#1930 don jail escape

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Lockwood’s Release Refused By Judge,” Toronto Star. December 23, 1932. Page 1. ---- Has Nearly a Year to Serve in Penitentiary --- Mr. Justice Kerwin in weekly court at Osgoode Hall to-day dismissed a motion by B. J. Spencer Pitt for release of John Lockwood of Toronto from Portsmouth Penitentiary.

Mr. Pitt said Lockwood was sentenced to from nine to 21 months at Burwash on January 27, 1926. He escaped on May 29, 1926, and was re-arrested in 1930. On November 7, 1930, he was sentenced by Judge Coatsworth to two years hard labor for his escape. He was held in the Don Jail for nearly a year , was transferred to Guelph Reformatory and later, on December 19, 1931, was sent to Kingston.

Mr. Pitt maintained Lockwood’s two-year sentenced ended Nov. 7 this year.

Joseph Sedgwick for the attorney-general, said the two year-term was to be served in addition to the unexpired portion of the old term. Lockwod, he said, still had nearly a year to serve.

[kuramirocket]

Whenever I visit Olvera Street, as I did a couple of weeks ago, my walk through the historic corridor is always the same.

Start at the plaza. Pass the stand where out-of-towners and politicians have donned sombreros and serapes for photos ever since the city turned this area into a tourist trap in 1930.

Look at the vendor stalls. Wonder if I need a new guayabera. Gobble up two beef taquitos bathed in avocado salsa at Cielito Lindo. Then return to my car and go home.

I’ve done this walk as a kid, and as an adult. For food crawls and quick lunches. With grad students on field trips, and with the late Anthony Bourdain for an episode of his “Parts Unknown.”

This last visit was different, though: I had my own camera crew with me.

My last chance at Hollywood fame was going to live or die on Olvera Street.

I was shooting a sizzle reel — footage that a producer will turn into a clip for television executives to determine whether I’m worthy of a show. In this case, I want to turn my 2012 book “Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America” into the next “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives.” Or “Somebody Feed Phil.” Or an Alton Brown ripoff. Or a TikTok series.

Anything at this point, really.

For more than a decade, I’ve tried to break into Hollywood with some success — but the experience has left me cynical. Personal experience and the historical record have taught me that studios and streamers still want Mexicans to stay in the same cinematic lane that American film has paved for more than a century. We’re forever labeled… something. Exotic. Dangerous. Weighed down with problems. Never fully developed, autonomous humans. Always “Mexican.”

Even if we’re natives of Southern California. Especially if we’re natives of Southern California.

I hope my sizzle reel will lead to something different. I doubt it will because the issue is systemic. Industry executives, producers, directors and scriptwriters can only portray the Mexicans they know — and in a perverse, self-fulfilling prophecy, they mostly only know the Mexicans their industry depicts even in a region where Latinos make up nearly half the population.

The vicious cycle even infects creators like me.

As the film crew and I left for our next location, I stopped and looked around. We were right where I began, except I now looked south on Main Street. The plaza was to my left. City Hall loomed on the horizon. The vista was the same as the opening scene of “Bordertown,” a 1935 Warner Bros. film I had seen the night before. It was the first Hollywood movie to address modern-day Mexican Americans in Los Angeles.

What I saw was more than déjà vu. It was a reminder that 86 years later, Hollywood’s Mexican problem hasn’t really progressed at all.

Birth of a stereotype

Screen misrepresentation of Mexicans isn’t just a longstanding wrong; it’s an original sin. And it has an unsurprising Adam: D.W. Griffith.

He’s most infamous for reawakening the Ku Klux Klan with his 1915 epic “The Birth of a Nation.” Far less examined is how Griffith’s earliest works also helped give American filmmakers a language with which to typecast Mexicans.

Two of his first six films were so-called “greaser” movies, one-reelers where Mexican Americans were racialized as inherently criminal and played by white people. His 1908 effort “The Greaser’s Gauntlet” is the earliest film to use the slur in its title. Griffith filmed at least eight greaser movies on the East Coast before heading to Southern California in early 1910 for better weather.

The new setting allowed Griffith to double down on his Mexican obsession. He used the San Gabriel and San Juan Capistrano missions as backdrops for melodramas embossed with the Spanish Fantasy Heritage, the white California myth that romanticized the state’s Mexican past even as it discriminated against the Mexicans of the present.

In films such as his 1910 shorts “The Thread of Destiny,” “In Old California” (the first movie shot in what would become Hollywood) and “The Two Brothers,” Griffith codified cinematic Mexican characters and themes that persist. The reprobate father. The saintly mother. The wayward son. The idea that Mexicans are forever doomed because they’re, well, Mexicans.

Griffith based his plots not on how modern-day Mexicans actually lived, but rather on how white people thought they did. 

A riot nearly broke out as Latinos felt the scene mocked them. It was perhaps the earliest Latino protest against negative depictions of them on the big screen.

But the threat of angry Mexicans didn’t kill greaser movies. Griffith showed the box-office potential of the genre, and many American cinematic pioneers dabbled in them. Thomas Edison’s company shot some, as did its biggest rival, Vitagraph Studios. So did Mutual Film, an early home for Charlie Chaplin. Horror legend Lon Chaney played a greaser. The first western star, Broncho Billy Anderson, made a career out of besting them.

These films were so noxious that the Mexican government in 1922 banned studios that produced them from the country until they “retired... denigrating films from worldwide circulation,” according to a letter that Mexican President Álvaro Obregón wrote to his Secretariat of External Relations. The gambit worked: the greaser films ended. Screenwriters instead reimagined Mexicans as Latin lovers, Mexican spitfires, buffoons, peons, mere bandits and other negative stereotypes.

That’s why “Bordertown” surprised me when I finally saw it. The Warner Bros. movie, starring Paul Muni as an Eastside lawyer named Johnny Ramirez and Bette Davis as the temptress whom he spurns, was popular when released. Today, it’s almost impossible to see outside of a hard-to-find DVD and an occasional Muni marathon on Turner Classic Movies.

Based on a novel of the same name; Muni was a non-Mexican playing a Mexican. Johnny Ramirez had a fiery temper, a bad accent and repeatedly called his mother (played by Spanish actress Soledad Jiminez ) “mamacita,” who in turn calls him “Juanito.” The infamous, incredulous ending has Ramirez suddenly realizing the vacuity of his fast, fun life and returning to the Eastside “back where I belong ... with my own people.” And the film’s poster features a bug-eyed, sombrero-wearing Muni pawing a fetching Davis, even though Ramirez never made a move on Davis’ character or wore a sombrero.

