Alcatraz Ghost Story, page 1
Copyright © 2024 by Brian Stannard
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-7824-5
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-7825-2
Printed in the United States of America
Dedicated to all of those who have celebrated many birthdays in spite of their struggles.
Contents
Introduction
Prologue: San Francisco
PART ONE: 1900–1920
Chapter One: Vallejo and the Bay Area
Chapter Two: San Francisco and the Philippines
Chapter Three: Gallup, New Mexico, and Bisbee, Arizona
Chapter Four: Northern Mexico
Chapter Five: The West
Chapter Six: San Francisco and San Quentin
PART TWO: 1920–1921
Chapter Seven: Tijuana and San Diego
Chapter Eight: Napa and San Diego
Chapter Nine: Los Angeles and Sacramento
Chapter Ten: Oregon
Chapter Eleven: Napa
Chapter Twelve: Parts Unknown
Chapter Thirteen: Davenport, Iowa
Chapter Fourteen: Napa
Chapter Fifteen: Roseville to Newcastle, California
Chapter Sixteen: Sacramento
Chapter Seventeen: San Francisco
Chapter Eighteen: Sacramento
Chapter Nineteen: Washington State
Chapter Twenty: Castle Rock, Washington
Chapter Twenty-One: Centralia, Washington
Chapter Twenty-Two: Centralia, Washington
Chapter Twenty-Three: Centralia, Washington
Chapter Twenty-Four: US Penitentiary, McNeil Island, Washington State
Chapter Twenty-Five: The West Coast
Chapter Twenty-Six: McNeil Island Penitentiary
Chapter Twenty-Seven: McNeil Island Penitentiary
Chapter Twenty-Eight: San Francisco
Chapter Twenty-Nine: McNeil Island?
Chapter Thirty: McNeil Island
Chapter Thirty-One: The West
Chapter Thirty-Two: The San Francisco Bulletin
Chapter Thirty-Three: Raymond, Washington
Chapter Thirty-Four: California
Chapter Thirty-Five: Moose Jaw, Canada
Chapter Thirty-Six: Islas de Todos Santos, Baja California
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Napa, California
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Phoenix, Arizona
Chapter Thirty-Nine: Phoenix, Arizona
Chapter Forty: Phoenix, Arizona
Chapter Forty-One: Phoenix, Arizona
Chapter Forty-Two: USP Leavenworth, Kansas
PART THREE: 1921–1936
Chapter Forty-Three: Los Angeles, California
Chapter Forty-Four: McNeil Island, Washington
Chapter Forty-Five: Long Beach, California
Chapter Forty-Six: Bay Area, California, and Spokane, Washington
Chapter Forty-Seven: Vancouver, British Columbia
Chapter Forty-Eight: Los Angeles, California
Chapter Forty-Nine: USP Leavenworth
Chapter Fifty: Maricopa, Arizona
Chapter Fifty-One: Fresno, California
Chapter Fifty-Two: Washington, DC
Chapter Fifty-Three: USP Leavenworth
Chapter Fifty-Four: USP Leavenworth
Chapter Fifty-Five: Dixon, California
Chapter Fifty-Six: Phoenix, Arizona
Chapter Fifty-Seven: The West Coast
Chapter Fifty-Eight: USP Atlanta
Chapter Fifty-Nine: Napa, California
Chapter Sixty: USP Atlanta
Chapter Sixty-One: Napa
Chapter Sixty-Two: USP Atlanta
Chapter Sixty-Three: St Elizabeth’s Hospital, Washington, DC
Chapter Sixty-Four: USP Leavenworth
Chapter Sixty-Five: The West Coast
Chapter Sixty-Six: Washington, DC
Chapter Sixty-Seven: Alcatraz
Chapter Sixty-Eight: Alcatraz
Chapter Sixty-Nine: Alcatraz
Chapter Seventy: Napa, California
Chapter Seventy-One: Alcatraz
Chapter Seventy-Two: USP Leavenworth
PART FOUR: 1938–1940
Chapter Seventy-Three: USP Leavenworth
Chapter Seventy-Four: California
Chapter Seventy-Five: Nevada City, California
Chapter Seventy-Six: The West Coast
Chapter Seventy-Seven: San Francisco
Chapter Seventy-Eight: San Francisco
Chapter Seventy-Nine: Hotel Governor
Chapter Eighty: Phoenix, Arizona
Chapter Eighty-One: Alcatraz
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes and Bibliography
Introduction
There are icebergs of humanity located within the ocean of single room occupancy hotels of San Francisco’s Tenderloin. Stories are the current within this humanity, but these stories tend to remain submerged behind half-closed doors. Most outsiders rarely see or hear them. As a Project Open Hand driver delivering meals to the homebound and critically ill, I caught glimpses of this world, but I could only see and understand what emerged above the surface. There were bloodstains on the carpets, the stench of industrial disinfectant to cover the scent of sorrow, and whispers of “Five-Oh” as I maneuvered through the narrow SRO hallways. Faces appeared from the depths only to disappear again.
