Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm editor Candice Gibson joined today as always Buy Stuff
Speaker 1: writer Joshua m Clark. I am joining you, Candice, whether
Speaker 1: you like it or not. Yes, we are one team
Speaker 1: Fourth Factory Fiction. Yeah, or Team Jaundice as you like
Speaker 1: to call it. I do. That is my name for us,
Speaker 1: Team Jaundice, because we are not only UM partners and podcasting,
Speaker 1: we're partners and writing and editing. That is true. That
Speaker 1: is true. So, Candice, I know you don't know this,
Speaker 1: but there's this really cool webcam. Uh it's called Alcatraz
Speaker 1: Live or something like that, I think. And you go
Speaker 1: on and I think it's on this default setting. It's
Speaker 1: just showing San Francisco, but you can turn the camera
Speaker 1: whichever way you want and one of the selections is
Speaker 1: Alcatraz and basically you can just sit there and watch
Speaker 1: Alcatraz in real time. There's not a happening. That's that's
Speaker 1: really the one the one thing. I mean, every once
Speaker 1: in a while you might see like a tour boat
Speaker 1: go by or something like that. Not the hotbed of
Speaker 1: activity today that it once was, but it once was
Speaker 1: a pretty cool place. Right. Have you ever seen Escape
Speaker 1: from Alcatraz? No? But I have seen so I married
Speaker 1: an axe murderer. And there's a scene in which Mike
Speaker 1: Meyers and Anthony Lapallia go to Alcatraz on the tour
Speaker 1: Have you ever been? I've never been. I've never been.
Speaker 1: Now I hear good things though, I hear it's kind
Speaker 1: of cool. You're good things about a former federal peditentiary
Speaker 1: about a tour of the yes, right, yeah, No, not
Speaker 1: too many good things about Alcatraz, um, although there have
Speaker 1: been some cool movies made. Murder in the first Escape
Speaker 1: from Alcatraz, Like I said, Birdman of Alcatraz, that is
Speaker 1: a great movie, very heartening. And I was actually surprised
Speaker 1: to see an actual picture of Robert Strap the Birdman
Speaker 1: of Alcatraz, because I thought he looked exactly like Burt
Speaker 1: Lancaster in the movie. Apparently not, but clearly the best,
Speaker 1: the best Alcatraz movie ever was Escaped from Alcatraz, starring
Speaker 1: Mr Clint east Twin you haven't seen it, so he
Speaker 1: plays this guy. And here's my question. This is this
Speaker 1: is what the question is based on. So listen carefully Okay,
Speaker 1: he plays this guy named Frank Morris who is supposedly
Speaker 1: an inmate, uh and Alcatraz and like the early sixties
Speaker 1: or something like that, and along with two brothers, Clarence
Speaker 1: and John Anglin, he Um basically digs his way out
Speaker 1: of Alcatraz with a spoon and makes off into this
Speaker 1: horribly chilly, shark infested bay um on a life raft
Speaker 1: made of raincoats. So my question is this just like Hollywood?
Speaker 1: WHOI or is that fact? Is that fiction? Answer? It's
Speaker 1: actually fact. So this really did happen, like escape from Alcatraz?
Speaker 1: Really happy? Yeah, it really happened. Okay, how how does
Speaker 1: one make a rink or how a life raft out
Speaker 1: of raincoat? Now that I can't tell you. I'm now
Speaker 1: Martha's steward of of great prison escape accouterments, But I'm
Speaker 1: sure you could probably find a how to somewhere on
Speaker 1: the lab. It's a good thing. Um Alcatraz, Like you said,
Speaker 1: I just want to fill everybody in this in case
Speaker 1: you haven't been watching the webcam. Alcatraz is this incredibly
Speaker 1: isolated place. It's essentially a mountaintop. It's all rock. There
Speaker 1: are barely any plans that will grow there. It's incredibly isolated,
Speaker 1: and like you said, the water around it is so
Speaker 1: so cold. I think on a good day it might
Speaker 1: be sixty degrees fahrenheit. And there are great whites that
Speaker 1: are constantly patrolling the water. So anyone perfect. Oh, it
Speaker 1: is definitely And it's been reinforced, or it had been
Speaker 1: reinforced a couple of times. It was first built. I
Speaker 1: know this, I know this. You're ready. So the Alcatraz,
Speaker 1: the island was actually first officially surveyed in eighteen forty
Speaker 1: seven and they realized, hey, you could really protect San
Speaker 1: Francisco from this location, right, So it became an outpost
Speaker 1: during the Civil War and uh that it was basically
Speaker 1: meant to stave off any Confederate invasion, which never came.