These and other faux pas (like Ramirez’s friends singing “La Cucaracha” at a party) distract from a movie that didn’t try to mask the discrimination Mexicans faced in 1930s Los Angeles. Ramirez can’t find justice for his neighbor, who lost his produce truck after a drunk socialite on her way back from dinner at Las Golondrinas on Olvera Street smashed into it. That very socialite, whom Ramirez goes on to date (don’t ask), repeatedly calls him “Savage” as a term of endearment. When Ramirez tires of American bigotry and announces he’s moving south of the border to run a casino, a priest in brownface asks him to remain.

“For what?” Ramirez replies. “So those white little mugs who call themselves gentlemen and aristocrats can make a fool out of me?”

“Bordertown” sprung up from Warner Bros.’ Depression-era roster of social-problem films that served as a rough-edged alternative to the escapism offered by MGM, Disney and Paramount. But its makers committed the same error Griffith did: They fell back on tropes instead of talking to Mexicans right in front of them who might offer a better tale.

Just take the first shot of “Bordertown,” the one I inadvertently recreated on my television shoot.

Under a title that reads “Los Angeles … the Mexican Quarter,” viewers see Olvera Street’s plaza emptier than it should be. That’s because just four years earlier, immigration officials rounded up hundreds of individuals at that very spot. The move was part of a repatriation effort by the American government that saw them boot about a million Mexicans — citizens and not — from the United States during the 1930s.

Following that opening shot is a brief glimpse of a theater marquee that advertises a Mexican music trio called Los Madrugadores (“The Early Risers”). They were the most popular Spanish-language group in Southern California at the time, singing traditional corridos but also ballads about the struggles Mexicans faced in the United States. Lead singer Pedro J. González hosted a popular AM radio morning show heard as far away as Texas that mixed music and denunciations against racism.

By the time “Bordertown” was released in 1935, Gonzalez was in San Quentin, jailed by a false accusation of statutory rape pursued by an L.A. district attorney’s office happy to lock up a critic. He was freed in 1940 after the alleged victim recanted her confession, then summarily deported to Tijuana, where Gonzalez continued his career before returning to California in the 1970s.

Doesn’t Gonzalez and his times make a better movie than “Bordertown”? Warner Bros. could have offered a bold corrective to the image of Mexican Americans if they had just paid attention to their own footage! Instead, Gonzalez’s saga wouldn’t be told on film until a 1984 documentary and 1988 drama.

Both were shot in San Diego. Both received only limited screenings at theaters across the American Southwest and an airing on PBS before going on video. No streamer carries it.

How Hollywood imagines Mexicans versus how we really are turned real for me in 2013, when I became a consulting producer for a Fox cartoon about life on the U.S.-Mexico border.

The title? “Bordertown.”

It aired in 2015 and lasted one season. I enjoyed the end product. I even got to write an episode, which just so happened to be the series finale.

The gig was a dream long deferred. My bachelor’s degree from Chapman University was in film. I had visions of becoming the brown Tarantino or a Mexican Truffaut before journalism got in the way. Over the years, there was Hollywood interest in articles or columns I wrote but never anything that required I do more than a couple of meetings — or scripts by white screenwriters that went nowhere.

But “Bordertown” opened up more doors for me and inspired me to give Hollywood a go.

While I worked on the cartoon, I got another consulting producer credit on a Fusion special for comedian Al Madrigal and sold a script to ABC that same year about gentrification in Boyle Heights through the eyes of a restaurant years before the subject became a trend. Pitch meetings piled up with so much frequency that my childhood friends coined a nickname for me: Hollywood Gus.

My run wouldn’t last long. The microagressions became too annoying.

The veteran writers on “Bordertown” rolled their eyes any time I said that one of their jokes was clichéd, like the one about how eating beans gave our characters flatulent superpowers or the one about a donkey show in Tijuana. Or when they initially rejected a joke about menudo, saying no one knew what the soup was, and they weren’t happy when another Latino writer and I pointed out that you’re pretty clueless if you’ve lived in Southern California for a while and don’t know what menudo is.

The writers were so petty, in fact, that they snuck a line into the animated “Bordertown” where the main character said, “There’s nothing worse than a Mexican with glasses” — which is now my public email to forever remind me of how clueless Hollywood is.

The insults didn’t bother me so much as the insight I gained from those interactions: The only Latinos most Hollywood types know are the janitors and security guards at the studio, and nannies and gardeners at their homes. The few Latinos in the industry I met had assimilated into this worldview as well.

Could I blame them for their ignorance when it came to capturing Mexican American stories, especially those in Southern California? Of course I can.

What ended any aspirations for a full-time Hollywood career was a meeting with a television executive shortly after ABC passed on my Boyle Heights script (characters weren’t believable, per the rejection). They repeatedly asked that I think about doing a show about my father’s life, which didn’t interest me. Comedies about immigrant parents are clichéd at this point. So one day I blurted that I was more interested in telling my stories.

I never heard from the executive again.

A pair of boots

Five years later, and that Hollywood dream just won’t leave me.

I’m not leaving journalism. But at this point, I just want to prove to myself that I can help exorcise D.W. Griffith’s anti-Mexican demons from Hollywood once and for all. That I can show the Netflix honcho they were wrong for passing on a “Taco USA” series with the excuse that the topic of Mexican food in the United States was too “limited.” And the Food Network people who said they just couldn’t see a show about the subject as being as “fun” as it was. Or the bigtime Latino actor’s production company who wanted the rights to my "¡Ask a Mexican!” book, then ghosted me after I said I didn’t hold them but I did own the rights to my brain.

When this food-show sizzle reel gets cut, and I start my Hollywood jarabe anew, I’ll keep in mind a line in “Bordertown” that Johnny Ramirez said: “An American man can lift himself up by his bootstraps. All he needs is strength and a pair of boots.”

Mexicans have had the strength since forever in this town. But can Hollywood finally give us the botas?

[timeless-hollywood-classics]

Robert Charles Durman Mitchum (August 6, 1917 – July 1, 1997) was an American actor, director, author, poet, composer, and singer. Mitchum rose to prominence for starring roles in several classic films noirs, and his acting is generally considered a forerunner of the antiheroes prevalent in film during the 1950s and 1960s. His best-known films include Out of the Past (1947), The Night of the Hunter (1955), Cape Fear (1962), and El Dorado (1966). Mitchum was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for The Story of G.I. Joe (1945). He is also known for his television role as U.S. Navy Captain Victor “Pug” Henry in the epic miniseries The Winds of War (1983) and sequel War and Remembrance (1988).

Mitchum is rated number 23 on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest male stars of Classic American Cinema.

