Escape from Alcatraz
I AM CHATTING with a man who is sitting directly across from my jumpseat. He’s older, gentlemanly, speaking in a slow, southern drawl. He asks the usual questions. How long have I been a flight attendant? Where do I fly? How many flights have I flown today? I don’t mind the inquiry. This may be the first time he has had an opportunity to speak to a flight attendant on a more personal level.
He asks where I’m from. When I tell him I grew up in San Francisco, he tells me about his visit to the city by the Bay. He describes the highlights of his trip, the drive down the crookedest street in the world, a cable car ride, Fisherman’s Wharf, a tour of Alcatraz.
I confess I’ve never been to Alcatraz, but would like to see it someday. He tells me he went to school with the two brothers who escaped The Rock. No trace of the two men was ever found and to this day, no one knows if they were eaten by sharks or made it to shore.
Instantly intrigued, I ask about growing up in a small southern town with these boys. “Did they get into trouble? Steal bicycles? Hurt animals? Were they bad seeds as children?”
“No,” my passenger says. “There were 11 kids in the family and John and Clarence were nice boys, quiet types who went to school, helped around the farm.”
Then they started robbing banks, getting arrested, serving time in jail. They escaped from jail in several states, and that is how they ended up in Alcatraz prison. No jail could hold them, but ‘inescapable’ Alcatraz surely could.
I ask if he thought they survived the prison break and the swim to shore through cold, shark-infested San Francisco Bay. He smiled and told me a few years ago on a visit back home, he had lunch with their youngest brother, nicknamed Man because of his serious expression as a baby.
He asked Man if he had ever heard from his brothers. Were they alive? Man just shook his head and said he didn’t know, they never contacted him. He had no idea.
“However,” Man told him, “When Mother died, two of the ugliest women I’ve ever seen came to the funeral and cried bitterly over the casket.”