REFORM SCHOOLS COME IN ALL SIZES- PART FOUR

Not too many days later I stood in the courtroom. The judge rifled through my record. It didn’t look so good. Boys Aid, Whittier State School, and the assorted jails I had been in and out of. No special help from outside. Only the prayers of Mom and they didn’t move the judge. He sentenced me to the preston school of Industry located at Ione, in Amador country, California. At 15, I was sentenced to my third reform school.

 

Here again, my hair was clipped and I was given a new outfit of clothes. Only now I received a shirt with a number on it and pants with a white stripe down the leg. The food was class D and the treatment, well.

 

The boys were divided into companies, ranging in size from thirty-five to seventy. At the head of each company was a boy who was captain and below him was a first and second lieutenant. Those three ran the company, and the boy who was the toughest and the quickest with his fists was captain. If a boy disobeyed rules, or tried to run away, the guard never laid a hand on him. With a sneer, he turned the boy over to the captain of the company, and the captain took the unlucky boy into the shower room and let him have it. The boy would come out beaten, with a black eye, or loose teeth. Just the kind of treatment that made a boy determines to learn to fight better so he could be the captain, and beat up the other boys!

 

The work was tougher, too. I worked with a pick and shovel or spent long hours in the hot sun building rock retaining walls. Those walls are still standing. And part of the time, I worked on a ranch for a Mr. Stack.

 

I met some of my old friends there. From Whittier there were both Ray and Sala who had been on the football team. At nights, we’d sit around in the dormitory and talk about what we’d do when we were released.

 

Ray got his release the hard way. He was put into F Company or the cell block room. He decided he was going to run away from the place. And so, one afternoon when Pop Dooley was making his rounds, Ray hit him over the head with a heavy shoe. Pop whipped his gun out of his holster and shot him. Not quite seventeen, Ray was dead.

 

After fourteen months of back-breaking work, poor food and plenty of fights, I was released from preston. I was seventeen and a graduate of the two best reform schools in the state of California. I had learned many things in those schools. True, I had attended school only a few weeks out of the three years I had spent in the two of them, but at Whittier, I had learned how to steal a car without a key, and in preston I had learned how to crack a safe. The boys taught me what they knew and I taught them what I knew, and if what we knew was wrong, we didn’t have anything else to teach other.

 

As a Whittier and preston graduate, with my accumulated knowledge of crime, I went back to Sacramento to Mom, determined to go straight!