Robert Mitchum was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on August 6, 1917, into a Norwegian-Irish Methodist family. His mother, Ann Harriet Gunderson, was a Norwegian immigrant and sea captain's daughter; his father, James Thomas Mitchum, was a shipyard and railroad worker of Irish descent.[3] His older sister, Annette (known as Julie Mitchum during her acting career), was born in 1914. Their father, James Mitchum, was crushed to death in a railyard accident in Charleston, South Carolina, in February 1919. Robert was one year old, and Annette was not yet five. Their mother was awarded a government pension, and soon realized she was pregnant. Her third child, John, was born in September of that year. Ann married again to Major Hugh Cunningham Morris, a former Royal Naval Reserve officer. Ann and Morris had a daughter together, Carol Morris, born July 1927, on the family farm in Delaware. When all of the children were old enough to attend school, Ann found employment as a linotype operator for the Bridgeport Post.

As a child, Mitchum was known as a prankster, often involved in fistfights and mischief. When he was 12, his mother sent him to live with her parents in Felton, Delaware; the boy was promptly expelled from middle school for scuffling with the principal. A year later, in 1930, he moved in with his older sister Annette, in New York's Hell's Kitchen. After being expelled from Haaren High School, he left his sister and traveled throughout the country, hopping on railroad cars, taking a number of jobs, including ditch-digging for the Civilian Conservation Corps and professional boxing. At age 14 in Savannah, Georgia, he said he was arrested for vagrancy and put on a local chain gang. By Mitchum's own account, he escaped and returned to his family in Delaware. During this time, while recovering from injuries that nearly cost him a leg, he met Dorothy Spence, whom he would later marry. He soon went back on the road, eventually "riding the rails" to California.

Mitchum arrived in Long Beach, California, in 1936, staying again with his sister, now going by the name of Julie. She had moved to the West Coast in the hope of acting in movies, and the rest of the Mitchum family soon joined them. During this time, Mitchum worked as a ghostwriter for astrologer Carroll Righter. Julie convinced him to join the local theater guild with her. At The Players Guild of Long Beach, Mitchum worked as a stagehand and occasional bit-player in company productions. He also wrote several short pieces which were performed by the guild. According to Lee Server's biography (Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care), Mitchum put his talent for poetry to work writing song lyrics and monologues for Julie's nightclub performances.

In 1940, he returned to Delaware to marry Dorothy Spence, and they moved back to California. He gave up his artistic pursuits at the birth of their first child James, nicknamed Josh, and two more children, Chris and Petrine, followed. Mitchum found steady employment as a machine operator during wartime era WWII, with the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, but the noise of the machinery damaged his hearing. He also suffered a nervous breakdown (which resulted in temporary blindness), due to job-related stress. He then sought work as a film actor, performing initially as an extra and in small speaking parts. His agent got him an interview with Harry Sherman, the producer of Paramount's Hopalong Cassidy western film series, which starred William Boyd; Mitchum was hired to play minor villainous roles in several films in the series during 1942 and 1943. He went uncredited as a soldier in the Mickey Rooney 1943 film The Human Comedy. Also in 1943 he and Randolph Scott were soldiers in the Pacific Island war film Gung Ho.

Mitchum continued to find work as an extra and supporting actor in numerous productions for various studios. After impressing director Mervyn LeRoy during the making of Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Mitchum signed a seven-year contract with RKO Radio Pictures. He was groomed for B-Western stardom in a series of Zane Grey adaptations.

Following the moderately successful Western Nevada, RKO lent Mitchum to United Artists for The Story of G.I. Joe (1945). In the film, he portrayed war-weary officer Bill Walker (based on Captain Henry T. Waskow), who remains resolute despite the troubles he faces. The film, which followed the life of an ordinary soldier through the eyes of journalist Ernie Pyle (played by Burgess Meredith), became an instant critical and commercial success. Shortly after filming, Mitchum was drafted into the United States Army, serving at Fort MacArthur, California, as a medic. At the 1946 Academy Awards, The Story of G.I. Joe was nominated for four Oscars, including Mitchum's only nomination for Best Supporting Actor. He finished the year with a Western (West of the Pecos) and a story of returning Marine veterans (Till the End of Time), before filming in a genre that came to define Mitchum's career and screen persona: film noir.

Mitchum was initially known for his work in film noir. His first foray into the genre was a supporting role in the 1944 B-movie When Strangers Marry, about newlyweds and a New York City serial killer. Undercurrent, another of Mitchum's early noir films, featured him as a troubled, sensitive man entangled in the affairs of his brother (Robert Taylor) and his brother's suspicious wife (Katharine Hepburn). John Brahm's The Locket (1946) featured Mitchum as bitter ex-boyfriend to Laraine Day's femme fatale. Raoul Walsh's Pursued (1947) combined Western and noir styles, with Mitchum's character attempting to recall his past and find those responsible for killing his family. Crossfire (also 1947) featured Mitchum as a member of a group of World War II soldiers, one of whom kills a Jewish man. It featured themes of anti-Semitism and the failings of military training. The film, directed by Edward Dmytryk, earned five Academy Award nominations.

Following Crossfire, Mitchum starred in Out of the Past (also called Build My Gallows High), directed by Jacques Tourneur and featuring the cinematography of Nicholas Musuraca. Mitchum played Jeff Markham, a small-town gas-station owner and former investigator, whose unfinished business with gambler Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) and femme fatale Kathie Moffett (Jane Greer) comes back to haunt him.

On September 1, 1948, after a string of successful films for RKO, Mitchum and actress Lila Leeds were arrested for possession of marijuana.[10] The arrest was the result of a sting operation designed to capture other Hollywood partiers as well, but Mitchum and Leeds did not receive the tipoff. After serving a week at the county jail (he described the experience to a reporter as being "like Palm Springs, but without the riff-raff"), Mitchum spent 43 days (February 16 to March 30) at a Castaic, California, prison farm. Life photographers were permitted to take photos of him mopping up in his prison uniform. The arrest inspired the exploitation film She Shoulda Said No! (1949), which starred Leeds. The conviction was later overturned by the Los Angeles court and district attorney's office on January 31, 1951, after being exposed as a setup.

Despite, or because of, Mitchum's troubles with the law and his studio, his films released immediately after his arrest were box-office hits. Rachel and the Stranger (1948) featured Mitchum in a supporting role as a mountain man competing for the hand of Loretta Young, the indentured servant and wife of William Holden. In the film adaptation of John Steinbeck's novella The Red Pony (1949), he appeared as a trusted cowhand to a ranching family. He returned to film noir in The Big Steal (also 1949), where he reunited with Jane Greer in an early Don Siegel film.

