve forgotten.  Baker, Hamilton, Gregor and Roger. Wilfong! That was one of those German spies wasn’t it? A rather stupid man. [Laughter] And well he was. I think he went around and tried to set a fire to a lumber yard over here some place, in Alameda. And they sent him as a spy during the war. And [Elliott] Michener, [crosstalk]. Basil [?], [Kurt] Ludwig, Stroud. Billy [Robert] Stroud, George Heck, he was a pretty nice guy.  Kramer, I guess that’s the end of them there, Oh no. That’s the German I’m thinking of. Roedel [Heinrich Herman], a big stupid Nazi. God, that’s the one we passed a can of peaches that was kinda broke, we passed through the gate down there to have him try it. [Laugher]. See if it was good. [Inaudible] Graham.

Interviewer 1:             Morris, Frank Morris?

Michener:                   I don’t ever remember some of them, it doesn’t’ jog my memory. It’s been 25 years ago. 

Interviewer 1:             Oh lord yes.

Michener:                   Cantrell, [inaudible] Miller, [George] Stubblefield I remember. [Radio in background]. Most of them, I’ve just forgotten.

Interviewer 1:              I think these are newer people.

Michener:                    Probably

Interviewer 1:             Yeah, these people came on.

Interviewer 2:             What did you think of Stroud?

Michener:                   Stroud was, he was all right. He didn’t, he wasn’t a particular friend of mine or anything like that.

Interviewer 1:             What’s interesting is because most of the people that I talk to, if they were here, they didn’t mind Stroud as much as the people that minded Stroud were the correctional officers and the guards that were with him.

Michener:                   He was a man that was always against something.  He wasn’t going to be forced to do anything. He wanted to contest everything. He could have been out long long before, but he wanted to fight his way out, to force them to let him out. He wouldn’t go along with anyone though. 

Interviewer 1:             Huh, that’s interesting.

Michener:                   Jack knew him better than I did, I scarcely ever saw him.

Interviewer 1:              When did you, when was it that you came here.

Michener:                    Let’s see if I remember, it was either in 1939 or 1940. I think

Interviewer 1:             Was there still a silent system here when you came?

Michener:                   Well, it’s suppose to be but you could talk in the dining room a little bit and that was a challenge and it was the near the end of the silent system. And it was just after they had a hunger strike here and at that time they were being fed just wonderfully before that and then for some reason they went on a hunger strike so they just changed the menu entirely and put them on the same kinda rations that they would get in the rest of the penitentiaries. The original idea was if they brought them here and fed them well then they wouldn’t have any trouble but as soon as they get into trouble…[background talking].

[Interview continues outside]

Michener:                    We had some white crowned sparrows and they have the most beautiful song I can still remember (mimics sparrow).  But we had the white crowned sparrows down in Sierra Madre. But they actually sung.

Interviewer 1:             Is that right?

Michener:                   Never hear of it, Jack was always commenting on that.

Interviewer 1:              Well, they’re very beautiful out here. This year, there are a lot more birds this year than there were last and a number of them have their nests out here so we find it very enjoyable as we are walking around to listen to them.

Interviewer 2:             Is this the plant you were talking about?

Michener:                   Yes, that’s Cymbryanthemum florabundum [Chrysanthemum (?) floribunda]. I didn’t plant this but on the other side, on those cliffs.

Interviewer 1:             It’s beautiful. Looks like a waterfall. [Crosstalk].

Interviewer 1:             Well gardening seems like it’s one of the better jobs here.  You’re your own master.

Michener:                   Yeah, that’s right.  No one to bother you as long as you behave.

[Tape cuts out]

Interviewer 1:             So there was one greenhouse down this side of the Island.

Michener:                   Yes.

Interviewer 1:             Well that’s a natural area down there, it’s very flat. And probably, to me, the nicest part of the Island right there. It’s the calmest and there’s not very much wind or anything else.

Michener:                   Yeah, it is.  He enjoyed gardening very much too.

Interviewer 1:             And you talk about water being expensive.  Do you have any idea how much it costs to run a prison as a whole, you know, for a year?

Michener:                   No, I don’t.

Interviewer 1:             That’s interesting, we did some checking on that. In the latter years of course, the price had been going up and up but in 1960 we found out that it cost them $1.2 million a month to run the Island.

Michener:                   [whistles] Yeah, and it was so unnecessary for 250 prisoners and most of them could have been hanged.

Interviewer 1:             What was the, how many people were out here, medical type people were here when you were here?

Michener:                   Well, they would have a doctor and a couple of assistants that would work part time up there and of course they would have a few prisoners that would help up there, as orderlies. Medical staff wasn’t big and they had a dentist that came over, oh, about once every 2 weeks. It wasn’t much then.

Interviewer 1:             What about a psychologist? Did you have any psychologist that came over every now and then?

Michener:                   None that I can remember. 

Interviewer 1:              Okay. What about…having…did many people get sick?  Was there a problem out here with sickness? Did many people…

Michener:                   Oh yeah, they, in every penitentiary there’re always a lot of goal breakers. They, it gave you somethin’ to do, go up and get some medicine, get some aspirin or get this or get that.  And there was of course some cases of real sickness I remember one fellow died of pernicious anemia just about the time he was due for release, or perhaps died after release. Jack Giles had a very bad ulcer about the time he was probably brought on about his escape plans and worry.  He nearly died up in the prison hospital up there.

Interviewer 1:              Did they give you pretty good treatment?

Michener:                   Yes, yes, it wasn’t bad at all. I think that’s all… 

Interviewer 1:              I read about a couple of pill scandals they had here.  Were pills very easy to get?

Michener:                   Oh yes, for a while they would give you nembutols and yellow jacket stuff and the guys would have to save them up and go on to jag. [Laughter] Well that was easier for them to do than to stand the complaints of all the. 

Interviewer 1:             That was kind of a way of letting the prisoner have something and not worry about it too much.

Michener:                   That’s right.  The main effort of most of the measures was simply to avoid trouble.

Interviewer 1:              Keep things peaceful.

Michener:                   Keep things peaceful.

Interviewer 1:             You know, I was down below and asked you just for second, I’d kind of like to get a little bit of background information so anybody that listens to this tape will know a little bit about your background and if you could fill me in a little bit. We talked about it before I know and I hate to have you repeat everything.

Michener:                   No, that’s alright. Where did you want to start?

Interviewer 1:             Well I just kind of like to know how you came to Alcatraz, what brought you here?

Michener:                   Well, in, I was, the one time I was doing quite a bit of time. 35 years in Waupun [Wisconsin] for forgery and then I was taken out of there and to federal court and was convicted of this counterfeiting.  So after that I did about 4 years in Waupun, I still had 30 years left here, they simply released me to federal authorities and I was sent to Leavenworth. And there was some labor troubles back in Leavenworth and I got kind of emotional about it, some friends of mine were involved and I thought that I would try to escape. Unfortunately, I confided to the wrong guy and he told the prison staff so I was sentenced to out here, that was about 1940 I believe. [Loud engine noise] And brought out of the prison.

Interviewer 1:             For the attempt to escape?

Michener:                   For the attempt to escape. Other than that I wouldn’t have been transferred over here. But as it happened, I’m glad I was, it was much easier to do time here than it was in Leavenworth.

Interviewer 1:             You came here about 1940 then? 

Michener:                    1940, it may have been 1939.  I’m not quite sure. And we got…as I said, when we hit the dock down here…Miller. Yeah, you claim you that you know about Miller.

Interviewer 1:             I’ve heard many stories about Meathead Miller [Edward J]. Right. [Laughter]

Michener:                   He was quite a character.  He made a song about the dock down there and he says ‘you’re sick, look sick and tired now. But,’ he says ‘I bet you’ll be a damn sight sicker tired before I get through with you’. [Laughter] But really, he was a pretty good guy. All bluff and big mouth, but he wouldn’t do you any harm and if he could help it.

Interviewer 1:             If I remember right, Miller was involved in the ’46 riot in a pretty influential way, didn’t he get captured or something or he somehow he got involved with a number of people in that situation.

Michener:                   I can’t remember what his part in it was. I know he wasn’t captured because he superintended all the business out in the yard there.  When he came in from the yard, the cellblock was full of tear gas and the windows were broken and shrapnel was rattling around. That was a rough couple of days I tell you. 

Interviewer 1:             I heard it got kind of tough. Almost like Second World War out here.

Michener:                   Yes it was. Oh, you can’t believe, they had gun bolts out here firing shots into D block and could hear the bombs rattling and out in the yard freezing to death.  We tore up some…we had some horseshoe parts out there and 2x4’s and 4x6’s around. Tore those up and put some fires out there.  Marines were all around the wall there. 

Interviewer 2:             What did you do on a day to day basis in your cell?

Michener:                   Well, when you working outside, you go out every day.  When it came, after the riot they brought us all back in we were in our cells there for several days.