And then I was off the clock and free to set myself adrift in my own ocean of booze. I didn’t possess the emotional infrastructure to navigate the memories of the workday, so I torpedoed them as best I could, causing 90 percent to sink beneath a beer and whiskey barrage. I emptied whiskey bottles to try to stuff the genies back inside. I would have been an alcoholic whether I was in Peoria or Paris, but working in San Francisco’s Tenderloin haunted my mind and accelerated everything into a mental Doppler effect.
The origins for this story begin somewhere in the Tenderloin as I navigated the glass- and syringe-covered sidewalks in the early 2000s, but it just as well could start in a suburban garage where an empty vodka bottle thrown into the recycling bin transforms the isolation into sounds of a bowling alley. This is a story of train robberies, jail breaks, and big moments in history, but its heartbeat is addiction: the invisible yet grinding force that mates good intentions with bad ideas.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, many addicts don’t exist in the spectrum of denial. A million damaged cells and an empty wallet are difficult to ignore. Instead an addict often ruminates on the possibility of their own dented goodness existing around the corner, if only they could extract themselves from the thorn bushes of active addiction.
If the puzzle pieces of fortune fall into place, the least of which include a wellknit safety net of forgiveness, the addict can over time move into an established landscape of sobriety. I am lucky to count myself as a citizen of this new landscape.
After Project Open Hand, I arrived at Alcatraz in my mid-forties, not as a convict but as a twenty-first-century tour guide. In an odd description for a former prison, Alcatraz presented itself to me as an opportunity, as it would be the first job I would begin as a sober person. Though currently sober, I carry residue of what I might deteriorate into if I resume drinking. It serves as a photo negative of the blurry light an active drunk feels they might possess if they could only pull it together; the anti-hero rubbing shoulders with the anti-villain while getting fingerprinted at the police station.
At the age of forty-five and a newly sober man working on Alcatraz, I first learned of Roy Gardner, a gambler who arrived at Alcatraz as a fifty-year-old convict. An addict is at heart a gambler, a person who feels uncomfortable with their present situation, so they take risks to either win big or dig a deeper hole. An addict rolls the dice as to whether another whiskey bottle or hit can rearrange the chemicals of their mind to improve everything. The possibility of disaster and epic loss is an appropriate risk.
While I never robbed a mail truck to try to make things right with my wife like Roy Gardner did, the shadow drunk that clings to my footsteps nonetheless identifies with Roy Gardner’s decisions. Furthermore, he lived in the Tenderloin, the area that activated so much of my intrigue when I worked there. There were so many stories that I could only guess at, and here Roy Gardner was one of them. My introduction to Roy Gardner came through Michael Esslinger, the authority on all things Alcatraz, and Alcatraz park ranger Tom Ryan. Bu
The more I learned, the more unbelievable the story seemed, like the tall tales of a drunk guy at the end of the bar. There is a juvenile appeal to Roy Gardner’s train robberies and jailbreaks, several of which were committed with a minimum amount of violence and a bumbling element of goofy friendliness toward his victims and the agents of the law. Roy Gardner was like an addict who operated on the teeter-totter of tenuous hope for tomorrow while becoming fluent in apologies to mitigate yesterday’s damage. Gardner, like most addicts, including myself at my most scrambled moments, was consumed by a cocktail of one part grandiosity, two parts despair.
The previous version of myself was attracted to Gardner’s wild escapes and robberies, many of which seemed launched out of a whiskey blackout. My forty-five-year-old, precariously sober mind, however, became drawn into his cinematic love story with his wife, Dollie. It was a love story fit for the big screen if only the third reel hadn’t gone missing. By my mid-forties, I, too, was on the cusp of losing all that was important to me. We create ghosts for ourselves to serve as a fuzzy gold filling to heal the cavities in our minds that strain to navigate grief and mourning when it seems that a broken compass is the only tool available. Roy Gardner called this struggle “hellnighting.” During its federal penitentiary era, Alcatraz confined over 1,500 inmates, all with their own unique and compelling stories, but I saw myself most in Roy Gardner and for this reason I kept gravitating back to him.
I try to explain the story of Roy Gardner to Alcatraz visitors, but I can never get it quite right. Perhaps I feel the gambler’s mind of Gardner too often matches my own alcoholic instincts and I feel self-conscious about confessing sins to strangers who have just arrived to San Francisco from Australia, England, or St. Louis. Instead, I wrote down Roy Gardner’s story here and will launch it into the void. This is a story of heartache, loss, and the upside-down journey an addict takes to preserve a garden that might need more sunlight and less water but is getting the opposite instead. It is a cautionary tale, directed at myself.
PROLOGUE
San Francisco
January 1940
The former boxer tilted his head in order to better read the paperwork presented to him. He was half blind, with a cataract threatening his good eye.
The blind eye wasn’t a casualty of too many punches from an up-and-coming Jack Dempsey or some other external assault. Roy Gardner’s eyes were losing their function because of absence. During long stretches of his life, his eyes had been starved of light. His pupils stretched themselves to their limits as they consumed more darkness upon more darkness until they could stretch no more and broke.
Inside the Halsted and Company Funeral Parlor on Sutter Street, there wasn’t complete darkness, just the half-light of the undertaker’s desk lamp. Roy wore a gray suit that squeezed a little tight across his broad shoulders, but it had to do. It was his only suit.