In Where Danger Lives (1950), Mitchum played a doctor who comes between a mentally unbalanced Faith Domergue and cuckolded Claude Rains. The Racket was a noir remake of the early crime drama of the same name and featured Mitchum as a police captain fighting corruption in his precinct. The Josef von Sternberg film, Macao (1952), had Mitchum as a victim of mistaken identity at an exotic resort casino, playing opposite Jane Russell. Otto Preminger's Angel Face was the first of three collaborations between Mitchum and British stage actress Jean Simmons. In this film, she played an insane heiress who plans to use young ambulance driver Mitchum to kill for her.

Mitchum was fired from Blood Alley (1955), due to his conduct, reportedly having thrown the film's transportation manager into San Francisco Bay. According to Sam O'Steen's memoir Cut to the Chase, Mitchum showed up on-set after a night of drinking and tore apart a studio office when they did not have a car ready for him. Mitchum walked off the set of the third day of filming Blood Alley, claiming he could not work with the director. Because Mitchum was showing up late and behaving erratically, producer John Wayne, after failing to obtain Humphrey Bogart as a replacement, took over the role himself.

Following a series of conventional Westerns and films noirs, as well as the Marilyn Monroe vehicle River of No Return (1954), Mitchum appeared in Charles Laughton's only film as director: The Night of the Hunter (1955). Based on a novel by Davis Grubb, the thriller starred Mitchum as a monstrous criminal posing as a preacher to find money hidden by his cellmate in the cellmate's home. His performance as Reverend Harry Powell is considered by many to be one of the best of his career.[15][16] Stanley Kramer's melodrama Not as a Stranger, also released in 1955, was a box-office hit. The film starred Mitchum against type, as an idealistic young doctor, who marries an older nurse (Olivia de Havilland), only to question his morality many years later. However, the film was not well received, with most critics pointing out that Mitchum, Frank Sinatra, and Lee Marvin were all too old for their characters. Olivia de Havilland received top billing over Mitchum and Sinatra.

On March 8, 1955, Mitchum formed DRM (Dorothy and Robert Mitchum) Productions to produce five films for United Artists; four films were produced. The first film was Bandido (1956). Following a succession of average Westerns and the poorly received Foreign Intrigue (1956), Mitchum starred in the first of three films with Deborah Kerr. The John Huston war drama Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, starred Mitchum as a Marine corporal shipwrecked on a Pacific Island with a nun, Sister Angela (Deborah Kerr), as his sole companion. In this character study, they struggle to resist the elements and the invading Japanese army. The film was nominated for two Academy Awards, including Best Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay. For his role, Mitchum was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actor. In the WWII submarine classic The Enemy Below (1956), Mitchum gave a strong performance as U.S. Naval Lieutenant Commander Murrell, the captain of a U.S. Navy destroyer who matches wits with a German U-boat captain Curt Jurgens, who starred with Mitchum again in the legendary 1962 movie The Longest Day. The film won an Oscar for Special Effects.

Thunder Road (1958), the second DRM Production, was loosely based on an incident in which a driver transporting moonshine was said to have fatally crashed on Kingston Pike in Knoxville, Tennessee, somewhere between Bearden Hill and Morrell Road. According to Metro Pulse writer Jack Renfro, the incident occurred in 1952 and may have been witnessed by James Agee, who passed the story on to Mitchum. He starred in the movie, produced, co-wrote the screenplay, and is rumored to have directed much of the film. It costars his son James, as his on screen brother, in a role originally intended for Elvis Presley. Mitchum also co-wrote (with Don Raye) the theme song, "The Ballad of Thunder Road".

He returned to Mexico for The Wonderful Country (1959) and Ireland for A Terrible Beauty/The Night Fighters for the last of his DRM Productions.

Mitchum and Kerr reunited for the Fred Zinnemann film, The Sundowners (1960), where they played husband and wife struggling in Depression-era Australia. Opposite Mitchum, Kerr was nominated for yet another Academy Award for Best Actress, while the film was nominated for a total of five Oscars. Mitchum was awarded that year's National Board of Review award for Best Actor for his performance. The award also recognized his superior performance in the Vincente Minnelli Western drama Home from the Hill (also 1960). He was teamed with former leading ladies Kerr and Simmons, as well as Cary Grant, for the Stanley Donen comedy The Grass Is Greener the same year.

Mitchum's performance as the menacing rapist Max Cady in Cape Fear (1962) brought him further renown for playing cold, predatory characters. The 1960s were marked by a number of lesser films and missed opportunities. Among the films Mitchum passed on during the decade were John Huston's The Misfits (the last film of its stars Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe), the Academy Award–winning Patton, and Dirty Harry. The most notable of his films in the decade included the war epics The Longest Day (1962) and Anzio (1968), the Shirley MacLaine comedy-musical What a Way to Go! (1964), and the Howard Hawks Western El Dorado (1967), a remake of Rio Bravo (1959), in which Mitchum took over Dean Martin's role of the drunk who comes to the aid of John Wayne. He teamed with Martin for the 1968 Western 5 Card Stud, playing a homicidal preacher.

One of the lesser-known aspects of Mitchum's career was his foray into music as a singer. Critic Greg Adams writes, "Unlike most celebrity vocalists, Robert Mitchum actually had musical talent." Mitchum's voice was often used instead of that of a professional singer when his character sang in his films. Notable productions featuring Mitchum's own singing voice included Rachel and the Stranger, River of No Return, and The Night of the Hunter. After hearing traditional calypso music and meeting artists such as Mighty Sparrow and Lord Invader while filming Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison in the Caribbean islands of Tobago, he recorded Calypso – is like so ... in March 1957. On the album, released through Capitol Records, he emulated the calypso sound and style, even adopting the style's unique pronunciations and slang. A year later, he recorded a song he had written for Thunder Road, titled "The Ballad of Thunder Road". The country-style song became a modest hit for Mitchum, reaching number 69 on the Billboard Pop Singles chart. The song was included as a bonus track on a successful reissue of Calypso ... and helped market the film to a wider audience.

Although Mitchum continued to use his singing voice in his film work, he waited until 1967 to record his follow-up record, That Man, Robert Mitchum, Sings. The album, released by Nashville-based Monument Records, took him further into country music, and featured songs similar to "The Ballad of Thunder Road". "Little Old Wine Drinker Me", the first single, was a top-10 hit at country radio, reaching number nine there, and crossed over onto mainstream radio, where it peaked at number 96. Its follow-up, "You Deserve Each Other", also charted on the Billboard Country Singles chart. He sang the title song to the Western Young Billy Young, made in 1969.