Interviewer 1:             You were outside though for what a day and a half or so? 2 days?

Michener:                    In the yard for that afternoon, that night, and all the next day.

Interviewer 1:             So, you didn’t even get to come back in the prison itself, it was all closed off?

Michener:                   No, it was all closed. We spent the time in the yard, they herded us out there to get us in one bunch and then they had the marines around on the walls.  That was a cold morning.

Interviewer 2:             I bet it was. I bet it was.

Michener:                   All night long you could hear those grenades and mortar shells bursting inside of D block.

Interviewer 1:             So you left here then in about ’49?

Michener:                   ’50. It was either the last of ’49 or the first of ’50, I can’t remember.

Interviewer 1:             So you spent all of 10 years out here.

Michener:                   Almost 10 years.  I never went to school. I came back over to the house one day and she said ‘Well, go saddle your horse, your going back to Leavenworth’.

Interviewer 1:             You must have had, what type of experience was it for you to be able to work in the Warden’s house can you go into some detail about it?

Michener:                   Oh yes, that was, it was really quite a change for me inside of the prison. Went up there and Mrs. Swope herself was very nice. And saw the newspapers, and you had radio and you had comfortable living quarters. Of course we went in at night but we had rest quarters downstairs. And it was almost like being on the outside for a little while. Mrs. Swope was really a wonderful person. She use to go, and…we were both kind of interested in horse racing. She’d bring in the paper, the morning paper to look over the horses and then she’d, I had a lot of gardens around here and I grew a lot of flowers and when they had guests, I’d bring up bunches of flowers and they’d leave a tip for me, they wouldn’t give it to me but leave it with Mrs. Swope so she’d take this money and bet it on the horses. And she says ‘don’t you ever tell the warden!’ [Laughter] We’d look at, of course you can’t handicap horses out of a newspaper, but we thought we were, we were having fun. And when it came around my birthday why she’d buy me something, a pair of shoes or something and I’d retaliated or I mean, reciprocated by doing my work well, behaving myself. 

Interviewer 2:             That’s nice. What were your duties? What would you do?

Michener:                   Oh, I came out in the morning, get their cook, get their breakfast, serve breakfast, clean up the kitchen and then go around and make the beds and do general housework and then I’d go down, I had a garden down here, along underneath that wall. I’d garden there, garden around back, cut their lawns and clean up the house and just keep everything ship shape all the time.  And then I built the greenhouse right on the corner there and take care of that.  So it was all fine. I enjoyed it.

Interviewer 2:             What was your botanical background before you got here?

Michener:                   I didn’t have any, I just learned to garden here, got a lot of books and studied them. Just learned about it.

Interviewer 2:             Were those out of the prison library?

Michener:                   No, I think mostly they were seed catalogues and things like that. The Guards would buy you some seeds if they got permission it’d be alright to give you a package of this, a Scabiosa [Butterfly Blue] or dahlia bulbs. And in return, why you’d cut them big bouquets of flowers to take home for parties. Pretty good leeway. Now on Saturdays, I had permission to go from the warden’s house around to the, under the gate tower, because Jack was working down there and at that time he was in my old greenhouse I’d always get a bunch of cake and candy and so forth and so on and the guards knew me and knew that I wouldn’t carry any guns or anything so they would give me a little pat and let me through the gate, before they searched me down. One day the guard wasn’t there but Madigan [Paul J.] was on. The Lieutenant. And so he carried me around there and I got a little bit worried. And I said ‘well, I got a few little things under my shirt here,’ and he starts patting me. And I had about 5 lbs of stuff under there. And he says ‘you certainly have a little bit’. [Laughter] But he opened up the gate and let me through.

Interviewer 3:             What’d you have?

Michener:                   Well, I had some fudge I remember. And probably some cake and sandwiches, a ham sandwich, an egg sandwich, this and that. 

Interviewer 1:              And Madigan is known as a fairly tough…

Michener:                   Yes, but he was a sensible man.

Interviewer 1:             Was he?

Michener:                   Yeah, a very fair man. Most of the guards you couldn’t complain about. Most of the lieutenants, [Henry] Weinhold, Madigan they were all honorable.

Interviewer 1:             Course Madigan, was that the same Madigan that went on to become Warden at McNeil?

Interviewer 2:              And here.

Michener:                   And here, that’s right.  He liked me and I liked him, we got along alright. 

Interviewer 1:             Do you feel that having the type of job that you had, did you find that maybe not trying to think of how to escape as much as other people did here? Do you think that affected you in any way? You know, in that type of sense?

Michener:                   Well, no because just about the time that they got that writ granted, I was telling you about. Got into the legal, they vacated half of my sentence I was around on the other side of the Island and I had definite plans for trying to escape. I didn’t want to do another 15 / 20 years. So, but then, as soon as I got the job out on the Warden’s House, I knew I was on my way out then. And so I could afford to behave myself a few years and get out. 

Interviewer 2:             Cool it for a while.

Interviewer 1:             But it did make a difference. You know, wouldn’t it make some kind of difference? 

Michener:                   Oh yes.

Interviewer 1:             You had some work you enjoyed and had some good feelings from the people that were running the whole prison.

Michener:                   That’s right, correct, it made it much easier. The men that worked down in the laundry, now, I sympathize with them, pity them, because that was pure drudgery. Get up in the morning, go down there and stand at the mangle all day and put that in and come back again at night. That would have, I couldn’t have stood that. I would have done something.

Interviewer 1:             Well, listen, let’s go ahead and walk on around here. This was burned in 1970 and maybe you can kind of give me an idea if we can stand back here where you can see into it at least at this point.

Michener:                   Well, let’s see. The kitchen was right over there.

Interviewer 1:             Off to the left. 

Michener:                    Can I go in here?

Interviewer 1:             Sure, sure.

Michener:                   I don’t remember myself again now. Yeah, the kitchen was over there.

Interviewer 1:             Now is that big fireplace there, did that, was that in the kitchen itself? Was that part of it? Did they have an oven in the fireplace?

Michener:                   No, no they didn’t. Oh, let me see, kinda turned around here, it’s been so long.

Interviewer 1:             The window, the bay window would have been over here to your right.

Michener:                   That’s right. There was a door that opened up to the backyard.  You came up here and turned and went up to the stairs to the kitchen. That was the kitchen. Then this was the dining room and I can’t remember that thing down there.

Interviewer 1:             That was in the basement.

Michener:                   Oh, that was in the basement. Correct, I remember they used to have firewood cord that I cut and cleaned up down there. And all this area down here was quite empty. It was, a few tools around in there.

Interviewer 1:             This must have been a living room right here.

Michener:                   This was the living room. Oh, let me see. Where is the bay window?

Interviewer 1:             The bay window is over there to the right. Yes.

Michener:                   The corner, no that was the, strange I can’t remember that fireplace.

Interviewer 1:             It probably looks a lot different with the walls down and the floors gone and everything else I’m sure.

Michener:                   That’s right, but I remember Hall (?) when he was helping me, they had beautiful staircase going up to the upper story. With mahogany steps and a pale ivory colored banisters. And Hall, while they were gone, well, he decided he was going to do something to please him. So he found a can of white paint and went over these beautiful ivory banisters and not only that but all over the mahogany stairs. And Swope came back from his vacation and I happened to come out of his dining room and he was standing there looking up at the stairs, half of his foot...[laughing]

Interviewer 1:             Ooh, why? I’m sure that a disheartening thing to look at after he had finished. 

Michener:                   [Inaudible] you could never believe that such a character existed. 

Interviewer 1:             Was he an Indian?

Michener:                   Yeah, he was Indian. He pretended he couldn’t read and write and maybe he couldn’t but he was a very sly, and conniving person. And what he’d do, he’d want to get me into trouble so he’d go up and mess up some of the Warden’s records up in the office stairs, or her records, and the idea was that they knew that he couldn’t read so therefore I must have done it, I must have been prowling through their records.  Well, I never touched the records but he, I think Mrs. Swope understood that after a bit.

Interviewer 1:             Let’s walk around over where you built the greenhouse.

Michener:                   See this? [Wind] These were the beds that went down and we threw the mahogany…and one time I got it so full of leaf mold you could just stick your arm [Loud wind].

Interviewer 1:             Well this must have been an interesting place to work with the view and everything else.

Michener:                   It really was. Yes, and at night, after it got dark you could come out here and look over at San Francisco and see the lights [wind].  A little work area for potting things. That was closed in, and there were pictures taken right back along back of this greenhouse. 

Interviewer 1:             Right, right, right. I told you about, there’s a steam radiator.  That’s why I was wondering if you knew…

Michener:                   I can’t remember.

Interviewer 1:             This was probably added on at a later day.

Michener:                   I think it was, I don’t’ remember having any steam. [Crosstalk]

Interviewer 1:             Didn’t some of the men used to pick up garbage? Or somebody would take garbage and have garbage runs down in the family housing area and things like that.