Speaker 1: And actually the guns on Alcatraz were fired a few times,
Speaker 1: but it was always a case of mistaken identity. But
Speaker 1: the thing is you had the citadel, this outpost, um
Speaker 1: and Alcatraz evolved into a prison almost um. Naturally, people
Speaker 1: started putting, you know, war deserters and things in the
Speaker 1: basement of the citadel, and over time more and more
Speaker 1: people were being kept there, and then finally the the
Speaker 1: the army I think was the one who who ran
Speaker 1: it said wait, we're not really you know, in the
Speaker 1: business of running prisons. Jaeger Hoover, who was running the
Speaker 1: FBI at the time, said, well, I am, and I'm
Speaker 1: actually looking for a perfect place to become like this
Speaker 1: horrible hole that the symbol of what happens to you
Speaker 1: if you're a gangster crook in America, because I'm going
Speaker 1: to catch you. And thus Alcatraz is porn. Nineteen thirty four. Uh,
Speaker 1: it opened its doors for the first time, accepting its
Speaker 1: first prisoners and began it's um. It's declined into its
Speaker 1: image ofty. Yes, and you know it's funny because even
Speaker 1: though it it declined into notoriety, it was incredibly high
Speaker 1: tech as far as US prisons went. It was especially
Speaker 1: for Yeah, I was top of the line. And when
Speaker 1: it was a military prison, I had iron bars. But
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty four they replaced it all with steel and
Speaker 1: everything was reinforced with concrete, and it was serious business.
Speaker 1: And it actually cost more to replace all the bars
Speaker 1: with steel than it did to build a prison from scratch. Yeah.
Speaker 1: For in the nineteen twelve version, right, yeah, because I
Speaker 1: actually did make it a military prison. I forgot to
Speaker 1: mention this in nineteen twelve, but then it went It
Speaker 1: went down after a few years to how did it
Speaker 1: go down? They just left it alone. Oh, even like
Speaker 1: it fell to ruin. It was decommissioned as another way
Speaker 1: to put it, and it was revived. It had its
Speaker 1: renaissance under under Hoover. There you go. And there were
Speaker 1: a lot of famous prisoners who trapes in an ad
Speaker 1: and the cells were pretty lonely places to be, but
Speaker 1: they weren't too bad. And that was a strange thing
Speaker 1: about Acatraz is that even though we may have this
Speaker 1: Hollywood perception of it as a very scary place, it
Speaker 1: wasn't too different from other prisons. It was fairly clean,
Speaker 1: well capped, and the prisoners, you know, they had their
Speaker 1: individual cells with a bed and a toilet, and they
Speaker 1: were riding five ft wide by nine ft deep. I
Speaker 1: was saying, they're trying to imagine that today. That is
Speaker 1: almost precisely the dimensions of a couple of our cupicles
Speaker 1: put together. Yeah, it really doesn't sound that terrible. They
Speaker 1: even had shelves for their personal effects. Yeah, yeah, which
Speaker 1: is strange because you wouldn't think of, you know, prisoners
Speaker 1: in Alcatraz having personal effects. I was wondering that too,
Speaker 1: but I guess people sent them things. Yeah, you know
Speaker 1: thought the first time. The first warden actually, as I understand,
Speaker 1: didn't allow speaking like the the prisoners couldn't speak, including
Speaker 1: during meals, and like that kind of rigid strictness, the
Speaker 1: argument goes um, actually made Alcatraz a safer place for
Speaker 1: prisoners than most other prisoners. And they're most other prisons
Speaker 1: in the country. You you weren't very likely to get shipped.
Speaker 1: You know, you can't even talk, so how can you
Speaker 1: offend somebody? And if you can't offend somebody, you're not
Speaker 1: gonna end up with a sharpened toothbrush in your stomach.
Speaker 1: And you're right about that. James Johnston was the name
Speaker 1: of the first warden, and he ran a really really
Speaker 1: tight ship. And eventually the prisoners all figured out, well,
Speaker 1: anyone who talks gets sent to confinement, but if we
Speaker 1: all talk, they can't send us anywhere because there's too
Speaker 1: many of us. So they all started talking at once,
Speaker 1: really really loud, that no one could do a darned thing,
Speaker 1: and thus ended the day long silence. Essentially, just be awful.
