Escape from Alcatraz by J. Campbell Bruce Read Free Book Online Page B

wait for a striped bass to strike. Color abounds on all sides: the greens of a few hardy scrub pines on the windward, and the eucalypti on the leeward; the rosy blossoms of the creeping ice plant; the bright yellow flowers of oxalis, related to the sour grass family; even the dull red faces of the arid cliffs. Many succulents, such as the century plant, border footpaths. These trees, shrubs, and flowers—planted in soil brought over from the mainland—thrive on the moisture of the summer fogs. Water is barged over by Army tugs, 170,000 gallons at a time, two or three loads a week.
    Some of the seventy-five children were born here, knowing no other home than The Rock. Daughter of the guards grow up to be wives of guards. The island once had a kindergarten class; now all the children go to public or private schools in the city. Pupils caught up by a favorite television program at night catch up on their homework on the twelve-minute ride to the mainland on the prison launch, the Warden Johnston. Before dashing down to the wharf, one lad delivers the morning papers. Occasionally, on the return trip after school, there may be a convict aboard, but he is shackled and out of sight in a sealed-off cabin.
    The youngsters of Alcatraz lead a life very much like that of their urban classmates, even to a curfew that sends them home at nine o’clock week nights, eleven o’clock Saturday and Sunday. They play ball beneath the frowning prison cliff, fish off the shore, shoot billiards or bowl at the Officers’ Club, where teenagers gather at a replica of a drugstore fountain.
    Only in one regard is a boy’s life different on Alcatraz: he cannot own a rifle to hunt or sieve tin cans on a fence post. Nor a cap pistol. Nor a rubber knife. When they play cops-and-robbers, forefingers serve as revolvers and lusty “Bang! Bang!” for shots. And they must never step outside the fenced-in limits of the family acres.
    Humor resides here with grimness, and the personnel christened the new staff dining room up at the prison The Top o’ The Rock. The Officers’ Club down below is the social and cultural center of the civilian colony: here old-fashioned square dances make The Rock sing on Saturday night; here the Alcatraz Women’s Club holds meetings, bridge parties, an annual Yule bazaar; here too the Alcatraz Ballet—girls four to fourteen, taught by a guard’s wife who had been reared on the island—stages performances.
    Alcatraz was once the setting for nuptials, when a light-keeper’s daughter married a classmate at Utah Agricultural College. The Coast Guard still operates the light, a new light mounted on an octagonal column towering 214 feet above sea level, with a flashing beacon visible twenty-one miles at sea. While on duty the Coast Guardsmen—a married man and a bachelor, who occupy two of the three apartments in the lighthouse—are under the control of the prison authorities.
    Rock families enjoy all the freedoms of the mainland. They can have guests at any hour of the day or night, and parties till dawn, subject to the same rules as party-givers anywhere: if they get too rowdy, they are told to pipe down. Residents are responsible for what their guests carry onto the island.
    “We hope they’re sensible enough not to bring any firearms,” says Warden Olin D. Blackwell. “We’re particularly anxious about ammunition. The inmates can make guns, but it’s harder to make cartridges.”
    Blackwell, fourth and current warden of The Rock, is a rangy, amiable, middle-aged, onetime Texas rancher who still wears an imprint of the open range: a western Stetson; on occasion, a bolo or cowpoke’s string tie; a tooled leather belt with an outsized buckle of Navajo Indian silver, turquoise adorned; a Navajo open bracelet on the left wrist, silver inlaid with turquoise stones. He feels that The Rock is an ideal place to live: “We have more privacy than people in the city. A lot safer at night, too. We never lock our