I was working as a rigger boss in the plate shop of the Richmond shipyards at Richmond, California,
in 1942. Warden Clinton Duffy of San Quentin prison phoned and said, I want you
bosses to come over and see my boys. Some of them have worked up a tumbling act
to show you. I want you to become acquainted with the men, so when they’re
ready for parole, you’ll give them a job. They aren’t all such bad fellows.
Warden, I guess the rest of the men will go, and I had like
to I answered, but I can not. I am an ex-con myself.
Who are you?
Phil Thatcher.
That’s right. You can not come he agreed. He still wanted
the other bosses to come. They talked back and forth about visiting the prison,
but they all objected, if the preacher can not go we won’t go.
That did it strings were pulled and I went with the bosses
to visit San Quentin. The inmates put on a tumbling act for us, as only those
boys can. We were served a grand meal and the guard took us on a tour, showing
us the prison. It was all familiar to me. Too familiar I had spent three years
of my life behind those gray walls.
We saw the mess hall where I had eaten my share of mush and
syrup, weak coffee, dry bread and beans. The prison officials who plan the
convicts meals never forget the beans. Then we visited the cell blocks. Row
upon row of cells, three stories high, built to keep men behind bars, where
they can be watched, awake or asleep. And some of the men I’d served time with
were still there. We walked along the catwalk, a narrow balcony with a rail,
where the guards walked back and forth, day and night eyeing the prisoners. I
saw the old bunk where I’d spent many an evening, reading detective stories and
listening to Joe, in the next cell, pick the guitar. And where I’d spent many a
day, cursing the world, hating the guard’s guts and my own, too, planning what
I’d do when I got out! As I walked with those men behind the guard, I walked
through a thousand black memories.
We visited the jute mill where I had spent many a weary day
at the loom with dust choking my nostrils. We went through the shops in the
alley where some of my pals had put in their time. We went down to the old
hole, a cave cemented into the ground, where buddies of mine had spent days and
weeks in solitude and darkness, going stir crazy. Only, now the hole wasn’t
used any more and I thanked God for Warden Duffy and the way he had cleaned up
the horror of the prison.
Then we walked by the condemned row, those cells where men who
are sentenced to death count the minutes, dreading the passing of each one. We
went on to the death cell above the carpenter’s shop, a cage-like affair where
men spend their last night on earth. I stepped inside the cell and thought of
my pal Smithy. I sat on the edge of the bunk where he had sat that last night.
I walked up and down the cell about six times where he had walked six thousand
restless times.
I had known Smithy for years. We had been little guys
together, back in the days when we were both inmates of the Whittier School
for Boys in 1922 to 1924. Smithy had played right end on the football team.
Life with all its adventure had stretched before us, and we had both landed in
San Quentin.
When Smithy was assigned to a cell on death row, I was
working in the mess hall. One of my jobs had been to fix the buckets for the
men on the row. I had put up Smithy’s last lunch. With a sick heart I fixed
that lunch for a man I knew wouldn’t eat another one. It had been taken to this
very cell where I now stood with the other bosses from the shipyards. Smithy
was dead and I was a free man.
I walked out of the cell, as Smithy had. I went around and
up the thirteen steps of doom. I steed on the same trap door, only there was no
rope around my neck. My pal smithy had stood on the trap door and dropped
straight into eternity. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I clenched my fists and
my heart cried, O God, do these guys have to come this far?
Three of my reform school buddies paid the supreme penalty.
There was Smithy; and Lloyd Sampsell. Of him the newspapers reported.
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