Bonnie and Clyde- A Twenty-First-Century Update Page 4
Marie Barrow was nine years old in 1927. She didn’t really understand all of the activity between the police and her two brothers, and her other siblings continued in their stable, law-abiding ways. Her sister Artie had a business going in Denison, Texas, where her husband worked for the local newspaper. Nell had gotten married to an orchestra leader, and Jack continued to raise his family on Forest Avenue.
Henry and Cumie were very concerned about the turn that events were taking with Clyde and Buck, but there was very little that they could do. They could only pray that things wouldn’t get any worse. But in 1928 things did become worse for both of the brothers. According to Clyde’s record, he was formally arrested in Fort Worth on February 22. The charge was described as “investigation,” and the charges were dismissed, but that fact didn’t give his parents any significant peace of mind.
On August 13, 1928, Buck Barrow was arrested in San Antonio on a charge of attempted car theft. Evidently, a policeman saw Buck walking down the street, carrying a small child and trying the door handles and ignition switches of parked cars. He finally selected a Whippet Roadster and was getting in when the officer confronted him. Buck ran but was captured. He was given a court date and released on bond but failed to appear. He was already under a suspended sentence from Waxahachie, so when he was later picked up, he was put in the county jail.1
Word of Buck’s arrest reached his parents in Dallas, and they decided to go down to San Antonio and provide whatever moral support they could. Henry, Cumie, L. C., and Marie were still living at the campground, so a 270-mile trip was a big deal. They didn’t have a car and couldn’t afford to take a train, so the family made the trip by horse and wagon.
The wagon was pulled down to San Antonio by the white horse Marie’s father used to move from the farm and pick up scrap metal. This same horse was later struck by a car crossing the west Dallas viaduct. The animal was run through by a piece of metal from that automobile, but it still managed to gallop all of the way back to the campground before it dropped dead. It wasn’t all bad, though. Henry Barrow collected damages from the driver and bought himself a Model T automobile. Marie said that the Model T was the only car that her father ever drove in his life and was also the first automobile she ever learned to drive.
The Barrow family didn’t travel down to San Antonio alone. They were accompanied by a Mrs. Jones and two of her three sons, William Daniel, always known as W. D., and Roy Lee. The older Jones boy was named Clyde. The Barrows knew the Jones family because they were living on the west Dallas campground too. Clyde Barrow and Clyde Jones were about the same age, L. C. and W. D. were friends, and Roy Lee and Marie were the youngest in each family. Four years later, W. D. Jones would beg to ride with Clyde Barrow, the famous outlaw.
Marie remembered the trip down to San Antonio very well. Not only did neither family have the money to afford any transportation by rail or automobile, none of them really had the money to afford the trip when traveling by horse and wagon either. They made their living expenses by picking cotton and doing other work on the farms along the way.
Henry Barrow was one of the best cotton pickers Marie ever saw. Picking cotton was very hard on his hands, though, and his fingernails would always come off after he’d been working for a long time. Ten-year-old Marie picked for one day, but when her sack was found to contain more twigs and leaves than cotton, it was unanimously agreed that she could do other tasks on these farms to earn extra money for the trip. All of the others in the Barrow-Jones traveling group continued to pick cotton. The money they earned bought food, which Mrs. Barrow and Mrs. Jones cooked over a campfire in heavy iron skillets.
The travelers finally made it to San Antonio, where the Barrows became involved in doing whatever they could to assist Buck, and the charge against him was dismissed on January 23, 1929.2 Everyone was very relieved, and they all returned to Dallas afterward. The relief would not last long, however. There were a lot of things the Barrow family didn’t know about Buck and Clyde’s activities. In fact, it was just a matter of time until both the brothers would make enough mistakes for the law to catch up with them.
Within the Barrow family, there were several opinions as to the causes of Clyde’s descent into a life of crime, and there probably was some truth to each of them. Clyde’s mother thought it had begun when Clyde started associating with some “wayward women” around west Dallas. She believed that the girls demanded to be treated in a grander style than Clyde could afford by working regular jobs, so he turned to crime for the money to impress the ladies.3
Nell Barrow and her sister Marie emphasized Clyde’s choice of companions as a big factor in his downfall. While this is undoubtedly true, the companion who may have been most responsible was Clyde’s own brother. Later, when Buck was serving his time in prison, he would tell fellow prisoners about the many burglaries he and Clyde had pulled over the years—including some as far away as Atlanta, Georgia.4 The stolen turkey flock in 1926 was probably not the first criminal partnership between the two brothers, and it certainly wasn’t the last during the years 1926–29.