Mitchum made a departure from his typical screen persona with the 1970 David Lean film Ryan's Daughter, in which he starred as Charles Shaughnessy, a mild-mannered schoolmaster in World War I–era Ireland. At the time of filming, Mitchum was going through a personal crisis and planned to commit suicide. Aside from a personal crisis, his recent films had been critical and commercial flops. Screenwriter Robert Bolt told him that he could commit suicide after the film was finished and that he would personally pay for his burial. Though the film was nominated for four Academy Awards (winning two) and Mitchum was much publicized as a contender for a Best Actor nomination, he was not nominated. George C. Scott won the award for his performance in Patton, a project Mitchum had rejected for Ryan's Daughter.

The 1970s featured Mitchum in a number of well-received crime dramas. The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) had the actor playing an aging Boston hoodlum caught between the Feds and his criminal friends. Sydney Pollack's The Yakuza (1974) transplanted the typical film noir story arc to the Japanese underworld. He also appeared in 1976's Midway about an epic 1942 World War II battle. Mitchum's stint as an aging Philip Marlowe in the Raymond Chandler adaptation Farewell, My Lovely (1975) was sufficiently well received by audiences and critics for him to reprise the role in 1978's The Big Sleep.

In 1982, Mitchum played Coach Delaney in the film adaptation of playwright/actor Jason Miller's 1973 Pulitzer Prize-winning play That Championship Season.

At the premiere for That Championship Season, Mitchum, while intoxicated, assaulted a female reporter and threw a basketball that he was holding (a prop from the film) at a female photographer from Time magazine, injuring her neck and knocking out two of her teeth. She sued him for $30 million for damages. The suit eventually "cost him his salary from the film."

That Championship Season may have indirectly led to another debacle for Mitchum several months later. In a February 1983 Esquire interview, he made several racist, anti-Semitic and sexist statements, including, when asked if the Holocaust occurred, responded "so the Jews say." Following the widespread negative response, he apologized a month later, saying that his statements were "prankish" and "foreign to my principle." He claimed that the problem had begun when he recited a racist monologue from his role in That Championship Season, the writer believing the words to be his own. Mitchum, who claimed that he had only reluctantly agreed to the interview, then decided to "string... along" the writer with even more incendiary statements.

Mitchum expanded to television work with the 1983 miniseries The Winds of War. The big-budget Herman Wouk story aired on ABC, starring Mitchum as naval officer "Pug" Henry and Victoria Tennant as Pamela Tudsbury, and examined the events leading up to America's involvement in World War II. He returned to the role in 1988's War and Remembrance, which continued the story through the end of the war.

In 1984, Mitchum entered the Betty Ford Center in Palm Springs, California for treatment of a drinking problem.

He played George Hazard's father-in-law in the 1985 miniseries North and South, which also aired on ABC.

Mitchum starred opposite Wilford Brimley in the 1986 made-for-TV movie Thompson's Run. A hardened con (Mitchum), being transferred from a federal penitentiary to a Texas institution to finish a life sentence as a habitual criminal, is freed at gunpoint by his niece (played by Kathleen York). The cop (Brimley) who was transferring him, and has been the con's lifelong friend and adversary for over 30 years, vows to catch the twosome.

In 1987, Mitchum was the guest-host on Saturday Night Live, where he played private eye Philip Marlowe for the last time in the parody sketch, "Death Be Not Deadly". The show ran a short comedy film he made (written and directed by his daughter, Trina) called Out of Gas, a mock sequel to Out of the Past. (Jane Greer reprised her role from the original film.) He also was in Bill Murray's 1988 comedy film, Scrooged.

In 1991, Mitchum was given a lifetime achievement award from the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, in the same year he received the Telegatto award and in 1992 the Cecil B. DeMille Award from the Golden Globe Awards.

Mitchum continued to act in films until the mid-1990s, such as in Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, and he narrated the Western Tombstone. He also appeared, in contrast to his role as the antagonist in the original, as a protagonist police detective in Martin Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear, but the actor gradually slowed his workload. His last film appearance was a small but pivotal role in the television biopic, James Dean: Race with Destiny, playing Giant director George Stevens. His last starring role was in the 1995 Norwegian movie Pakten.

A lifelong heavy smoker, Mitchum died on July 1, 1997, in Santa Barbara, California, due to complications of lung cancer and emphysema. He was about five weeks shy of his 80th birthday. His body was cremated and his ashes scattered at sea, though there is a plot marker in the Odd Fellows Cemetery in Delaware. He was survived by his wife of 57 years, Dorothy Mitchum (May 2, 1919 – April 12, 2014, Santa Barbara, California, aged 94); his sons, actors James Mitchum and Christopher Mitchum; and his daughter, writer Petrine Day Mitchum. His grandchildren, Bentley Mitchum and Carrie Mitchum, are actors, as was his younger brother, John, who died in 2001. Another grandson, Kian, is a successful model.

Mitchum is regarded by some critics as one of the finest actors of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Roger Ebert called him "the soul of film noir." Mitchum, however, was self-effacing; in an interview with Barry Norman for the BBC about his contribution to cinema, Mitchum stopped Norman in mid flow and in his typical nonchalant style, said, "Look, I have two kinds of acting. One on a horse and one off a horse. That's it." He had also succeeded in annoying some of his fellow actors by voicing his puzzlement at those who viewed the profession as challenging and hard work. He is quoted as having said in the Barry Norman interview that acting was actually very simple and that his job was to "show up on time, know his lines, hit his marks, and go home". Mitchum had a habit of marking most of his appearances in the script with the letters "n.a.r.", which meant "no action required", which critic Dirk Baecker has construed as Mitchum's way of reminding himself to experience the world of the story without acting upon it.

AFI's 100 Years...100 Stars lists Mitchum as the 23rd-greatest male star of classic Hollywood cinema. AFI also recognized his performance as the menacing rapist Max Cady and Reverend Harry Powell as the 28th and 29th greatest screen villains, respectively, of all time as part of AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes and Villains. He provided the voice of the famous American Beef Council commercials that touted "Beef ... it's what's for dinner", from 1992 until his death.

A "Mitchum's Steakhouse" is in Trappe, Maryland, where Mitchum and his family lived from 1959 to 1965.

[xtruss]

For Spaniards Who Remember 1981, the Storming of the Capitol Looked Eerily familiar

— Giles Tremlett | Guardian USA | Saturday December 9, 2021

The events in Spain marked the definitive end of Francoism. Will the assault on the Capitol do the same for Trumpism?

Lt Col Antonio Tejero during the attempted coup in the Spanish parliament on 23 February 1981. Photograph: Manuel Barriopedro/AP

Tension was high, security was weak and a bitter handover of power was under way when violent intruders forced the people’s representatives to stop their debate and cower on the floor.