Michener:                   That’s right, and then they’d bring them all around the Island down to the incinerator. They’d dump them down the thing.

Interviewer 1:             Was that kind of a special job?

Michener:                   Yes, they had a couple of trusted people, on the garbage trucks, picking up the cans. [Fog Horn]

Tape cuts out

Interviewer 1:             This is where you need your coat.

Michener:                   I’d come in here and of course they’d shake me down when they came in this place and then pass me through into the cellblock, this is the armory right along here.

Interviewer 1:             When you first came here, where were you, did you go through any administrative procedures? Did you come in down below or did you come in the front of the building?

Michener:                   We came in through here.

Interviewer 1:             Came in right in through here.

Michener:                   Yes.

Interviewer 1:             And all the administration was in this area over here I guess, from what I gather.  And then the Warden’s office was right in here.  Did you happen to…?

Michener:                   Yes, I’d been to the Warden’s Office once.

Interviewer 1:             It’s right in here, we are going in here. This is kind of the Captain of the Guards area, this area here, assistant Warden, Secretary.

Michener:                   [Inaudible in background]

Interviewer 1:             This is the Warden’s Office here. And this was his. I wonder what’s up on the wall, as far as…

Interviewer 2:             Printing?

Interviewer 1:             Yeah. That’s interesting. 

Interviewer 2:             Yeah.

Interviewer 1:             [Asked question, responds ‘no’]

Interviewer 2:             [Inaudible] about discipline and character.

Interviewer 1:             Character. Well I’ll be darned.

Interviewer 2:             [Inaudible]

Interviewer 3:             How many prisoners did you come in with?

Michener:                   There were about 20 of us on the train. People had the idea that there were a lot more prisoners on Alcatraz. The maximum they got was 250…

Interviewer 1:             No, the maximum we ever had here was 303 and that was only in one particular time. But the average was about 250, it didn’t fluctuate much from that, it was fairly close.

Michener:                   The amount of money they spent on this place for 250 inmates was absurd.

Interviewer 1:             It was pretty phenomenal and of course about 80% went for salary.

Michener:                   Yes.

Interviewer 1:             And maintenance was the next biggest expense, and then your food and water. We’ll walk on in and go on in to the main cellblock.  You might explain as we get in here, you know, the procedure that you would go through to get in.

Michener:                   As I came in, I would come in just the door there, course that was locked. They’d let me in there and I’d step in here and frisk me and then they’d let me on in.

Interviewer 1:             In order to get through here, you’d have to have one man open the door from the outside, right? Plus the man from the armory had to…

Michener:                   My recollection of that isn’t too good. I would rather think that there’d be just one man who’d open that door, let me in, frisk me, take me back there and let me into the cellblock.

Interviewer 1:             They didn’t, at any time, see there were two major door systems here and one right here.  …. type …

Michener:                   That’s right, it might have been a little different.  And this is where we went up to the movies.

Interviewer 1:             Right, that’s right, that’s exactly right.  Theatre is upstairs.  In 1960 they put up in an Officer’s mess up there, they moved it out of the mess hall back in the back and moved it up here and of course the change of the guards and stuff were up there, they kept it up there and that’s where you went into the walkway, the catwalk, outside there. 

Interviewer 2:             Visiting?

Michener:                   Visiting room. Yes, that’s where I came out with [Inaudible]

Interviewer 1:             Course this probably looks a little familiar in here.

Michener:                   Yes, it does. I had this cell to myself. Working out at Swope’s.

Interviewer 1:             It’s interesting because this is the same cell, these 3 cells, were the cells involved in the 1962 breakout. 

Michener:                  Oh they were? I didn’t know that.

Interviewer 1:             That’s when, who was it?

Interviewer 2:             Anglin Brothers.

Interviewer 1:             Anglin Brothers and Morris took off, went through the back wall and right up through the top.

Michener:                   That was a well-planned and well executed attempt.

Interviewer 2:             Yes, I think everybody that worked here and was here will admit to that. [Laughter]

Michener:                   And then over here. Some of the old isolation cells along there, and I was in the second one for 2 weeks. Once they had a strike down at the laundry when I first came and they, went to work down there. So they had about 6 of us along in there and some of the fellows that worked around the cellblock came up and they’d just throw tobacco along the front of the cell and you could rake it in. 

Interviewer 1:             Did they…say, I guess it was about 1940 that they built the other isolation block on the other side.

Michener:                   That was built just before I came here.

Interviewer 1:             Must have been completed just right around 1940.

Michener:                   Now on these cells down along here, there’s a brick made from these. When I first came they’d taken the doors off, you’ll notice they have flat steel in front of them.  They’d sawn them just below the rivet but they’d saw them at an angle. Of course the angle was necessary so that when they pulled them open they would be free to swing and I saw those doors down at the old model shop when they took them off and had them down there.

Interviewer 1:             They didn’t keep, after 1940, they didn’t keep too many people in this area over here though did they?

Michener:                   No, only when they had problems.

Interviewer 1:             Special situation like they’d put too many, you know, like they had a strike situation or something like that.

Michener:                   And then they would put a few of them over here but most of the time, I don’t think they ever used the bottom ones after the big breakout. But that was the time, [Arthur] Doc Barker I think got down on, got shot right down there.

Interviewer 1:             While you were here did you have many problems with the people as far as food, strikes, sitdowns, or anything like that?  Never seemed to be too much of that problem here?

Michener:                   Well, no but periodically, there would be people kind of talk it up.

Interviewer 1:             To have something to do or was it legit? 

Michener:                   No, I think mostly it was just to raise a little, break the monotony.

Interviewer 3:             Where’s the hole that they put Jack [Giles] in.

Michener:                   That’s over on the other side.

Interviewer 1:             We’ll go over there in just a second, look around.

Interviewer 2:              Did you have any knowledge of the area underneath this building?

Michener:                   Not at all. Jack Giles knew a little bit about it but I didn’t.  He’d been down there horse whipped.

Interviewer 2:             Charlie Berta spent a couple days down there. He said, he told me ‘they put him down there a little bit’.

Interviewer 1:             But he said he deserved it. That’s what he said, he said that he deserved it.

Michener:                   I remember Charlie- Tape ends.

[Tape One – Side B]

Michener:                   This is Broadway.

Interviewer 1:             No, Broadway is one over.  When you were here, you know, we have a lot of confusion, we hear many different things, there was talk of, at one time this being called Michigan Avenue.  Did you ever hear it being called that during your day?

Michener:                   No.

Interviewer 1:             Yeah, I think it was some kind of fallacy that somebody picked up someplace along the line.

Michener:                   I remember they had in one of these cells here, they used to put in a phonograph of a lot records, they’d play that on Sundays afternoon over broadcast.  And everyone got so tired of the records, they kept on playing over and over that someone smashed them all and even called him the Champ – he broke all the records. [Laughter]

Interviewer 1:             You were here later in the 1960, about 1960…Oh you had one here too.

Michener:                   I’d like to go up and see if I can find my old cell.

Interviewer 1:             Well, we’ll walk up there. Sure.

Michener:                   I can find it because I had a little place I could hide a razor blade. 

Interviewer 2:             Did you carve your initials in there?

Michener:                   No, I didn’t do that. When they had these periodic riots around here, that what really something.  See how these beds are hooked up.  They are hinged on this side and they can just pound, pound, pound and get every man in the place doing that and they would keep it up all night.  All night.  They could hear it over in the north side of San Francisco.

Interviewer 1:             We’ve tried to fix this one up to be basically the way it was back in the earlier years with not too much in it.  Of course, there’s not as much in here as there probably would have been at that time. 

Michener:                   No, there isn’t.  Most of the men had more books, wallpapers, magazines.

Interviewer 1:             But it gives us people an idea of the size of space they had here to occupy and uh...

Interviewer 3:             Now, could those beds be pulled up against the wall?

Michener:                   Yeah. They could but…

Interviewer 1:             Not many people did. They didn’t spend much time.

Michener:                   You came in and you sat down on your bed and put your feet up on the little shelf, either that or against the wall or on this thing and read all day or all evening. Until it’s time to turn in.

Interviewer 3:             Is that your only light up there?

Michener:                   Yeah

Interviewer 1:             You know, I was always interested when people talk about committing suicide in a prison etc. and I don’t know if there was much of that here, if there were attempts, I’m sure that there were, I heard of some, but were the lights glass?  Were they just exactly like that?

Michener:                   Yes.

Interviewer 1:             Seems like to me that if a man wanted access to something, that a light bulb would have been the best means of…

Michener:                   Well, there were easier things you can always get hold of a razor blade.  For instance through the nembutol time, you could get all the yellow jackets practically, or aspirin. Save up enough stuff to do away.  I was around here during a number of killings, I remember there was a negro, up on, got stabbed up on Broadway and he came down the stairs there, coming to dinner I think it was, or just after dinner. Or something. And stabbed him across the abdomen he was spilling out beans coming down the stairway, took him up to the hospital.  He would then never say who killed him or stabbed him.  He died. I can’t remember his name.

