The Dustbowl Getaway

By Mike Marino

"Nuthin' can outrun my V-8 Ford..."

Merely a mercurial lyric from a Chuck Berry song? Hell no! The desperado's of the Depression used Motown Mo-chines to get out of town fast, quick fast, post haste, after robbin'a bank or two, and the obligatory shootout with the local sheriff's yokels. Mechanized murder and mayhem speeding through the decade of the Thirties on four wheels, revving engines, floored, redlining and barking out horsepower louder than shotgun blasts. Machine guns firing bullets at rates of speed to make your Tin Lizzy dizzy and cut holes through it like metallic Swiss cheese. Jesse James, the Youngers, the Daltons, and all the outlaws hiding in the shadows of the wild west, old west past, were now stepping aside, and making room for a new breed of 20th century "outlaw" hell on wheels and hell bent to score big time, with the help of automatic weapons, fast cars, and faster women at their side. Full steam ahead, live fast, die young.

It was an era of hardcore hard-on criminal erotica. Bonnie and Clyde (The G-spot couple leading G-Men by the short hairs)...Machine Gun Kelly (Doesn't get much more Tommy-gun phallic than that!)....Babyface Nelson (How's that one for Freud!)...(Speaking of Freud) there was also Ma Barker...Now we get down to the nitty gritty, down and dirty with the baddass rock star of them all who came crashing out of the cornfields of Indiana, John Dillinger. Depression era "bad guys" developed faithful followings of true believers, and with that being the case, John Dillinger was Elvis.

The golden years of infamy of the wild west bad guy materialized just as the dust was settling from the blue and grey blood red battles of the Civil War. The Southern War of Independence spawned it's Confederate comrades, and Southern sympathizers, who all returned home to find little left of their former family farms and homelife. They had been carbetbagged, while those pesky Pinkertons were tracking down the ragtag rebel remnants of "guerrillas" from the wars other side. High on the hang 'em high arrest list were two Missouri families in particular, James and Younger.

The James Gang, not to be confused with an early Joe Walsh group, roamed the Midwest robbing banks and trains, all to the applause and adulation of a citizenry in perfect sympatico who felt as some still do, that the government was the publics enemy, and not Jesse James. The war left a bitter taste in the mouth of the south, and the James' and Youngers' rode the crest of a crimewave with the unconditional approval of a backwards backwoods and literate back-East public hungry for folk heroes. Robbing Robin Hoods. Righters of wrongs. Robbing the banks that were robbing the poor and foreclosing on their homes and farms......the banks were the bad guys....the James Gang merely exacted retribution in the name of the people...or so the public relations spinmeisters said. To this day the argument continues...Was he a good guy, or a bad buy? The answer lies in which side you're on. Remember, one mans patriot, is another man's terrorist. It's all relative, and the one thing George Washington and Osama Bin Laden have in common.

The bad guy cowboy heyday of the wild old West came to a close, it crashed in like last call in the bar as an old drunk in a saloon fell face down and ass up on the swinging door sawdust floor, just as the 20th Century opened it's assembly line of industrial might. The manufacturing prowess of Henry the Ford in Detroit replaced the buggy and horse, with rubber and steel, and pedal to the metal horsepower harnessed under the hood...it was now the era of Mechanized Criminal Mayhem...giddyup!

World War I blasted America onto the center stage of the world stage. The war, it turns out, was also the mother of invention, developing an astounding array of automatic rip-through-human-flesh weaponry that found their way from the European battlefields to the Midwestern cornfields and dusty back roads. It was the Roaring Twenties, rarin' to go, until the dirty Thirties loomed on the horizon. A black cloud of dust and bust. Economic good times had led the boom down a garden path...and then...the bust...the stock market collapse, food lines, foreclosed farms, suicides by the American breadbasket full, life on the road, spare changin' ...real Woody Guthrie shit ridin' the rails from sea to shining sea, past the purple mountains majesty, mister, this land is your land, this land is our land, now can you spare a dime, pissed off grapes of wrath, better dead then wobblie red.