Future generations of Americans will identify this as a description of events at the Capitol in Washington DC on 6 January 2021. For Spaniards, however, it fits an earlier moment in history – an assault on Madrid’s parliament, the Congreso de los Diputados, on 23 February 1981.

Spain’s attackers – reactionary followers of the dictator General Francisco Franco, who had died six years earlier – were also led by men in silly hats, although Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero was sporting the patent leather tricorn of Spain’s civil guard paramilitary police force rather than a pair of buffalo horns.

Comparisons mostly end there. Tejero was waving a real weapon. Some of the 200 soldiers and civil guards with him peppered the debating chamber ceiling with machine-gun fire.

This was a proper coup attempt, not a shambolic human tidal wave containing costumed followers of an egomaniacal conspiracy theorist. In Spain, tanks rolled down the streets of the eastern city of Valencia to support the coup. Some people began packing for exile. Others worried about firing squads, recalling the techniques employed by Franco.

Reactions in the Spanish debating chamber were also different. The outgoing prime minister, Adolfo Suárez, and the deputy prime minister for defence affairs, General Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado, refused orders to hit the floor, while the latter angrily commanded the armed assailants to desist. They ignored him.

The communist leader, Santiago Carrillo, was the only other deputy to remain in his seat, slouching calmly and chain-smoking. “Old, disobedient and smoking away,” is how Javier Cercas describes him in his masterpiece of literary non-fiction, The Anatomy of a Moment. “He understands that if he survives the gunfire, the golpistas [coup leaders] will execute him.”

In Spain, there was no need to urge the head of state to make a television address condemning the assault. King Juan Carlos organised that himself, donning his commander-in-chief uniform and rebuking the “actions or attitudes of anyone who wants to interrupt by force the democratic process … voted on by the Spanish people”.

He did not say, like Donald Trump, “We love you. You’re very special.” Yet it seems Juan Carlos may also have unwittingly encouraged the plotters in advance, since many were convinced he was on their side. “In the King’s name!” some shouted during the assault.

Those who stormed the Spanish parliament thought a military junta was ready to take over, led by a mysterious figure known as White Elephant (probably the now deceased former royal aide, General Alfonso Armada).

When the gunmen burst in (failing to turn off a TV camera that recorded the whole thing), there were good reasons to believe people would die, but in the end nobody was hurt. White Elephant did not reveal themselves and, after 18 hours holding the deputies hostage, the attackers surrendered. The coup had flopped.

I once met a musician who claimed that, during his military service, he had taken part in the coup. He recalled being bundled into a truck and deposited outside the parliament building, but he sneaked off to buy cigarettes while his unit awaited orders. When he returned, they had gone. A policeman told him they had entered the parliament building, so he ran in and joined them. For Spaniards, then, there was a spooky element of deja vu in the scenes transmitted live from Washington on Wednesday, not least because they combined real danger with farce.

The good news, though, is that Spain’s coup was an end, not a beginning. When it failed, Spaniards realised they no longer had to fear an army that had been the backbone of Franco’s regime. Democracy and its institutions proved resilient, just as they have in the United States. The assailants went to jail, even if their shadowy backers mostly escaped identification and retribution.

In fact, apart from a few frights in the 1980s, Spain has barely witnessed any further military stirrings in the post-Franco era – until last month. In a 6 December “patriotic” letter, 34 aged generals and admirals, and hundreds of other ex-officers, claimed the Socialist-Podemos coalition government led by Pedro Sánchez was intent on imposing a form of communism.

Publication of the letter, which was also signed by the 1981 coup plotter Major Ricardo Pardo and one of Franco’s grandsons, followed revelations of a group Whatsapp chat among retired officers in which one participant wrote that “there is no other choice but to start executing 26 million sons-of-bitches”.

The reactionary old Spanish military officers clearly feel emboldened by a global normalisation of far-right, anti-democratic rhetoric, but their threats are empty. A year after the failed 1981 coup, Spaniards voted in their first leftwing government since the 1930s. The socialist prime minister Felipe González stayed in power for 14 years, overseeing a remarkable and solid transformation in Spain.

The trauma, then, need not last. In fact, an incident like this can be purifying and clarifying. For Spain it marked the limits of violence and the definitive end of the rotten era of Francoism.

In time, one can only hope the events in Washington on 6 January may seem just the same.

—Giles Tremlett is a correspondent based in Spain. He is the author of Ghosts of Spain, and biographies of Catherine of Aragon and Isabella of Castile

[silviajburke]

Memorializing a Real-life James Bond

This post Memorializing a Real-life James Bond appeared first on Daily Reckoning.

It was April 1945 and the German SS had just captured French agent Count Robert de La Rochefoucauld…

The Gallic saboteur was coming off another mission of derring-do when the hated German occupiers collared him.

Monsieur Rochefoucauld was a man used to seeing off long odds. But Lady Fortune turns a cold cheek to every man eventually.

At least he would die a proud man.

He had sold himself dearly — he left a path of lifeless Germans behind him — and covered his name in glory.

Nazi justice would be swift… and it would be severe.

German soldiers seized the condemned by the scruff and hauled him into a nearby field.

They fell in, line abreast… readied their weapons… and awaited the order…

“Feuer!”

A belch of machine gun fire tore the early spring air. Then silence.

But something was wrong. Cosmically wrong. The Frenchman was… alive. No, alive doesn’t describe it. He was unscratched.

What happened? How could they miss from point blank range?

The Frenchman was now living a moment of pure adrenaline, a moment beyond description. Then suddenly his disbelieving eyes solved the mystery.

The bullets weren’t for him.

Rochefoucauld’s French Resistance confreres saw the proceedings and opened up on the SS men just in time. The timing was a thing of Hollywood — only more so.

Survival trumps justice, so the Germans wheeled to their immediate source of anxiety. The Germans would deal with their prisoner later. Streams of molten 7.92 millimeter arced their way downrange.

That’s when Rochefoucauld seized his chance…

His heart pounding to ¾ time, the galloping frog dashed out of sight — unexecuted, unbroken and unbowed.

Rochefoucauld had cheated death… again…

Count Robert de La Rochefoucauld was born in 1923 to a family of Paris aristocrats. They could trace their roots to the time of Charlemagne. One of his ancestors, Francois de La Rochefoucauld, often drank with Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin while they were in France.

Before the war Robert attended Europe’s most elite schools. High society was his natural habitat. The young Count knew this one and that one, went to all the parties — as one would expect from a young aristo. He had life by its tail.

And believe it or no, the young man actually met Herr Hitler in 1938. The German chancellor even pinched the young 15-year old’s cheek. But that was before Hitler was Hitler. And before the Germans invaded France two years later.