Interviewer 1:             Pretty dedicated. Isn’t it? I swear.

Michener:                   He wouldn’t tell who killed him.

Interviewer 1:             Because he was afraid if he lived then someone would really take care of him.

Michener:                   Well, maybe that or maybe it’s just a natural code among inmates.  Brought up not to snitch.

Interviewer 1:             Were blacks always isolated over in B, in Broadway?

Michener:                   No.

Interviewer 1:             Were they spread out throughout the prison?  Ok. In the earlier years, I know, up until about 1940, the blacks supposedly were isolated on Broadway in the first couple of tiers up there.

Michener:                   They may have been but they were generally, they were spread out.  To some extent. Probably a lot of them like a cell next to each other. But some of them were major trouble makers.  They… [Lyle] Groves, now there’s a man, he was really bad, he was a vicious, tough… And he was not [inaudible].

Interviewer 1:             You must have come just after [Al] Capone left, maybe a year, not quite a year or so?

Michener:                   Yes, I never saw Capone. Jack Giles did.

Interviewer 1:             Right, of course Giles was here at that time and Karpis. Was Kelly [George Kelly Barnes] here?

Michener:                   Machine Gun Kelly, yes.

Interviewer 1:             What was he like as an individual?

Michener:                   He seemed to me a rather harmless amiable sort of fellow.

Interviewer 1:             I’ve heard many rumors that his wife was the one that more or less ran the operation, that she had control of him.  I was just curious about…

Michener:                   I don’t know too much about his career.  I did meet him back in Leavenworth later after he was transferred back there just before I got out.

Interviewer 1:             Let’s go upstairs and see if we can find your cell.

Michener:                   There was a gun cage over there. And Barney Coy, he was the plumber around the place. He was a very skinny man. And he went for about 4 days of starving himself to get even thinner and he took all of his clothes off and greased himself and got up there with a pipe spreader, spread some of those pipes, I don’t know just where it was, the bars apart and got into the gun cage.  Now, the man in the gun cage had gone through that door down there to D block and when he came back out, why, Barney Coy jumped him. And got his guns and so forth.

Interviewer 3:             Well, how’d he get in there…

Michener:                   Oh, and then, as I said…

Interviewer 3:             But what’d he do? Did he climb up?

Michener:                   He climbed up there.

Interviewer 2:             Right there.

Michener:                   Is this the place where he went through?

Interviewer 1:             No, that’s not it.  He went up over here in the corner.  At that time, the crossbars weren’t in here.  The only bars they had were running up and down.

Michener:                   Up and down, correct. And, so it was fairly easy. He was a plumber, he had access to his tools so he could spread them. And he got through there. And I remember we were talking, seems to me the name of the guy was [Burt] Burch the guard, wasn’t it?

Interviewer 1:              Yeah, I believe so.

Michener:                   And he was a harmless old fellow, a nice guy and he was telling Jack and I about it later, he said he saw this guy flying out at him that was all legs [inaudible].

[Laughter]

Interviewer 1:             I’m sure he wasn’t expecting it. 

Michener:                   No.  And then they seized the guns down here. And there was a desk, right here. And another desk over there, that was Meathead’s [Edward Miller] desk where he… [Tape cuts out]

Interviewer 1:             Original menu that was here in March of ’62 that’s when they closed down.

Michener:                   We use to look at that every day and comment sarcastically.  Come in here, and I remember one time they had baked Texas turnips, or something like that. And we would say, ‘well, why the Texas?’ And Victory hash, that was during the war, that god damn steward, doesn’t he know any better to like something called Victory hash. [Laughter] Come along here and see. You pick up your, have your tray and go along there, and…

Interviewer 3:              Did you pick out the food as went? Was it…could you take a choice of anything?

Michener:                    Oh yeah, you could tell them what you want; light or heavy or… one of your friends on there and if they had stew why he’d go down to the bottom and pick the meat for you.

Interviewer 1:              Was it kind of…the philosophy that we’ve heard here was take what you want but eat what you take.

Michener:                   Yes, you generally have to eat pretty much everything, they wouldn’t be too critical about it but generally if you took something you really suppose to eat it.  That was the bake shop, in the kitchen back there. I’ve never been back there, but that’s where Karpis worked back there and smuggled things out of here.

Interviewer 1:             Did a lot of home brew back there, I think.

Michener:                   Oh yeah, that’s right. And, that was a favorite occupation around here, making home brew.

Interviewer 1:             They had access to all the yeast and everything back in the shop.

Michener:                   And smuggling coffee, everyone wanted coffee.

Interviewer 1:             They were telling us that they use to bring it out in the mop bucket a lot. Dirty water in the mop bucket because the guards wouldn’t want to dip their hands down in the dirty water in the mop bucket.

Michener:                   What used to be a great strategy around here was getting through those snitch boxes. Somebody bringing something in, not necessarily metal but then not only having the snitch boxes, but at the top of the stairs they’d have a man that would shake down the occasional ones, and shake them down. So they’d always send, if you wanted to get something in you sent someone ahead of you that would act just a little bit suspicious as if you were trying to avoid the guard and snatch him up and you could get right through.

Interviewer 1:             That was pretty clever.

Michener:                   There use to be an old grey [inaudible]… right out on this bank and we could look at big yellow flowered, the other side of that road there.  But it’s gone now.

Interviewer 2:             How about knowledge of censorship, as far as information coming into the prison and information going out?

Michener:                   Well, of course they didn’t’ allow any newspapers, after a long time they did allow sport sheets to come in but when I was first here it was pretty hard to get anything.  When the war was going on, they’d have a black board out there, they’d write down the names, score, of what was going on.  I remember… one day we came up through the gate there into the prison yard, or was I going out? I’m not sure. But they announced Pearl Harbor had been bombed.

Interviewer 2:             What was your reaction?

Michener:                   Oh, everyone was, generally, it was overjoy. They thought well now maybe they’d get out somehow.

Interviewer 2:             Maybe send us to go fight.

Michener:                   Yeah, there were all kinds of attitudes.

Interviewer 2:             How about at the end of the war? Same kind of reaction?

Michener:                   Yeah, well, no, some of the men hoped that Nazis were going to win against. Hope against hope. And when they had the blackout here they were lighting newspapers and throwing them down in the corridors so if any enemy bombers came over they could see the lights. A lot of pretty stupid foolish things.

Interviewer 2:             Was there some problem between the warden out here and the mayor of San Francisco as far as leaving the…

Michener:                   Lights? Yeah. They didn’t want to, they were very averse to shutting off the lights over here and finally they did, they made them shut them down. 

Interviewer 1:             What I think we’ll do now is walk back down Broadway and we’ll come back up C Block and go into isolation. But what I’d like to do is, if we get close to a group or something we’ll just kind of drift on by them because what will happen is that you’ll get people starting to come over and they want to hear what’s going on and it starts disrupting our situation and it’s probably not good for you either.

Interviewer 3:             This is the nicest way to see it, really.  He was so afraid he’d have to come up here and go through one of the tour things. You know, because…

Interviewer 1:             No. We try and you know, anyone that comes out…

Interviewer 2:             Seems like there was a massive modification in this...

Interviewer 1:             After ’46.  This may have been put in even later than that because they did have a little gun place here where a man could come up and look in, as an alternate because they said something, if something happened over here, they didn’t have any place over here that they could have added protection so they put this little hole in here.

Michener:                   Yeah, that wasn’t there when we were here.

Interviewer 1:             I think there were a lot of things that changed after the ’46 riot because they found out they couldn’t hardly do anything in the main cell block here. 

Michener:                   Here were the steps up to the hospital.

Interviewer 1:             Right, right.  It’s very blank up there now, there’s nothing left up there whatsoever.  We’ll just drift on past these people here and go down the other end.  

Michener:                   Don’t you think it would help kids out a lot when they were young if they were taken on a tour of an actual jail or prison and see the misfits and the horrible things men can do to themselves?

Interviewer 1:             I think if you could, you know, work it in conjunction with possibly people that are coming here could also go to a place where there are people involved, where they can’t get funny and they can’t laugh about it because there are human beings involved.

Interviewer 3:             You know, my husband and I went through the Ohio State penitentiary when we were there [inaudible]. And the company was taken through the penitentiary.  Do you know that it made the greatest impression on me of anything that I ever done in my life that was such a group, a quartet that sang for us, and this man that took us through was, oh he was so intelligent, and so great, and he explained all these things to us.  This quartet was a group of young men and they were so talented and here we set, and going through with this group of talent and recognizing this kind of talent and finding out that these men, these four men, were all in the corridor. And when we got all through and the man that did taking us through, got to the gate and said ‘well, this is as far as I can go with you. I’m in for life for murder.’  You know, I was very young and you know that it made a lasting, lasting impression on me and it was a long time before I really got over that experience because to see all of these people and see them actually in there.