Speaker 1: I think you and I would both go out of
Speaker 1: our mind and saying if we couldn't talk, especially you.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry I didn't say that. But it was funny
Speaker 1: about these prisoners too, is that they weren't all gangsters.
Speaker 1: There were some who, you know, had committed smaller crimes,
Speaker 1: you know, sort of a Jean Valjean stealing a lift
Speaker 1: of bread thing, and they were all lumped in there together,
Speaker 1: so somewhere a little bit more gentlemanly and the um.
Speaker 1: When the silence was lifted, I think that the prisoners
Speaker 1: became a little bit more cooperative and easier to manage,
Speaker 1: you know, like any other prison. They had their library time,
Speaker 1: their exercise time there, you know, lending a helping hand time,
Speaker 1: and Alcatraz itself it was almost like its own little
Speaker 1: community because it was an isolated island. The wardens and
Speaker 1: their families lived there. Yeah, yeah, I heard this. Just
Speaker 1: really weird. You would you live on Alcatraz with your
Speaker 1: kids because there were kids on the island because they
Speaker 1: had a policy that children weren't allowed to have toy guns,
Speaker 1: so to protect those toy guns ending up in the
Speaker 1: hands of a prisoner who could use it to bluff
Speaker 1: his way out of the prison rightly, and the kids
Speaker 1: it was a very strange lifestyle for them because they
Speaker 1: had to get boted over to the mainland for school.
Speaker 1: And I was like, you know, I mean, we have
Speaker 1: jokes today about you know, kids getting picked up and
Speaker 1: ratty looking cars and staff outside of their elementary schools.
Speaker 1: What if you were the kid who came over from
Speaker 1: the Alcatraz boat. I just I feel really sorry for them. Yes,
Speaker 1: so apparently life on Alcatraz sucked for everybody. It did.
Speaker 1: But to answer your question, which I realized, yeah, I
Speaker 1: was out taking a very round about way circuitus indeed. Um.
Speaker 1: But to answer your question, which you asked me about
Speaker 1: five minutes ago, I know, did brothers really escaped using
Speaker 1: nothing but spoons, cardboard and rain coats? Fact, yes, this
Speaker 1: is in the Annals of Murky and Mysterious Alcatraz History. Uh.
Speaker 1: Clarence and John England and their friend Frank Morris essentially
Speaker 1: had a very long and grueling plan during which they
Speaker 1: used parents to ship away it rotted concrete around these
Speaker 1: vents in their cells, and they used painted cardboard to
Speaker 1: mimic the appearance of the vents as they were, so
Speaker 1: that it would look as though no damage had been
Speaker 1: done to the infrastructure of their cells. And then once
Speaker 1: the holes got big enough, Um, this is all very
Speaker 1: Shawshank redemption. You know, they had they hit it with
Speaker 1: painted cardboard instead of a big poster Hayworth, but the
Speaker 1: principle was the same. At that point they could crawl
Speaker 1: into the hole and then there was a tunnel through
Speaker 1: which they they worked their way in and they used
Speaker 1: this as sort of their workshop for constructing this raft
Speaker 1: and life vests out of the raincoat material. Don't ask
Speaker 1: me how it stayed a float, especially if they were
Speaker 1: shark infested waters. But supposedly they made it out and
Speaker 1: no one ever recovered anybody's They did find a plastic
Speaker 1: bag floating around with some of their effects on it.
Speaker 1: But supposedly they made off and there was a ship
Speaker 1: waiting for them and they escaped. So they were never found,
Speaker 1: not one of them, never found, no complete break from Alcatraz.
Speaker 1: So this is one of those cases where Hollywood it
Speaker 1: is actually pretty accurate. Huh. There you have it, And
Speaker 1: I'm really really proud of that Shallshan predemption analogy, because
Speaker 1: as you guys know, I never see any movies but
Speaker 1: that one. That one I did. Yeah, good going. Thanks.
Speaker 1: So I actually have one more fun fact about acatre.
Speaker 1: You may be wondering, how did the England Brothers and
Speaker 1: their friend Frank Morrish make off without the guards noticing. Answer.
Speaker 1: They made paper mache heads and put them in their
Speaker 1: beds and cover them up with sheets, so it looked
Speaker 1: like they were actually people sleeping, and they weren't discovered
Speaker 1: until they've made it off. That's the same thing that
Speaker 1: happened in the movie. Ar't ientertaining life with lots of
Speaker 1: versa militude? Yes, well, everyone's looking not at You can
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