The Germans settled into the rough business of occupation after their lightning victory in June 1940.

Rochefoucauld’s father was dragged off. Other relatives weren’t as fortunate. But young Robert managed to slip through the dragnet.

He tried to piece a resistance group. But he soon learned that his efforts attracted the Gestapo’s worried interest. It was time to quit Paris. He’d take his chances in the French countryside…

Rochefoucauld shed his aristocratic title, assumed a false name and went as a commoner. It was life at the other end.

He soon fell in with two downed British pilots who needed out of occupied France. The hatchling guerilla volunteered his assistance. So the three struck out for Spain, the Germans hot behind them.

They somehow made it through the German patrols. But when the unlikely trio crossed into Spain, their luck drained. They were immediately arrested. Spain was technically neutral — but still fascist. And international law demanded neutral countries intern foreign combatants.

The war was over for the young aristocrat… before it even started.

Rochefoucauld spent two impossible months holed up in Spain’s notorious Miranda de Ebro prison. It was known during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s for its ghastly conditions. It was here, here in this pit, that the young Frenchman nursed his appetite for revenge.

What those Nazis did to his country… what they did to his family…

Then one happy day a fellow from the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) — also known by the sterlingly British “Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” — showed up to spring the pilots. But when the airmen told the SOE officer about their comrade who saw them out of France, the Brit also worked a get-out-of-jail card for Rochefoucauld.

The Frenchman was off to England, where he’d soon acquire the black arts of ungentlemanly warfare…

Rochefoucauld was immediately assigned to SOE’s espionage section. The Count was schooled in skydiving, sabotage, safecracking, weapons tactics and self-defense. By June 1943 he was cutting wild capers in his native France… and visiting unshirted hell on its Nazi occupiers.

Rochefoucauld took up with the local Resistance and went straight to work. He cut his teeth dynamiting train tracks and an industrial power station.

But cruel fate moved against him…

A collaborator turned coat and delivered Rochefoucauld to the Nazis. He was badly used by the Gestapo, and sentenced to death as a spy… his days of sabotage over.

The inevitable day came. His captors bound his hands and packed him onto a truck. As the truck sped towards his personal Golgotha, Rochefoucauld considered his options.

Options? The fellow was flanked by guards with submachine guns. And his hands were bound.

An absurd idea suddenly jumped into consciousness. What if I…

He’d only have one chance at it.

The bound captive suddenly bolted to his feet and dashed for the stern of the speeding truck. The fall should have broken an ankle, a leg… or cracked his skull. But nothing. The guards weren’t about to let him go so easily, of course…

Bullets screeched by the former prisoner as he dashed for the tree line, his hands still bound. By some miracle he escaped through the hail.

If you’re starting to think this was a man with unique talents for luck, you might be right…

Rochefoucauld proceeded to skirt enemy patrols, and snaked his way back to the city. Darting through the streets he suddenly found himself in front of the local Gestapo headquarters — the same Gestapo that was trying to kill him.

Tugging on fate’s cape, this daredevil walked right up and stole a Nazi limousine parked in front. That’s correct. He stole it.

The Germans were toweringly unamused.

They got his scent right away and Rochefoucauld led the Nazis on a high-speed chase through town. At one point he crashed through an SS roadblock. His New York taxicab driving bought him time before he ultimately ditched the car. He then took to his heels, losing his pursuers in a minotaur’s maze of city streets.

Count Robert de La Rochefoucauld defied death yet again.

Rochefoucauld eventually made it to the French coast. He then boarded a fishing boat that rendezvoused with a British submarine in the English Channel.

But the gods weren’t through testing his mettle…

Shortly after Rochefoucauld boarded the sub, it was sniffed out by a German destroyer. The “swish-swish” of the destroyer’s engines attained a fiendish pitch as the hunter closed in. What followed Rochefoucauld described as his worst experience of the war. “I’d never been so scared in my life,” he would later say.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

Place a garbage can over your head and invite a lunatic to proceed against you with a sledgehammer. That may give a faint suggestion of the experience (we highly recommend the German submarine movie Das Boot).

But the sub survived the attack. After three impossible days at sea Rochefoucauld was back in England. And glad of it. “We were invited to the best houses,” he’d later say. “Girls fell into our arms.”

No doubt they did.

Rochefoucauld’s next mission took place in May 1944 — a month before D-Day. And this one was one for the books. His job was to destroy the largest ammunition factory in France, near Bordeaux. All by his lonesome.

The place was a fortress, airtight with security and strewn with guards. And he’d somehow have to smuggle 90 pounds of explosives past it all.

But how? Then the Count had another sunburst of inspiration…

He might blend in as a factory worker. But how would he get 90 pounds of dynamite in through security? Then it came to him…

He’d hide it inside hollowed-out loaves of bread. The French and their bread, after all. Who’d suspect?

It took him four days to smuggle it all in… loaf by loaf.

Undetected, he placed the dynamite around the factory’s structural supports and set the timers. Then he sauntered out, scaled a wall and made off on a bicycle…

The explosion could be heard ten miles away. Rochefoucauld didn’t even bother looking back. He just single-handedly destroyed the Germans’ largest ammunition in factory in France. And in time for D-Day.

But his satisfaction was short-lived…

He was off to Bordeaux to meet a contact who’d get him back to England. But he chanced upon a German roadblock. The winsome young man told them he was heading for a romantic assignation. They didn’t believe him.

The French aristocrat was taken prisoner again.

Torture is an insufficient description for what the Gestapo would work once they discovered he was responsible for the factory bombing. So Rochefoucauld nearly resorted to the final solution — downing the cyanide pill he kept hidden in his shoe.

He’d escaped from German captivity once before. But this was a Fort Knox. And he was locked in a dungeon.

This seemed the end of the tether for Count Robert de La Rochefoucauld.

At one point a guard entered his cell, only to find the French saboteur writhing on the ground in an epileptic seizure. When he approached the flailing prisoner, Rochefoucauld whipped out a table leg he’d broken off, and clouted the guard over the head with all the energy at his command.

The guard staggered, stunned, then the trained killer snapped his neck like a twig. “Thank Goodness for that pitilessly efficient training,” Rochefoucauld later noted.

But now what? He was still trapped inside this fort, Germans everywhere.

Another inspiration came to him…

Rochefoucauld donned the guard’s uniform and walked out of the cell. He proceeded to the guardroom. And shot dead two additional guards.

Then he walked right out the front door.

He’d escaped from German hands — for the second time.

Rochefoucauld joined a local contact as he figured his next move. By now the Nazis were out for blood, and swarmed the area. He was trapped. And there would be no escape next time.