Interviewer 1:             It does make a lot of difference.  In ’46, when they had the riot in ’46, of course [Joseph] Cretzer and [Bernard] Coy were trapped in the corridor.  And this utility corridor here was were they were killed, actually it was in this one right here. And what they did, is that they dropped grenades, concussion grenades, and you can see there is still a hole in the ceiling where they dropped and it went through and you can look at the floor here and see where they were exploded and actually I think there’s about 10 holes in the ceiling all the way across the roof line here and they dropped those bombs down into the corridor and when they came in after they had exploded these bombs they found Cretzer and Coy, dead, in this corridor right here.  And one of the other men, two of the men were sent to San Quentin and executed in San Quentin after it happened.  And [Clarence] Carnes was the only one that was left and the reason that he got survived the situation was he was only 19 at the time, or 20 I guess, 20, he’d been here about a year but he was the youngest prisoner ever to come to Alcatraz at that time I believe, pretty close, one of the youngest.

Michener:                   I was in that cell over there that night they dropped all those grenades in here. [Makes shudder sound] You’d ever hear them rattling all over and…

Interviewer 1:             You mean actually, there were people actually in here when they were dropping them?

Michener:                   Oh sure, I was.  There were a lot of prisoners over in there when they were dropping the grenades.

Interviewer 1:             Well I’ll be darned. 

Interviewer 2:             That must have scared the crap out of them.

Michener:                   Oh yeah.  They may have been dead by then but they kept on dropping those grenades and then it was rough, it was dark.

Interviewer 1:             What we’ve got, we’ve got a group of people that are just now going into D Block over there, what we’ll do is wait until they get finished and then we can drift in on our own and kind of look around.  We have about a 5 minute, 7 minute break between tours there.

Michener:                   I’ve never been into D Block.

Interviewer 1:             Oh, you never had any chance to spend any time over there, huh.

Interviewer 2:             Congratulations.

Interviewer 3:             What is D Block?

Interviewer 1:             That’s the isolation block. It’s the newer one that was built to take the place of the one over on A Block, the old ones that he was talking about.

Interviewer 3:             I see, this is the one where Jack [Giles] nearly lost his sanity.

Michener:                   No.

Interviewer 3:             No? Isn’t it?

Michener:                   Meathead did like Jack [Giles] very much. And he said ‘well, he didn’t hurt anyone’ and so he had to put him in there for a while just as a matter of form but he kept him in there for 30 days.

Interviewer 1:             Was that when he was going to escape, after his interrogation?

Interviewer 3:             Where was the one he was in for…

Michener:                   That was up in Salem.  Salem, Oregon, he was very young.

Interviewer 1:             Well, I’m sure I’ve met another man, who was the other guy that was out here, that you worked with for while? That went back, that got busted on a charge and had to go back for a while but he’s out again. 

Interviewer 2:             [Robert] Guilford.

Interviewer 1:             Guilford.  Do you know John [Robert] Gilford?  John [Robert], he’s supposedly spent 97 days in cell 13, which is a strip cell, or 14, I guess, 14.

Interviewer 3:             What do you mean a strip cell?

Interviewer 1:             Well, it’s a cell that they take all of your clothes off and put you in there without anything on and I guess this was a common practice, not a common practice but more of an extreme punishment situation and that was the top of  the line punishment basically here.  I don’t know how often it happened, we don’t have anything that we can go back and check on.  Just by talking to people and of course you know sometimes, you don’t know whether to believe somebody when they tell you they did all this, if they are telling you because they want you to think it was really bad, or if it really did happen, because we found a hard time getting really accurate material here.  On both sides, you know you talk to a correctional officer and he’s not always going to give you accurate material because he maybe wants to glorify things a little bit too.  So you really have to weigh things carefully a lot of times and come up with, after you talk to a number of people, maybe a standard situation and work from there.  So you have certain extremes.

Michener:                   Basically, I think that they treated us well.  In federal, in this place, there wasn’t any brutality as far as, I never saw a prisoner get hit or, and I think the ones that, if they ever were roughed up they asked for it.

Interviewer 1:             Deserved it?

Michener:                   Yeah.

Interviewer 1:             You know the correctional officers carried a sand billy and it’s pretty heavy and I wondered if you knew anybody that got whacked by one of those. Seems like it would put a pretty good knot on you head if you got.

Michener:                   I didn’t know that they did carry that, and I never saw anyone get hit.

Interviewer 1:             That’s interesting.

Michener:                   In fact, I’ve never seen any actual violence. I suppose that fellow Groves, that got, I’m not sure, can’t remember his name, got stabbed up there on Broadway, up on the tier, came down there holding his stomach and the beans spilling out.

Interviewer 1:             That must have been… Hmmh.

Interviewer 2:             Was Bumpy [Ellsworth Raymond] Johnson here when you were here?

Michener:                   You mean Warden?

Interviewer 2:             No, Bumpy was a black gentleman, I believe Washington D.C., he was a murder incorporator [mob boss]. He was here for several years.

Michener:                   I wonder if that’s man was killed.  I can’t remember his name.

Interviewer 2:             He’s dead now.

Michener:                   He’s dead, he was a negro, heavyset, a young negro and that probably, seemed to me vaguely that his name was Johnson. I’m not sure of that.

Interviewer 2:             There’s prisons where you see a lot of violence between inmates.  Did you see that here? Was that common?

Michener:                   Yes, well among a few of them, there were these, negroes got involved in homosexual activities with some of the others.  That, I think, was the principal cause of violence and…

Interviewer 1:             What type of homosexual activities were, you know, took place here? Was it something that was prevalent, like it is in most other prisons or was it something that was kind of low key here?

Michener:                   Very low key as far as I know. There were a few homosexual men and then, of course, putting them in a place like this…

Interviewer 1:             Bound to be. For sure, for sure.

Michener:                   …make them worse. So they’d have their love affairs and be some jealousies. But that was mostly, seemed to me, among the coloreds. I never saw any instances in the whites.

Interviewer 1:             Well, I think it’s interesting because I don’t’ know how they can expect people when they are put in an all male situation not to have problems and I don’t think it’s really a problem, it’s more of a release situation than anything else and they tend to, it is a problem that’s what they refer to it as in a prison systems. And I know Atlanta and I know Leavenworth both have a major homosexual faction and…Do you think it’s becoming more prominent in the prisons, something that is being, their not coming down as hard on the prisoners as they use to?  Do you think they’re more accepted in that situation?

Michener:                   In a place like Leavenworth, I saw a great deal of it.  There weren’t any guards around and you could see guys making love, openly. And all that sort of thing.  In Alcatraz, there wasn’t the opportunity for it, and

Interviewer 1:             Small amount of people.

Michener:                   Small amount of people, and closely watched.  And so they needed someplace out on the yard, [crosstalk] something like that they could manage any kind of activity.

Interviewer 1:             Ok, let’s go on over here and see if we can get in here.

Michener:                   They had the library over here.

Interviewer 1:             That’s right. I’ll talk to you for just a second and maybe you can explain a little bit about how you went about getting books, how you turned your books back in and things like that?

Michener:                   Well, yeah, we had little library catalogues and you could, with numbers on the books and you could mark your, the numbers, listed numbers on the library card and turn them in with your book, you just leave them in your cell on your pillow and they could reach in and pick them up and take them down and change your books. And then when you returned them you crossed off that number and always keep quite a few.

Interviewer 1:             So you were not allowed to come in here?  Right.

Michener:                   Oh no.

Interviewer 1:             This was always off limits. 

Michener:                   I think I was only in here once for some reason, that I can’t remember now.

Interviewer 1:             These kids over here, I’ll just tell you while we’re just talking. They’re all from the Delancy Street Foundation, are you familiar with the Delancy Street Foundation here in San Francisco? 

Michener:                   No.

Interviewer 1:             It’s a rehabilitation organization that is very highly recognized throughout the United States, it developed here in San Francisco where they take ex-prisoners and ex-drug offenders and they are in an unique program and what they do is bring kids over here to Alcatraz and they can take them through here and express the problems of being in prison. And it’s what you were talking about before but this is something that the National Park Service has worked out with them and we’ve developed a summer program where they do this and from here they go down to one of the local beaches and have a camp out and you know play games and do certain things like that.  And all the people that are teaching them are ex-offenders or ex-drug people.  So it’s worked out quite well.

Michener:                   I think it takes some…

Interviewer 1:             And some restaurants and quite a few enterprises that they [inaudible].  In fact, they were on Walter Cronkite about 2 weeks ago and on 90 minutes, they had a major segment on 90 minutes on TV. 

