My Web Site - Children of Alcatraz

Children of Alcatraz: Growing Up on the Rock

Military Prison 1861-1934

Almost from the beginning, Alcatraz also housed a military prison. Bessie Crabbe got to know the Hopi Indians brought to Alcatraz in 1894 because they refused to let their children be sent to a government boarding school.
Some prisoners were still kids themselves. Fifteen–year-old Walt Stack lied about his age to join the army, but then left his post while stationed in the Philippines in 1925. Locked up on Alcatraz for desertion, he suffered through months of hard labor in the quarry and mistreatment by the older prisoners. Walt became an accomplished runner and swimming and is the only known inmate to ever success.
Some of the inmates were dangerous and kept locked up away from the families. But those convicted of nonviolent crimes like desertion and refusal to serve in the army worked around the island. Some cut the children’s hair in the post barbershop. Others called “pass men” worked for the families cooking, cleaning, and even babysitting. One prisoner known as Mason accompanied three-year-old Kenneth Michaelwaite all over the island, as the young boy checked out the foghorns and watched the ferryboats pass by.
Wanda Harrington’s grandfather was head lighthouse keeper in the 1920’s. From her bedroom in the lighthouse quarters, she could look right into the prisoners’ assembly room on the top level of the prison. There, twice a week, the families attended movie screenings right along with the convicts. Wanda and her friend Jacquie Schneider perched at the prisoners’ feet, while the adults sat in wicker chairs along the wall. On her eighth birthday the men showered Wanda with gifts.

Read an another excerpt from the book.

Further Reading

Babyak, Jolene. Breaking the Rock: The Great Escapes from Alcatraz. Berkeley, CA: Ariel Vamp Press, 2001.
Babyak, Jolene.Birdman: The Many Faces of Robert Stroud. Berkeley, CA: Ariel Vamp Press, 1994.
Babyak, Jolene. Eyewitness on Alcatraz: Interviews with Guards, Families and Prisoners Who Live On the Rock, Berkeley, CA: Ariel Vamp Press, 1988.
Bunting, Eve. Someone is Hiding on Alcatraz Island. New York: Berkley Publishing Group, reissue edition ,1994.
Chandler, Roy F. and E. F. Chandler. Alcatraz: The Hardest Years 1934-1938. Jacksonville, NC: Iron Brigade Amory Publishers, 1989.
Choldenko, Gennifer. Al Capone Does My Shirts. New York: G.P. Putnam, 2004.

Fortunate Eagle, Adam. Heart of the Rock. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002.
Johnson, Troy. The Occupation of Alcatraz Island. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1996.
Esslinger, Michael. Alcatraz: A Definitive History of the Penitentiary Years. San Francisco, CA: OceanView Publishing, 2003.
George, Linda. Alcatraz: Cornerstone of Freedom. Children’s Press, 1999.
Lagerson, Ernest B. Battle at Alcatraz: A Desperate Attempt to Escape the Rock. Omaha Nebraska: Addicus Books, Inc., 1999.
Martini, John A. Fortress Alcatraz: Guardian of the Golden Gate. Kailua, Hawaii: Pacific Monograph, 1990.
Odier, Pierre. The Rock: A History of Alcatraz – The Fort, The Prison. Eagle Rock, CA: L’Image Odier, 1997.
Quillen, Jim. Alcatraz From the Inside. Golden Gate Parks Association, 1991.
Weintraub, Aileen. Alcatraz Island Light: the West Coast’s First Lighthouse. New York: PowerKids Press, 2003.
Martini, John A. Fortress Alcatraz: Guardian of the Golden Gate. Kailua, Hawaii: Pacific Monograph, 1990.
Odier,Pierre. The Rock: A History of Alcatraz – The Fort. The Prison. Eagle Rock, CA: L’Image Odier, 1997

“Alcatraz Is Not An Island," Turtle Island Productions, 2001, narrated by actor Benjamin Bratt.
“Children of Alcatraz.” Center for Nonprofit Media, www.centerfornonprofitmedia.org
“Lonely Island: Hidden Alcatraz.” KQED, 2003.
“Secrets of Alcatraz,” KQED, GGNRA (date not available)

Published in The Inlander

Sept. 28, 2006

The Last Word

Rocky Childhood

LIFE IN THE BIG HOUSE. Years in prison, yet never accused of any crime. Unlawful detainees? No, the subjects of Claire Rudolf Murphy’s new book.

by MICHAEL BOWEN

You should see the big eyes when I tell people that my wife did time in prison. Then I lean in confidentially for effect: Yep, five years at Soledad. Two years in San Quentin.