While Marie Barrow and her sister Nell saw their brother Buck as a victim of circumstances and didn’t seem to blame him for Clyde’s troubles, they did point to some of Clyde’s friends.5 One fellow whom Marie and Nell both felt strongly about was Frank Clause. They say that Clyde met him at one of his last jobs, but other sources say it was at the city jail.6 Given Clause’s vocation, the latter seems more likely. Frank Clause was a good-looking young man from the city of Dallas proper, not the “wrong side of the tracks” area that was Clyde’s turf. He was also, in Marie Barrow’s words, a professional “second-story man.” He and Clyde were soon roommates, and beginning in early 1929, they joined some other local boys (probably including Buck) in a series of burglaries and house break-ins in Dallas, Lufkin, Hillsboro, and Waco, Texas.7
Ironically, Marie said that it was about this time that Buck came under the influence of the one person who could have made a big improvement in his life. After Buck and the family returned from San Antonio in early 1929, he began to date a girl in west Dallas. One night when Buck went over to this girl’s house, he met an eighteen-year-old named Blanche, who happened to be visiting at the same time. After this accidental meeting, Buck dropped his current girlfriend. He had found the love of his life.
Iva Blanche Caldwell was born on New Year’s Day, 1911, to Matthew Fountain Caldwell, age forty, and Lillian Bell Pond, age sixteen, of Garvin, Oklahoma.8 Most popular accounts state that Blanche came from a farm in Missouri, but this was not the case.9 At the time she met Buck, Blanche’s father was still living in the McCurtain County, Oklahoma, area, but her mother may have been in Missouri. Her parents had been separated for several years.
Marie Barrow knew Blanche from the time she and Buck met in 1929 until Blanche’s death in 1988. The Barrow family always spoke very highly of Blanche, and Marie often said that if Buck had met Blanche earlier, things might have been different. Perhaps, but while Blanche was probably never directly involved in any of the robberies or an actual shooter in any of the gunfights, she was not the passive, innocent girl some have said. Even less was Blanche the terrified, screaming, hysterical little wife that her portrayal by Estelle Parsons in the 1967 movie would suggest. She and several other Barrow family members were present for some of the filming of the movie, and, afterward, Blanche sued the movie company for the way they portrayed her.10
Blanche Caldwell Barrow
—Courtesy Marie Barrow Scoma and author Phillip W. Steele
Four years before her death, Blanche Barrow was interviewed by author John Neal Phillips about her time with Buck and Bonnie and Clyde. She made it clear that she was never forced to do anything. When she married Buck in 1931, she knew he had been married twice before, had two children, and was, at the time, an escaped convict.11 She also freely admitted that from March 1930 until December 1931, when Buck was at large, she went with him on several robberies before convincing him to
go back and finish his sentence. She may not have been particularly happy about the life she and Buck were leading, but, as she told Phillips, “Clyde never held a gun to my head. I was there because I wanted to be, plain and simple.”12 Unfortunately, it was just a few months after Buck met Blanche that he and Clyde got into their first really serious trouble.
Jan Fortune’s book, Fugitives, does offer some significant family information along with the errors the Barrow family correctly point out. According to Fortune, Nell actually came upon Clyde filing the motor numbers off a stolen car and went down-town with him when the police picked him up for questioning. Nell explained that the police told her Clyde and Frank Clause were cracking safes but she didn’t want to believe it.13
Clyde Barrow had been involved in burglary, safecracking, and car theft for at least three years by Thanksgiving 1929. The police had picked up Clyde and Buck on suspicion many times but couldn’t prove anything. Just after Thanksgiving, a road trip changed everything.
Buck and Blanche Barrow with unidentified child—probably a young relative. Taken around the time of their marriage in McCurtain County, Oklahoma, July 3, 1931.