Michener:                   How nice, how nice.

Interviewer 1:             The man that was involved with getting the organization started here was an ex-Synanon man who was involved in that whole thing when it started and he didn’t’ like that idea so he moved on and developed something a little bit different here and it’s become very successful. 

Michener:                   Yeah. Sounds like a good idea.

Interviewer 2:             Synanon has remained so controversial. Whereas, Delancy Street doesn’t have a lot of [tape cuts out]

Interviewer 1:             [tape starts in the middle of conversation] This is because [Robert, “Birdman of Alcatraz”] Stroud was here in 41 and down in 21 for a while, before he was moved upstairs into the hospital.  But I guess he was carrying on a lot of activity in here during that period of time, yelling and screaming and hollering around and covered up under his mattress and everything.  You know, of which I can’t blame him.  They didn’t’ even take the people out of here when that was going on.  They just…

Michener:                   They were all in here. They got under, as you say, their mattresses, or under everything they could get and just shelling and shelling and rocked this place.

Interviewer 1:             But why, why? I can’t understand why they didn’t take the people out of here?  Oh, I know why.  They thought that Cretzer and Coy were in here at the time. A/B Block.  Yeah, that’s what it was.

Michener:                   As I understand it, as I remember it, they tried to get in here and it flashed some light, safety light, out in the armory.  They knew something was wrong so [H.W.] Weinhold came in to investigate it. And he walks around on the not Broadway but the next corridor there, and came around and they nailed him and put him in one of the cells over there.

Interviewer 1:             That’s right. They had about 9 people at one time in that cell and that’s when Cretzer got happy with the .45 and started blasting away at them. A couple of the individuals were killed.

Michener:                   I remember there was some stool pigeon over on that cell on that  far side, and as [H.W.] Weinhold was walking along the corridor coming in from the armory to see what was wrong, he walked up there and this guy didn’t’ say a thing. But Weinhold confronted him later and said ‘you bastard, you let me walk right in there to my death’. He said, ‘if you wanted to do some snitching, [inaudible] it would have done you some good. 

Interviewer 1:             Did they have a number of stool pigeons here?

Michener:                   Oh yeah.

Interviewer 1:             Quite a few?

Michener:                   A few. That’s right. Yeah.

Interviewer 1:             Now, does the word usually get out on who was stooling? [Crosstalk]  Pretty obvious I would say. Pretty obvious. Seems like…

Interviewer 2:             Do the guards get the word back? How’d it get back to them?

Michener:                   Oh, just from circumstances. Could only be 2 or 3 people it could possibly be.

Interviewer 2:             Process of elimination.

Interviewer 1:             I’m sure they’d become fairly unpopular too.

Michener:                   Oh yeah, they would.

Interviewer 1:             Little dangerous for them too I would say. Taking their life in their own hands.

Michener:                   Yeah. When they start doing that, yeah.  

Interviewer 1:             Well, this, you know, of course, this area is more controversial in the prison system.  It’s the only electrically monitored cells are right here in the very bottom. 

Interviewer 3:             These cells are larger than the ones on the top.

Interviewer 1:             Right, all these cells are larger because the men spent 24 hours a day in here, not allowed out, except for…

Michener:                   …some very short periods, when all of the people…

Interviewer 3:             They have an inner door here too.

Interviewer 1:             So when they opened this door these guys wouldn’t jump out at them.

Michener:                   The men in here, [crosstalk] at least once or twice a week at least, I think perhaps everyday, I’m not sure, but before we went to work they’d take these few men out and exercise outside. So, I think they all got out occasionally for exercise.

Interviewer 1:             Would it be some very small groups of these men in here right would go out? They wouldn’t take the whole group out?

Michener:                   No, just a few of them at a time.  They’d go out there and play handball.

Interviewer 1:             I’ve often wondered what it might have been like to have been a correctional officer here, being caged in this thing all the time too.  You know, you kind of wondered who’s on which side here sometimes. 

Interviewer 3:             [inaudible]

Interviewer 1:             Right.

Michener:                   See now, this is the door that Burch…he came through from that…

Interviewer 1:             Not the main…

Michener:                   [Inaudible] the main thing, that supervise from, probably from in here. They check every hour or so, come through and see if everything was alright.  While I was in here they looked at that gun cage on the outside.

Interviewer 1:             Now what had happened, right, there was an individual in here who was part of the plot and he started raising a ruckus in here and they knew that when he did that the man would have to come in here and check on it.  So when he came in here, the other man went up, it had to be within 2 minutes.  2 minutes or so. 

Interviewer 3:             That’s timing.

Interviewer 1:             Oh they had it down to a minute fraction.

Michener:                   What did happen, what was quite impressive, was to get the key to this door to let them out into the yard.  They had, I’m not sure which…

Interviewer 1:             Second cell. Second cell, I believe.

Michener:                   They threw him in there, and he could get, reach the key to that door and hid it in there someplace.

Interviewer 1:             In the stool, down in the neck of the stool.  Down below.

Michener:                   Down in the..? That’s where it was. So, they tried to come in and get it and they had about 6 or 7 of these guards in the cell and the guys – [Joe] Cretzer just started firing into the group. [whistles]

Interviewer 1:             Only 2 people got really hurt, or 2 people died out of that situation.  But out of 9 people, he emptied a couple of clips in there or something.  It was amazing that nobody else…

Michener:                   [H.W.] Weinhold, got his lung punctured, I remember. He was in the hospital for a long time but he didn’t die. But they played dead, for one thing.

Interviewer 1:             Oh yes.  For a day and a half, nobody could get to them for a day and a half.  One of them bled to death I think was his situation.  But the interesting thing that we heard talking to numerous people is that when he hid the key in here, he wrote on the of the bottom sheet in the bed what he had done with the key so if he got killed they would know where it was and what had happened and that was kind of an interesting story.  One of the men told us about that that was a correctional officer out here. 

Michener:                   Those are the things that I don’t know. But they, another guy got killed up here during that riot.  They were trying to get into that, I’m not quite sure how it happened, but somewhere around this door, another guard got killed. 

Interviewer 1:             I’m not sure.

Michener:                   Trying to get into the, from the outside.

Interviewer 1:             I don’t’ know. Well, I tell you, what we can do from here is, if you are interested, we can go down and look at the showers, there’s not much down there…

Michener:                   No.

Interviewer 1:             …but if you’re interested or we can walk on out here and go around the other side of the Island, and see what’s there.

Michener:                   Yes, I’d like to see what’s out there.

Interviewer 1:             Please watch your steps as you are going down there. [Wind]

[Tape 2 – Side A]

Interviewer 1:             Tuesdays and Saturdays were supposedly shower days.

Michener:                   Yeah.

Interviewer 1:             And then you had your recreation Saturday afternoons and Sundays. 

Michener:                   No, it was on Sundays.

Interviewer 1:             Now did you have a choice on Sunday whether you went to church or had recreation?

Michener:                   Well, I can’t remember anything about church, I don’t’ think anyone…[laughter] as far as I know any one went.

Interviewer 1:             That’s kind of the point I was trying to make. Church was carried on at the same time that you had recreation basically, wasn’t it?  Most people just didn’t’ want to go to Church, would rather come out.

Michener:                   I don’t’ think, they may have been some people but I can’t’ remember anyone.

Interviewer 1:             What activities?

Michener:                   Well, Jack [Giles] used to play handball right in this court up here and when they waiting for time out or something, they’d sit on those steps down there and watch the other guys.  Jack [Giles] was a pretty good handball player. 

Interviewer 1:             You said Giles was good. Yeah.

Michener:                   [Seagulls in background] And they played horseshoes and all the fellows would walk up and down by that wall over there. And over there they used to get out and play baseball, softball and when they weren’t doing that they would sit over there and play bridge.

Interviewer 1:             Seemed like to me, most of the pictures that I look at they were all huddled over there in the far corner playing bridge.

Michener:                   Playing bridge. It’s out of the wind. 

Interviewer 1:             Yeah, right.

Michener:                   Then some guy, John Chase, he used to come out. He did some painting out here.

Interviewer 1:             Oh really?

Michener:                   Yeah, they’d draw, work out here, [loud engine noise] some of them. Basketball standards weren’t there.

Interviewer 1:             Yeah, that was 1960 again.  A lot of stuff done out here during that period of time, I don’t’ know exactly what brought it all about.  Do you notice anything missing out here, if you look around?  Something of major importance?

Michener:                   The tower.

Interviewer 1:             That’s right,

Michener:                   What did you do?  Pull it out?

Interviewer 1:             No, what happened it was becoming very weak so we decided when we first took over out here that we would take it down.  So we pulled the tower down, it was a hazard.  We thought maybe it would fall on somebody so we had to. 

Michener:                   Yeah, it was right over me as I worked in the garden and I talked to the guard up there and we’d discuss something.