And it’s true, though Dannie Loriano has no criminal record. It’s all because her father worked his way up from prison guard to associate warden and then on to the California parole board.

Yet Dannie says the best school she ever attended was a two-room schoolhouse inside the walls of a maximum-security prison. And what’s striking, in talking to my wife and to Claire Rudolf Murphy, author of Children of Alcatraz, is how normal the lives of prison guards’ families could be. Even when the neighbors were doing 25 to life.

The kids on the Rock, says Rudolf Murphy, “played baseball on the parade ground. They played football with a white ball that could be seen in the fog. They hung out at the corner store. They held dances — there was even a lover’s lane.” She’s describing what sounds like idyllic Bay Area lives back in the 1940s and ‘50s. But then she recounts the “tradition, every Christmas Eve, that they would sing Christmas carols at the warden’s house — and then to the prisoners.” In memoirs, inmates admit that they wept to hear the children’s voices at Christmas.

During the years when Alcatraz was a federal prison (1934-63), it housed Machine Gun Kelly, the Birdman and, in a typical year, about 50 children — prison guards’ kids, mostly, but also the children of service personnel and even the lighthouse keeper. Civilians tend to think that living inside a notorious federal penitentiary must somehow have been dangerous for the little tykes — yet in fact, says Rudolf Murphy, mothers worried more about their kids playing on ocean cliffs than about the prisoners. “Kids snuck around to places, as kids would, but in this case they were getting into places they were really not supposed to,” she says. “There were guard towers all over, and they thought they were getting away with stuff, but they were being watched.”

Children of Alcatraz had its origin some 30 years ago, when Rudolf Murphy took a bunch of sixth-graders on a field trip to the island. And what were the kids most curious about?

The escapes, of course: rifles and guard dogs, searchlights and city lights, barely a mile away over the freezing waters. Back in ’63, three inmates escaped and got themselves immortalized in a Clint Eastwood movie — but unlike all the other escapees (“either captured, or killed, or shot dead on the fence, or else their bodies were found,” says Rudolf Murphy), Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers were never discovered. Might they have made it?

You can see the school kids’ widening eyes. But then my wife knows all about prison danger. The better-behaved prisoners at Soledad, for example, were allowed to work as gardeners right outside the guards’ homes. “One gardener liked to build things for us — tepees, a mission church, a barn with fences,” recalls Dannie, who was 5 at the time. “But then my dad had him transferred away. He had murdered his wife.”

Dannie recalls that during her San Quentin years (two years inside the walls, then 15 years on an adjacent property), prisoners simply climbed over the fence every month or two. She remembers the red phone in her family’s home that, when it rang, made her dad holster his gun and hurry away. The light outside her bedroom window that turned red in case of a prison riot. Guards checking the trunks of cars and the backs of buses every time they left the gates. The playground rumor that, after every gas chamber execution, you’d be able to see a poisonous plume rising over Death Row.

Living in a place where armed guards might interrupt his daughter’s slumber parties, naturally a prison official like Bob Loriano would have worries and even nightmares. The toll on prison families could be heavy. Dannie recalls guards’ kids getting heavily involved in drugs and prostitution while still in high school; she remembers one guy who actually returned to San Quentin as one of the inmates.

The Alcatraz kids had their share of troubles too. Even if they have stories of the occasional alcoholic or abuser — “the kinds of problems you would find in any neighborhood,” says Rudolf Murphy — for most of them, the Rock was simply home. That’s why the most historically significant event in the history of Alcatraz, the Indian occupation of 1969-71, has upset so many conversations at Alcatraz alumni reunions.

When 68 unarmed Native Americans commandeered Alcatraz in protest of two centuries’ worth of broken treaties, the media played up the story, says Rudolf Murphy. “It was the whole underdog thing,” she says. “Everyone in the country knew that the Indians had been so poorly treated in all those wars. The San Francisco Chronicle ran the story the night they landed. Two days later, it was Thanksgiving, and restaurants in the city brought over boatloads of food. The Black Panthers came over, the motorcycle gangs showed up — everyone came out and partied on the Rock.”

The Alcatraz kids, now elderly, have different recollections. Even if the occupation marked the beginning of the American Indian civil rights movement, what they remember is the trash and the squalor: their former homes and neighborhood, desecrated. Because while most people associate places like San Quentin with guys in striped pajamas, and while tribal leaders can point to Alcatraz as the birthplace of Indian activism, for the kids who grew up on the Rock, it was simply a place they called home.