—Courtesy the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum, Waco, Texas
On November 29, 1929, Clyde, Buck, and a fellow named Sidney Moore left Dallas in a stolen vehicle headed northwest toward Wichita Falls. In the small town of Henrietta, Texas, they traded their Buick for a Ford and began to cruise around for a score. They located an unoccupied house, and the break-in went smoothly, but the take was disappointing. Clyde found some jewelry, which he shared with the other two, but very little cash.
On the way home to Dallas, someone had a bright idea. Since they were going through Denton, why not look for another opportunity? They arrived just after 1:00 A.M. and settled on the Motor Mark Garage on Oak Street. They forced the rear door and found a small safe inside. After a few unsuccessful tries to crack the safe where it was, they loaded it into the car and took it with them.
It was just past 2:00 A.M. when their luck ran out. A patrol car saw them and wondered what a strange car was doing out that time of the morning. When the police tried to pull them over, Clyde, who was driving, took off, but the chase didn’t last long. Clyde took the corner from West Oak Street onto Piner too fast and broke the car’s front axle on the curb. Now the men were afoot. Officer Clint Starr shot Buck Barrow through both legs, and Moore stopped and gave himself up, but Clyde kept right on running. He hid under a house all that day and then hitchhiked back home. The owner of the Motor Mark later said that the safe contained only about $30.14 Buck and Sidney Moore were even caught trying to get rid of the jewelry from the Henrietta job.
On December 6, 1929, they were indicted, and the trial date was set for Tuesday the 17th. Buck and Sidney pled not guilty, and by noon they had rested their case—such as it was. The jury took just a few minutes to return a guilty verdict. Six days later, both were given four years, and on January 14, 1930, they were moved to the state prison at Huntsville.15 Buck assumed full responsibility for the affair. He never implicated his younger brother in connection with what happened in Denton.
Clyde lay low in west Dallas for several weeks after he made his way home. To the family, he seemed thoroughly unnerved by what had happened. As far as they knew, the action in Denton represented the first time Clyde had ever been the subject of a police chase, an automobile crash, and officers’ gunfire. They hoped the shock of Buck’s arrest and sentence and his own brush with capture might cause Clyde to resolve to walk the straight and narrow way, and he did—for a few weeks.
Clyde began to return to his friends from earlier years. On the evening of January 5, 1930, he and old friend Clarence Clay went over to Clarence’s sister’s house for a visit. There were several other young people there that evening, including some of Clarence’s in-laws. It was strictly a social gathering, just a group of friends and relatives getting together for an evening of fun and talk.16 One of the guests happened to be the younger sister of Hubert “Buster” Parker, Clarence Clay’s brother-in-law. Her name was Bonnie Thornton, and she was a nineteen-year-old blue-eyed blonde currently “estranged” from her husband of three years, who was in prison for robbery.17 Before the night was out, Clyde Barrow was in love.
In spite of several other versions of the meeting of Bonnie and Clyde—including the one made famous in the 1967 film when Bonnie looks out her window and sees Clyde trying to steal her mother’s car—Marie Barrow’s version, given above, has the ring of truth because it is so utterly commonplace and elegant in its simplicity. A bored, lonely, young, out-of-work waitress, abandoned by her imprisoned husband, goes over to her brother’s house and meets a charming young fellow. Nobody thought it was anything special. Nobody guessed where it would lead.
Bonnie Parker was born October 1, 1910, the second of three children, to Charles Parker and Emma Krause in Rowena, Texas, about 250 miles southwest of Dallas. Charles Parker had a good trade (he was a brick mason), and the family lived a good, quiet life centered around the First Baptist Church.1 When Charles Parker died suddenly in 1914, Emma Parker was left with three small children to raise alone.2 Fortunately, Emma’s parents took them all in.