Interviewer 1:             I’m sure that the guards had their solitary confinement being stuck in a tower all day long too, they had to serve and 8 hour shift.  What did they call it the gold fish bowl or something like that?

Michener:                   Most of the guards were pretty, pretty decent fellows.  I can remember only one or two that rather obnoxious. [Fog horn in background]

Interviewer 1:             In talking with them, did most of them enjoy their jobs out here to a certain extent compared to other prisons?  Do you have any feelings about?

Michener:                   I think so, yes. Generally, the guards here were higher I think that in the other federal penitentiaries.  There were some very reasonable men, Jack [Giles] used to like to talk to a lot of them. They went along with it very well. 

Interviewer 1:             Well, you ready to mosey on down the way? We’ll go around and see your garden.

Michener:                   [tape cuts] and we were out of the wind, we tore up these 2 x4s and the horseshoe pits and made fires

Interviewer 1:             So they had men all the way around the outside here.

Michener:                   Yeah, there must have been 100 marines around these walls and they were ready to shoot.

Interviewer 1:             I’ve heard different stories.  One guy that was over here from Treasure Island where they came from, said he was a baker and he didn’t’ know a damn thing about a gun or anything else.  They just gave him a gun and told him to come on over here that he’d be guarding some prisoners.  [Michener laughs] And he said half the guys didn’t even know what was going on and he said a lot of them wanted to get into some action, they wanted to shoot, you know, they actually wanted to get involved and shoot some bullets around.

Michener:                   Oh yeah, sure they would be very happy to. Well, [inaudible]

Inteviewer 1:               Maybe you could point out a few things from right here while we’re standing up at a higher level.

Michener:                   I planted all of this. [Edward J. Miller] Meathead gave me a job first job as the gardener on this side of the fence and he wanted all this mesembryanthemum [Latin plant name, not sure what plant Michener is speaking of] planted so I planted it piece by piece.  A lot of it’s gone by now, it was solid once. And, this is new down there, that wasn’t’ there when we were here.

Interviewer 1:             I think they converted that into a snitch box situation down there.  It was kind of communications, west side communications area there.

Michener:                   They had a snitch box down at the bottom thing there and that was all it was, as you came up the steps. That’s brand new.  And of course you know all about, I used to go around there and down there and chase shag balls down below there.

Interviewer 1:             When they knocked them over the fence?

Michener:                   Yeah, over the fence. I’d go along this narrow bit of bluff along the end, crawl down and get.  Then they’d knock them over this side too, but I had the freedom of the whole place on Saturdays and Sundays when we were playing ball so I could.

Interviewer 1:             When you were here, did you ever have baby seagulls like they have down there right now? 

Michener:                   Oh yes!

Interviewer 1:             Was that a situation that I’m sure must have been kind of enjoyable for the men to watch the little gulls grow up.

Michener:                   They weren’t up on this part of the Island but down along the incinerator, down there, just over the outside of the fence, we use to watch them along and when they first come up they’re very speckled, don’t look like gulls at all. 

Interviewer 3:             These are very young gulls right here.

Michener:                   Very young gulls.

Interviewer 1:             Learning to fly. See them? See it?  He’s just bouncing around down there.

Michener:                   I remember one New Year’s, day after New Year’s, I was working down at the incinerator, there was a pile of lumber along there and we got a drunk seagull.  Somebody got sick on the ferry and the seagull had eaten, cleaned it up.  So he was trying to walk along that.

Interviewer 3:             [Inaudible]

Michener:                   They could probably, some descendents of ?

Interviewer 1:             Cousins and…

Michener:                   Watch your step on

Interviewer 3:              I will.

Michener:                   Maybe how many thousand of times I’ve been up and down these steps.

Interviewer 1:             Well, I’m sure. [Seagulls]

Michener:                   Yup. And first I gardened here and on that hillside and this piece and down alongside the fence. Now there was a hedge before you came before down here and went straight down to the laundry on a

Interviewer 1:             There’s a little pathway that goes on down and this is the way we usually go down but we’ve had to fence it off  because we’ve had people sneaking down in there and stuff like that so we’ve put this fence around it.

Michener:                   And Jack [Giles] was quite a mycologist and I remember that, one time I took half an egg shell that came up this way from the laundry, up the path, and so I took the egg shell and put it on a little stem and very carefully marked it with some of the characteristics, I think it was an agaricus. Planted it over there where he’d be sure to see it coming up. [Laughter]

Interviewer 1:             Oh what a mushroom.

Michener:                   And here are my old fig trees.

Interviewer 1:             Yeah, they sure.

Michener:                   Yes, they have lasted a long time, just all these years.  I had a birdbath in here.  That’s part of it. 

Interviewer 1:             [laughter] Part of the birdbath. Right. Uh oh, careful. 

Michener:                   The …. I had it as a bowl. And around the bowl, I put some big brass wire and made it, set it in there with a bit of the arubia. Let’s see, ‘the bird of time? Has but a little way to fly, and lo the bird is on the wing.’

Interviewer 2:             Tell it. Tell it. [Laughter] Great.

Michener:                   I’ve eaten figs off of this tree.  Those are, that’s down on this side of the fence. …garbage that I’ve lugged up here to put in this bed.  That was pure hardpan.  Just…

Interviewer 3:             [Inaudible] is what it was.

Interviewer 1:             Well, we have done very little out here, work, I think it’s beautiful the way it is right now. 

Michener:                   Yes. It is. [Crosstalk]

Interviewer 1:             To see it growing naturally. 

Interviewer 3:             Here’s raspberries.

Interviewer 1:             We have blackberries all over the place, they are just thick out here, lot of blackberries in here.

Interviewer 3:             Look at them in there.

Interviewer 1:             They’re tasty. These are very good out here.

Interviewer 3:             Did you plant these?

Michener:                   No, this was all…

Interviewer 3:             Look at them over in there.

Interviewer 1:             These are crabapples? [Crosstalk]

Michener:                   No, I remember I had one of the most gorgeous [loud engine]  solid bank of them.

Interviewer 1:             There’s a walnut tree right here.

Michener:                   I believe that’s new.

Interviewer 2:             That’s new, yeah.

Michener:                   No, the plant I remember is the fig trees on both sides of the fence there.  And there’s where the guard tower was, right there.  And let’s go down and look for the old greenhouse, I thought

Interviewer 1:             Sneak through right here. You get a lot of people down here looking at it already.

Michener:                    Yup, you’d open the door there and a lot of the glass, it’s all there, I could go in there and stay in there, the guard at the top could see me in here.  Except when I was doing something I wasn’t’ suppose to do and then I’d manage to kind of work in the center.[laughter]

Interviewer 2:             Did you work at the center? Or in rows?

Michener:                   Well, I, over there I had some work benches and with flats, flowers with seeds on them.

Interviewer 3:             [Inaudible]

Interviewer 1:             You did? Where’d you leave it?

Interviewer 3:             I don’t know. This nice young man brought it to me.

Interviewer 1:             Well, good for him.

Michener:                   Can you get a picture of my greenhouse, Robin?

Robin:                         I’m trying to now.

Michener:                   Winehold, once he found out I was interested in doing something, why he would make sure that, there’s even an old piece of the glass. 

Robin:                         Stand still now.

Interviewer 1:             There’s the window.

Michener:                   25 years ago I guess I put that in there, close to it.  The old cable next to it.

Interviewer 1:             Must be interesting to come back.

Michener:                   Yes, it is.

Interviewer 1:             This is the one thing that we’ve always had a kind of special interest in too, wondering…

Robin:                         How and when.

Interviewer 1:             …how and what was going on here.  That’s right.

Michener:                   Every bit of it. Laid the brick and put in the gullet. Some of these pieces were cut for me down at the wood shop but it was all second hand glass from old windows they had taken out someplace and took it all up, cleaned it up, put it in.

Interviewer 3:             I don’t suppose there’d be anything wrong if I took one of these? Would there?

Michener:                   No.

Interviewer 1:             What’s that? Have her stick it in her purse so no one else sees it.  We get a lot of people out here wanting to uh…

Michener:                   I was standing right here one time and I had a bush over there and had some penstemons and a little hummingbird came along and sat on that bush there and I picked that penstemon over and very carefully put it over to the hummingbird it sat there and drank from it. They used to dive bomb around here.

Interviewer 1:              We have a lot of fun with the hummingbirds out here.

Michener:                   Oh look at that.

Interviewer 3:             Skyline, huh?

Michener:                   No, just looking at that used to be solid with mesembryanthemum.

Interviewer 1:             We have a lot of sour grass out here. 

Michener:                   Oxalis.

Interviewer 1:             Oxalis yes. It fills the hillside up during the early part of the spring.

Interviewer 3:             [Inaudible]

Interviewer 1:             A lot of that is rose bushes there. [Michener and Interviewer 3 converse in background]

Interviewer 1:             I’m not a rose specialist as you can tell.