The horseback gangs of the 1800's gave way to the mechanized mayhem of the 1930's...internal combustion bad guys, and in the eyes of the American public, bonafide heroes of legendary status at the time...or were they? Take the story of Bonnie and Clyde.

Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, born and bred Lone Star Texans, had a date with destiny, to collide on a road made of myth mixed with reality. Their free-for-all spree of robbery and killing between 1932-1934 kept them prominently on the front pages and in the forefront of the American consciousness for over a year until they were ambushed and gunned down during a back road barrage of gunfire in swampy Louisiana with more bullets fired into their automobile and bodies then were fired at the gunfight at the OK corral turning the car into a collander. Clyde was the first, to not only appreciate the automobile as the machine of choice for the future of crime, but he went so far as to write a letter to Henry Ford (the letter is on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan) extolling the V-8's virtue as a powerful innovation that led the pack in fast getaways from the lawdogs who laid in wait to waste the lawless.

Of course, gangsters have to have colorful names. Names that play well in the black ink headlines of newspapers. Billy the Kid .. Al "Scarface" Capone... "Baby Face" Nelson...Not bad, but one nickname that went over the top was George "Machine Gun" Kelly! Machine Gun!! Damn!

Blasting like machine gunfire from the womb in 1895, Memphis born George Kelly found as he was growing up, along with a lot of other people, that trying to carve out a living was not easy. The wages tended to be below even acceptable socialist standards, and the work duller than a rusted axe blade left in the snow all winter. The Twenties were roaring like a boom times lion, with boom times boom towns booze times booze towns, and by 1927 Kelly decided that he too wanted to cash in on the good times, and began working as a small time hood for other gangsters. On his own, he had already earned his prison stripes by doing time for small time crimes, but in 1928 Kelly was caught smuggling booze onto an Indian reservation and was sent to Leavenworth prison in Kansas for three years. When released he continued in his criminal ways, and even found time for someone else to steal his heart, when Kelly met and fell in love with bad girl Kathryn Thorne, (a criminal in her own right) and they married in 1930.

The astute and cagey Kathryn saw the headlines of other notable gangsters of the era, and was hellbound to carve out a Public Enemy No. 1 spot especially for her and George. With affectionate intentions, it was she who bought Kelly his first machine gun, (a hell of a gift to find in your Christmas stocking!) and dubbed him...Machine Gun Kelly! She acted more as a publicity agent than a wife, and she gathered up the used spent machine gun cartridges left on the ground after practice to hand out as souvenirs to friends and strangers alike. With machine gun and gun moll at his side, by 1933, Kelly felt they were ready to pull off the big score. So in true "gang who couldn't shoot straight" fashion, they ineptly engineered a kidnapping of a wealthy oil tycoon and his family that backfired and led to his capture. Turns out that Kelly couldn't identify the oil tycoon out of the group he held hostage and decided to go on a drinking binge instead to clear his mind. By the morning, cops had followed up on a tip, surrounded the farmhouse and took the entire gang, including a hungover Kelly into custody without one shot, let alone a barrage of machine gun bullets being fired.

Kathryn was sent to prison and when released simply vanished and disappeared. Kelly, however, was sent to Leavenworth prison once again, and in 1934 was one of the prestigious first prisoners at Alcatraz, or simply, the Rock. After his celebrity stay in San Francisco Bay, he was sent back to Kansas, to live out his last days at Leavenworth prison. Kelly, braggart to the end, died in 1954. The Kelly saga had come to a close as one of the last remaining "stars" of the star studded Depression Era Desperado's died.

Flashback...take a guy so agressive and violent that even Al Capone fired him, and you have the ingredients for a baddass bad guy with the unlikely name of Babyface Nelson. Lester Gillis, real name, was born in Al Capones Chicago in 1908. The son of Belgian immigrants, he took to crime and to the streets at an early age..petty crimes mostly until Capone hired him to utilize in the growing business of Labor Racketeering. Nelsons lust for blood and killing led to his being "downsized" and the terminator was terminated by the Chicago crime syndicate. His boyish goodlooks got him the name Babyface if not his boyish charm of which he had none. He also adopted the name "George" and dropped "Lester" and 'Gillis" too like a hot potato. He mainly did that so as not to embarrass the family name back home just as Lucky Luciano had changed his from Luciana for the same reason.