Frank and Mary Krause lived at 2908 Eagle Ford Road in west Dallas.3 When Emma found a job, Grandma Mary looked after the kids while Emma was at work. In the book that Marie and the Barrow family denounce, Jan Fortune quotes Bonnie’s mother and her cousin Bess as they tell stories about Bonnie’s childhood, and it’s hard to believe that it’s all invention. The Bonnie they knew was a bundle of energy—and mischief—from the time she could stand. She was cute and attracted the boys, even in grade school. She could be utterly charming when it suited her, and, according to Bess, she was devoted to her mother.4 Unfortunately, this devotion, which was real and lasted to the end of Bonnie’s life, didn’t keep Bonnie from playing on her mother’s sympathy and manipulating her to get her own way. Later on, Bonnie would lie to her mother about many things as her relationship with Clyde deepened.
Formal portrait of Bonnie Parker.
—From the collections of the Texas/Dallas History and Archives Division, Dallas Public Library
Bonnie arrived in west Dallas about eight years before Clyde. She had lived there ever since she could remember, unlike the refugees from the farm country who began arriving in the early 1920s—people like the Barrows. There were oil refineries and foundries along Eagle Ford Road near Bonnie’s grandfather’s house, but the area took its name from the large Trinity-Portland Cement Company nearby. It was called Cement City.
Bonnie went to school in Cement City and, according to her cousin Bess, showed about equal parts talent and combativeness. Bess remembers Bonnie being a star pupil and winning a spelling contest and then, on the same page, tells how the two of them beat the living daylights out of two other girls who were stealing Bonnie’s pencils.5 Even if Fortune was guilty of embellishing her notes for the sake of a good story, Bonnie still emerges as a feisty, headstrong girl who was determined not to be pushed around and to have her way even if it meant a fight.
Bonnie Parker (left), Roy Glenn Thornton, and a friend, Annie McLean. Taken around the time Bonnie and Roy were married—September 1926. Most versions of this picture show only Bonnie and Roy, but the original, shown here, includes the third person.
—Courtesy Sandy Jones–The John Dillinger Historical Society
Bonnie had always had boyfriends while she was growing up, but when she met Roy Thornton, she fell in love. She was not quite sixteen when they married on September 25, 1926. Unfortunately, Bonnie and Roy were not a good match. Bonnie couldn’t bear to be separated from her mother for long (a trait she and Clyde would share), and Roy, as it turned out, was a thief. Roy was already acquainted with many people Bonnie would come to know well—Raymond Hamilton and his brother Floyd, the Mace brothers (Fred Mace would marry Bonnie’s younger sister, Billie Jean), and, of course, the Barrows.6
Bonnie and Roy set up housekeeping a
couple of blocks from Emma, but for Bonnie, even that was too far. Bonnie was constantly crying to go back home to see her mother. After a while, it became a running joke. Roy finally gave up and they moved back in with Emma, but he found his own way to deal with the situation.7 Beginning in August 1927, he would just disappear for several weeks at a time. When he left for the third time, around the first of December, Bonnie decided she was through with him. She didn’t see him again for over a year. When Roy finally showed up in January 1929, Bonnie told him it was over. Not long after that, he was arrested during a robbery at Red Oak, Texas, and sent to Huntsville for five years.8
With Roy gone, Bonnie had to go to work. Shortly after he left in December 1927, she got a job at Hargraves Cafe on Swiss Avenue and found that she had a talent for working with the public. Cute and full of life, she soon became a favorite with the customers. In early 1929, she moved downtown to Marco’s on Main Street, near the courthouse. She was doing well in her new situation, but in October, the stock market crashed, and in November Marco’s closed and Bonnie was out of a job.9 Just after New Year’s, Bonnie went over to her older brother’s house and met the man who would change her life.
The Parkers
Emma Krause Parker and her three children. Probably taken in Rowena, Texas, near the time her husband died—1914.
—Courtesy the Bob Fischer/Renay Stanard collection
Bonnie Parker, left, and her sister Billie Jean Parker Mace. Probably taken about 1930.
—Courtesy Marie Barrow Scoma and author Phillip W. Steele
The Parker children about 1918. Left to right: “Buster,” Bonnie, with a sucker in her mouth, and Billie Jean.
—Courtesy the Bob Fischer/Renay Stanard collection
Emma Parker and her children somewhat later. Probably taken at Emma’s parents’ house on Eagle Ford Road in west Dallas: Billie Jean, standing by her mother, Bonnie, facing the camera, and Hubert “Buster” Parker.