Interviewer 3:             Did you plant all of this?

Michener:                   All of that?  There was a little up there when I started and I planted the whole thing once and it was just solid with.  They started blooming in…

Interviewer 1:             It sure is pretty.

Michener:                   You could really see it in San Francisco.

Interviewer 2:             You still can, when it growing on the other side over here.

Michener:                   [Inaudible] The garden when I was coming from the, shook me down.

Interviewer 1:             That’s when you would bring all you treats through.

Michener:                   Yeah, that’s right. 

Interviewer 2:             How about this little building down here. 

Michener:                   That’s new. It wasn’t there when I was here [wind].

Interviewer 1:             That’s a little garden shack. Looks like somebody worked over in this area. Possibly.

Interviewer 2:             Did you work down in this area any?

Michener:                   No, no I didn’t.  [loud engine and wind] while I was inside workin in the Warden’s House, coming over, visit Jack [Giles].

Interviewer 2:             [Inaudible] features down there…

Michener:                   Yes, I think that’s it. I wasn’t here then, was before my time.

Interviewer 1:             He was, Mr. Michener was telling me about, were you down there when we were talking about Franklin?  And when he took off from the hobby?  Remember when he was out here last and he was telling us how they made the motors and stuff up, or [Floyd] Hamilton I mean. And he was going to be in on that little escape.

Michener:                   I was working with the same detail and just about that time, they had that strike in the laundry and I got thrown into isolation and when I came back out, they made me work in the laundry for a little while and then they, I didn’t’ like that so . [Edward J. Miller] Meathead finally let me garden over on that side of the fence, the other side.  I remember I was working just the other side of the fence when I heard the shooting that day.  The shooting at the guys in the water as they got out.  I didn’t know the actual plan, I knew they had something going but I didn’t want.

Interviewer 1:             It was so funny listening to him tell the story because he had built this board and had actually put a fake seagull up on top of it or something that he could, kind of match the water, that looked like a seagull was floating on this piece of wood in the middle of the water.

Michener:                   Well, that was pretty good.  That was from the old model shop down there, the old model shop.  A guard killed once up on top if that, before my time, I don’t know.

Interviewer 2:             Did you know Floyd [Hamilton] fairly well?

Michener:                   Yeah, he wasn’t a friend of mine, I just knew him. 

Interviewer 2:             He was back out here yesterday.

Michener:                   Yeah, someone told me. [Crosstalk]

Interviewer 1:             It’s been busy out here the last week or so.

Michener:                   There used to be another greenhouse right down there by the incinerator.  About 8ft this side of the [wind] fence.  You got no fence up around down there but I use to have an escape plan to work down there.  And I was going to the chain link fence around that wall just this side of the incinerator was very rusty and knew that I could work it out.  So what I was going to do was to put a GI [Government Issue] can there with the lid on it, and have the side cut out of the GI can so I could get right there and work on this wire and get through and drop down and be out of sight of the guard, he couldn’t see down that cliff.  And then I was going to have a, I started making it in the greenhouse there, a can with an extension, a plastic extension around the outside.  Clear plastic so it would hold a little water on top, a tube coming up from underneath and a bellows on the bottom of this, so that it would compensate for the up and down the lift of the waves and I could get in there, that is if the can started to come up with the water on top held in with this plastic ring would keep it down and if I started to go down, the bellows at the bottom would drag in a little more air and stabilize it.  And I’ve always meant to try that out since I’ve got out to see if it would work. [Laughter]

Interviewer 1:             A little experiment.

Michener:                   Yes. You only get one shot at it.  I remember I was working on it in the greenhouse there one day with some rubber tubing that I had and I didn’t hear the gate open and one of the lieutenants came along, I cant’ remember which one it was now, and opened the door, I knew I must have given a hell of a guilty start but he looked at it and I guess he…

Interviewer 1:             Sprinkling device.

Interviewer 2:             You had to make a story.

Interviewer 1:             That’s interesting.

Michener:                   Yeah, you uh, it seems strange but you put in a good part of your life in one of these places and it has a, no matter how darn make it seem, might it seem to someone else as useless but it’s part of your life and has some meaning for you.

Interviewer 1:             I was telling you about the catwalks, you can see how those have rusted through.

Michener:                   Oh look, all those concrete guard royals they had along there, they’re all gone.

Interviewer 1:             Right.  Bees love that don’t they?  Was this out here when you were here?

Michener:                   I guess it was, I’m not sure. 

Interviewer 1:             This is one of my favorites. See that one that’s under there?

Michener:                   Oh yes!

Interviewer 1:             I really like that, I think that’s really a nice looking cactus. 

Interviewer 3:             Was this another greenhouse?

Michener:                   That wasn’t’ there when I was here.  It looks older than mine but I can’t.

Interviewer 1:             It’s possibly. You know sometimes things might have been here, if you dint’ have much association with them, as time goes by, you tend to forget about things like that, especially if they weren’t important in your

Michener:                   That’s right, some of the things up there aren’t quite the way I remember.

Interviewer 1:             Have you ever seen geraniums this size?

Michener:                   Oh, yeah

Interviewer 3:             They’re beautiful.

Interviewer 1:             You don’t’ see geraniums that are grown in this capacity very often, these are like trees.

Michener:                   I want to take a cutting.  And when Jack was up here before he took some, we got geraniums from the rock.  This is Martha Washington [geranium, var.]. 

Interviewer 2:             Beautiful contrast.

Interviewer 1:             Yeah, just try to keep them under cover because we tell all our people that come out here that they not allowed to. [Background talk] I’m trying to think there use to be a gentleman that used to be a secretary for Johnston when he was here and he was here for a number of years but he was a botanist and had an interest in plants and he planted these New Zealand, well this is his tree, this New Zealand Christmas, that’s what he calls it over here.  But he’s been out a number of times to check on his plants and see how they are doing and everything else.

                                    Boy the blackberries are getting ripe, getting ready to eat.

Michener:                   Oh yeah, I can’t, as far as I know there were never any blackberries on the Island.

Interviewer 3:             Look at them over there.

Interviewer 1:             Well, they’ve sure taken over you know, they run right in.

Michener:                   This whole area was pretty well trimmed and taken care of when I was here.

Interviewer 1:             Right, well this type of thing would have poured too much of cover.

Michener:                   Oh that’s right.  That makes sense, they had to be careful of that. 

Interviewer 3:             Now what type of flower is this?

Michener:                   I don’t know. 

Interviewer 1:             That’s mallow.  I would say it’s in the morning glory family.

Interviewer 3:             I was going to say it has that kind of feel.

Michener:                   Yes, the blackberries are taking over aren’t they.

Interviewer 2:             What do you call this tree?

Michener:                   I don’t know. I’m not a botanist.

Interviewer 3:             Jack [Giles] would I bet.

Michener:                   It looks very much to me like a flowering eucalyptus. 

Interviewer 3:             I think it is too.

Interviewer 2:             Looks that way.

Michener:                   The blossom on it is very much like, yeah. There’s so many…

Interviewer 3:             Varieties [Inaudible]. I’m sure that’s a eucalyptus.

Michener:                   What am I thinking of? I don’t know too much…

Interviewer 1:             Looks like a Bottlebrush.

Interviewer 2:             Yeah, it does. From Australia.

Interviewer 3:             Well, David, Isn’t Australia where they brought in the eucalyptus trees from?

Interviewer 1:             Yes. [Crosstalk]

Interviewer 3:             But it sure has a eucalyptus look.

Michener:                   There are a number of kind of eucalyptus.

Interviewer 3:             These are going to harden, these little seed pods. Yeah, that’s a eucalyptus. [Inaudible crosstalk]

Interviewer 2:             Was the structure still on Treasure Island when you got here?

Michener:                   Yes.  They were getting it fixed for one of the World’s Fairs then.  Seems to me they were building both of the bridges then.

Interviewer 2:             They opened the Golden Gate Bridge in ’39 I think, they opened up this one in ’37. 

Interviewer 1:             Was that what it was? 

Interviewer 2:             They finished with this but I looked it up the other day and showed people walking across in ’39.

Interviewer 1:             Well, I’ll be darned.

Interviewer 2:             I thought that was about 3 years later.

Michener:                   Who was Eschscholtz [Johann Friedrich von Eschscholtz, German botanist]?  Was he a colonel or a general?  He visited the Island and Eschscholzia [California poppy] is named after him.

Interviewer 1:             Well, I have no idea.

Michener:                   He was a German that came over here just prior to the gold rush. He visited the Island. 

Interviewer 1:             You can sure see a difference too, you can figure out.  The dark ones are beautiful.  The deep ones. 

Michener:                   Had an office right in there.

{Interview ends}

Description

An interview with Elliot Michener about his time as a prisoner on Alcatraz during the 1940's. Interview conducted while walking around Alcatraz, various background noises are prevalent.

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