Nelson was arrested and sentenced to prison in 1931 but in 1932 he overpowered a prison guard and flew over the cuckoos nest. It was this juncture that marked the spot in the road where his bank robbing career began and Nelson was making national headlines and a national name for himself. Mainly a solo act, he did join up with the Dillinger Gang, what was left of it at the time, and Babyface and John became a daunting criminal duet for dual bank robberies. In effect they became the first supergroup of crime, the Led Zeppelin of bank robbers. Once Dillinger cashed in his ticket on the bloody streets outside the Biograph Theater, FBI Director Hoover needed a new bulls eye to aim for so proclaimed Babyface Nelson as the new Public Enemy #1. In November of 1934, FBI bullets brought down Babyface in a bloody shootout. Babyface was dead as a doornail at the age of 26.

Not exactly the Brady Bunch, but the Barker Family did make a name for themselves and were on the road a lot, usually shooting up the towns and robbing the banks dry. Again, there is a lot of conspiratorial theories regarding the alleged head of the household, Ma Barker. Some say she was the devil personified, while others say she was an innocent bystander. As in all things in the Pop Culture Dumpster, you make up your own mind.

Ma Barker was born in 1877 as Arizona Clark in Ash Grove, Missouri, or Missourah depending how badly you wish to butcher the pronunciation of the Show Me State. Ma gave birth to four sons, all bouncing baby bank robbers it turns out, Herman, Lloyd, Arthur and Fred. George Barker, the father, left the impoverished family around 1915...so the boys, denied a weekly allowance for mowing the lawn decided to rob banks and mow down the law instead. Ma Barker it's said, also plotted their crimes and was responsible for the joining of two forces to forge the Barker - Karpis Gang, a notorious combination it turns out. C'mon, the guys name was Alvin "Creepy" Karpis..."Creepy" is creepy no matter how you look at it. Ma also didn't like her boys to have girlfriends, now that too is creepy. They were bank robbing fer crissakes, not breast feeding."

Their spree of killing and crime lasted two decades and once most of the gang was dead and buried in the ground or deep in a prison cell, Ma and her boy, Fred went on the lam to Florida where they were gunned down in 1935. It was that year that the age of Depression Desperados, was finito, ironically with the death of a woman who gave birth to one of the most vicious crime families to roam from the womb to terrorize the Midwest...some speculate that the old lady, ala Throw Momma from the Train was actually innocent of all crimes, but because she was gunned down in a hail of FBI bullets, and supposedly innocent, J. Edgar Hoover had to fabricate crimes to attribute to her in order to justify the killings. A branch of the United States Government lying to it's citizens...unheard of...yeah, right! Think George Bush or Richard Nixon and you'll get the picture.

John Dillinger....1934 was not a good year, depending which side of the badge you were on. If nothing else, it was the end of the road for backwoods bad guys as they dropped like flies in the kitchens of desert cafes. Sure there were colorful headline names, questionable journalistic reporting that fawned rather than reported, and the dime novel was reborn, once again, yet again in the form of newspaper and newsreel reportage. The Sinatra of Criminal Activity, the Elvis of Dubious Desperados was none other than John Herbert Dillinger, Jr. If all the bank robbers were in a room together, they could headline as the criminal version of the Vegas Rat Pack...hat being the case then, Dillinger would be the Chairman of the Board.