The undertaker respectfully looked away to allow Roy some time and space, the two elements that had never achieved good ratio for Roy in the past twenty years. He either had time, but no space. He had space, but no time.
Roy studied the paperwork and signed and dated most of the areas required of him. It was one day before his fifty-sixth birthday.
The undertaker pointed out one section of the paperwork that Roy hadn’t completed.
“Who sir, is the deceased?”
“I am,” said Roy Gardner.
As Roy Gardner planned for death, San Francisco was coming to life. He was departing as over one hundred thousand new residents would arrive within the city’s boundaries by the end of World War Two. Many of the future residents would be the newly born, part of the upcoming Baby Boom.
In San Francisco’s Outside Lands, new housing construction defied logistical wisdom and sprung up in the wind-whipped sand dunes of the city’s Pacific edge, an area previously dismissed as a gray, fog-shrouded Hades hospitable only for ravens.
Returning soldiers from the Pacific Theater would also support San Francisco’s upcoming population surge. The newly built Golden Gate Bridge, an engineering achievement celebrating humanity’s potential, served as the receding vision for the young men sailing off to upend their own humanity in order to do battle and kill on the island cemeteries of Tarawa and Saipan. Returning to the Golden Gate Bridge represented a return to potential, a turning away from the bloodstained coral beaches, and many veterans decided to make San Francisco their new home.
Roy hadn’t seen the Golden Gate Bridge in a while, and even then it was through his foggy, cataract-afflicted eyes as he cajoled tourists with tales of Alcatraz murder and desperation. He had worked on a tour boat that did rubbernecking laps around America’s Devil’s Island before making its return journey to the friendlier port on Treasure Island, the midpoint and terrestrial anchor for the Bay Bridge. The construction of Bay Bridge worked in tandem with the building of the Golden Gate as part of America’s strategy to build its way out of the Great Depression. The Bay Bridge, linking San Francisco with Oakland, would become the gray workhorse to complement the show-pony Golden Gate. Roy’s job on the tour boat ended, however, a victim of both the winter season and Hitler’s Luftwaffe, which disrupted international travel and the 1939 carnival of San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition, which folded a month before scheduled. In the months since the Exposition’s closure, Roy had been out of work.
After finalizing the bureaucracy of his own death at the mortuary, Roy walked onto Sutter Street and felt the odd warmth of January sunlight on his face. Rainstorms originating off the Pacific had battered San Francisco all week, but today offered a ceasefire. The rain clouds broke into scattered jigsaw puzzle pieces across the confident blue sky, as sunlight revealed itself like a man emerging out of a hangover.
Roy would figure out later how he would pay his remaining balance to the undertakers at Halsted and Associates, but for now he walked up a hill and then back down Hyde Street toward his downtown room. Along the way he would pass under the apartment window where Dashiell Hammett typed up The Maltese Falcon.
Roy walked toward his neighborhood which was still called downtown, but in later years would be known as the Tenderloin, an eventual epicenter of heroin, rotgut booze, street-level prostitution, and Vietnamese refugees struggling to gain a foothold in a neighborhood that was often terrifying and foreign for those born in America.
Now as then, the drain of the Tenderloin caught isolated men unmoored from family: the drunks, the paroled, and the otherwise brokenhearted. As Roy made his way to sea level, women became scarce, and the few that existed trended toward the B-Girl variety: smoky mirages who waited in tavern doorways looking for a sailor to roll. Roy descended the Hyde Street hill and approached the Hotel Governor on Turk Street, his home for the past year and a half.
There were no children in this neighborhood, save the newsboy who stood out front the Hotel Governor while hollering the summary of the day’s events. The newsboy shouted loud as he was in competition with the street preacher. The preacher yelled about the Book of Revelations, while the newsboy answered, “‘Finland Pushes Back Against Red Russian Invaders!’ Give your donation to the Finnish Relief Fund! Help the Finns survive winter!”
The world was unraveling, but for now San Francisco was at peace, a temporary oasis while the rumblings of war grumbled across the curve of the earth, like a locomotive announcing itself in a person’s bones, knees, and stomach before it could actually be seen.
Roy approached the newsboy, with whom he had a cordial relationship. With Roy’s failing eyesight he received a verbal summary of the day’s events from the kid rather than reading all about it. Count D’Or had good odds at Santa Anita and there was a debate about whether Seabiscuit could take it to the finish with a bum leg. Roy insisted that the newsboy call him Roy despite being an elder. Everyone called him Roy.
After his encounter with the newsboy, Roy entered the diner near the Hotel Governor and sat at the counter alongside the other men who would not be eating dinner with family that day. Later they would individually return to their empty hotel rooms that smelled of old rain and yesterday’s booze.
A week later, when the newsboy assembled his January 11, 1940, papers, he would learn more about Roy in three front-page articles than he had in all the prior months the two made small talk together at the intersection of Turk and Jones. To the newsboy, Roy was a friendly face who dispensed nickels, gambling advice, and a few vague references to being a baseball player when they talked about the San Francisco Seals in the springtime.