Appropriately, the man who spent his adult years outrunning the law as the fastest man in a getaway car, was born in Indianapolis in June of 1903, in the hometown of the Brickyard at the Indy 500 Raceway,..it also the year of the Model T the car that Henry Ford said, would put the world on wheels. Even though there are many accounts of Dillingers life, it's his death that has an ominous air of a conspiratorial dark cloud that always seems to surround celebrity death. One thing about the baddass badguys, they knew how to generate press, as the media and the public were in love with the adventure, their exploits and their giving the finger to the banks and bankers that the little man viewed with suspicion, and rightly so in many cases.

J. Edgar Hoover, Drag Queen and FBI Director, was no stranger to grabbing publicity headlines himself. It was he who came up with the "Public Enemy No. 1" list for his dry cleaned agents to track down and apprehend giving them an aura that of a Super-hero. Of course by now we all know of the FBI directors Ethel Merman flair for flamboyance, and women's lingerie, so coming up with a whiz bang show biz name for the protagonists in his real life play was not a stretch. Hoover fitting into a size 7 evening gown however is!!

Something about authority that John didn't take to very well. He went AWOL from the Navy in 1923, and by 1924 he was already staring to rob banks. He was caught the same year, and spent a few years in the Indiana State Prison before being paroled in May of 1933. As for robbing banks and cementing his criminal legend, it was uphill from there, again, depending on which side of the badge you're on.

Enough has been written, said and filmed about his exploits and "gentleman's" attitude..ala Robin Hood but the paparazzi frenzy over his persona and most of all jail breakouts are the measure of the man in retrospect. C'mon using shoe polish on a .38 facsimile fashioned from wood and some backwoods backwater bumpkin of a deputy buys into it? Lawdogs with loose screws or was Dillinger in fact a jailhouse Rodin? In jail, out of jail, he left an indelible impression on the public, and even law enforcement itself. Respect for him is probably more like it. Not a vicious mad dog killer on a rampage, but just a guy after a little spending cash that wasn't his, but a banks.

Two important sidelights about Mr. D....Humphrey Bogart utilized film footage of Dillinger arrests to affect Johns walk and mannerisms in the film, "The Petrified Forest" as the character, Duke Mantee, where Bogie shared the screen with Bette Davis. Notice the hair do too. Also, in this era of bank robbery, bank robbing wasn't a Federal offence warranting the intercession of the FBI...but stealing a car and taking it across state lines was, and when when John jacked a car in Indiana and drove to Illinois crossing the state line, the bugle sounded and that is all that was needed to bring Federal heat on his tail.

In and out of jail, behind bars at local jails and in front of the cameras, John mugged for the newsreels, posing with the Sheriffs and deputies as though it was a night out in NYC with a cast of star studded celebrities. John was that, a celebrity of the criminal class.

Enter now, The Lady in Red...hooker, harlot, moll, Anna Sage, real name, Ana Cumpanas, a companion of Johns she cut a deal with the Feds to set up John for arrest, probably not realizing that arrest in those days meant almost certain extermination...it's all a matter of semantics I suppose...or your definition. John and Ana attened a movie in downtown Chicago at the Biograph Theater...it was a gangster flick staring Clark Gable of no people, and on the night of July 22, 1934 John was gunned down on the streets outside the theater as he walked out with Ana, dressed in Red...her code for Federal Agents.

To this day, the demise of Dillinger has created controversy and theories of conspiracy. Was it really John all slabbed out at the morgue or an uncanny look alike...on the other hand, if it didn't quite look like John, was that the result of plastic surgery performed by some back room practitioner...add this conspiracy to the over burdened shelf that holds other top heavy theories of the deaths of JFK, MLK, Amelia Earharts disappearance, the location of Jimmie Hoffa, Judge Crater, and lets not leave out the extra terrestrial Alien landings in Roswell, Area 51 and the X-files. Dont forget, the cheating of death and living a long life of numerous Billy the Kids, Jesse James' and of course Butch and Sundance.

No matter how you look at things...you have to admit the Mid Thirties were loaded with high octane horse powered bandits with charm, wit, and enough PR savvy to keep them alive today in memory, movies and the obligatory T-shirt...in the world of pop culture, there is a rule, if you don't make it to a T-shirt...you aint shit...