Then someone else had an idea this time…

His host’s sister was a nun. Nuns wear funny clothing. So Rochefoucauld slipped into a nun’s habit and started out of town. Sure enough, he made his way past the German patrols and to eventual safety… disguised as a woman of God.

Finally, in April 1945 Rochefoucauld was captured in his final mission, which led to the dramatic escape with which we opened this story. That would be the third time the Germans captured him. And the third time he escaped.

As the Count would later say, “I had what I needed more than anything else. Luck.”

Better to be lucky than good. But best to be both.

But what a war! He carried out many successful missions — including one that had him singlehandedly dynamiting the largest ammo factory in France.

The Nazis captured him three times… and he escaped certain death each time. He also survived a savage depth charge attack while trapped in a submarine.

The James Bond of film couldn’t hold aces and spades to this royal gent.

After the war Rochefoucauld was recruited by the French secret services. He led commando raids against the Viet Minh during France’s 1950’s war in Vietnam.

His retirement into peaceful civilian life left him bored. So he pursued his thirst for risk by running a banana company in Venezuela. He tried his chances in Cameroon.

Count Rochefoucauld ultimately returned to service in time for the Suez Campaign of 1956, during which he parachuted into the Sinai. But fighting concluded before he could see action.

In 1966 the seasoned aristocrat became mayor of a small French town. It was an office he would hold for 30 years.

Time accomplished what the Nazis couldn’t. Count Robert de La Rochefoucauld died on May 8, 2012, aged 88 years.

Life is lived not in years, but in moments. And this man packed more moments into 88 years than most could fit into a thousand.

Well and truly, a remarkable life.

Regards,

Brian Maher Managing editor, The Daily Reckoning

The post Memorializing a Real-life James Bond appeared first on Daily Reckoning.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Four Escape From Don Jail - One Recaptured by Police,” Toronto Star. March 21, 1930. Page 2. ---- REMOVE BAR FROM WINDOW - SLIDE TO FREEDOM WITH BLANKET ROPE - DROPPED LETTER LEADS TO ARREST --- Four men in the Don Jail, awaiting removal to Guelph Reformatory to serve various sentences, made a break from the prison by removing a bar from an upper window and dropping to the ground by means of a rope made of eight blankets tied together. A letter dropped on the ground led to the capture of one of the quartet at a house in Anglus Pl. and the near capture of another. The photographs here show: (1) Tilly Desjardins (Standing) and Ruth Desjardins at whose house in Angus Pl. Basil O’Donnell was captured by police. Letters from Tilly to one of the quartet found on the ground outside the jail led to his arrest. (2) Artist’s drawing showing window with bar removed, through which the escaped convicts squeezed and from where the blanket rope led to the ground. (3) Outside view of Don Jail showing window from which the escape was made and artists’ illustrative sketch of blankets tied together, down which the convicts slid. (4) Basil O’Donnell, one of the jailbreakers, who was recaptured at the Angus Pl. house by policer officers under Sergeant of Detectives Mulholland. (5) Albert Murphy, another one of quartet, still at large. (6) View of Desjardins home in Angus Pl., where O’Donnell was captured and where Kemp only narrowly avoided arrest. (7) Fred Kemp who was nearly re-captured at the Angus Pl. house, when he dropped at a shot fired by Sergeant of Detectives Mulholland zipped past him. (8) Hugh Barclay, other member of fugitive quartet, who is still at large.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Captured Fugitives Like Young Truants,” Toronto Star. March 22, 1930. Page 33. ---- Don Jail Breakers Humble and Subdued - Remanded Until 28th --- Looking like nothing so much as a motley group of ‘kids,’ huddle in the corner of a school yard, expecting every moment to be grabbed by the principal and spanked for playing ‘hookey,’ Albert Murphy [MIDDLE], Hugh Barclay [BOTTOM], James D. Smith, Frank O’Donnell, Joseph Smith, and Patrick Intowease, appeared in the dock today on charges arsing out of the miniature jail delivery of Thursday evening last. [Basil O’Donnell, one of the other jailbreakers, is pictured TOP.]

Murphy and Barclay were charged with escaping from the jail, the others with assisting in the getaway. So far as outward and visible signs were concerned, the boys, who only a few short years ago, were babbling at their mother’s knees, or begging coppers for all-day suckers, showed no signs of being in the desperado class, and were apparently a distinct disappointment to the crowd of police court ‘followers’ who had come in expecting to see a lot of beetle-browed thugs, in dire need of everything from a shave to a moral code. Some of them looked as if their teeth were chattering, or at least would chatter if ever they opened their jaws. But there wasn’t so much as a squeak out of the whole lot, and when Crown Attorney McFadden asked for a remand until the 28th, and Magistrate Brown fixed the time for trial at 2 p.m. the ‘worried-to-death,’ little crowd made a rush for the dock stairs and disappeared from view.

ALLEGED ACCOMPLICE HELD IN $1,000 BAIL --- Betty Kitts Accused of Aiding Don Jail Break ---- Betty Kitts, the 17-year-old Toronto girl, alleged to have assisted in the escape from the Don Jail of four young men Thursday evening, appeared in women’s court to-day in answer to the charge. On request of F.T. Malone, assistant crown attorney, the girl was remanded until March 28. Bail was set at $1,000.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Arrest Jail Breaker,” Toronto Star. May 14, 1930. Page 32. ---- Fred G. Kemp, prisoner at the Don jail, who escaped recently with three other prisoners, and who re-arrested in Montreal. Detective Lockhart Trinnell of Toronto left to bring the prisoner back. The three others were arrested shortly after the break and sentenced to additional time.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Eleven Held in Jail Probe, More Arrests Are Hinted,” Toronto Star. March 22, 1930. Page 2. ---- Three of Four Youths Who Escaped, Retaken - Eight Accused of Complicity - Brother of One Persuades Two to Surrender ---- Eleven persons are now held by the police, following the escape of four youthful prisoners from the Don Jail Thursday night, and further arrests are predicted.

Three of the fugitives have been recaptured, and eight other persons, including three girls, are accused of conniving at their escape.

Detective-Sergt. Alan Alexander and Fred Skinner to-day visited the jail and interviewed twelve prisoners who were in the same corridor from which Basil O’Donnell, Albert Murphy, Fred Kemp, and Hugh Barclay escaped. Only Kemp is still at liberty.

Among the men who will be interviewed are three prisoners who are said to have admitted that they held the rope blanket while the four slid down to the ground, then hauled back the blankets into the corridor, untied them, spread them on the cots again, and feigned sleep.

There were also nine other prisoners in cells in this corridor. Police say that these men knew of the plot, but could not get away on account of being locked in their cells.

It is said that Basil O’Donnell and a man who did not escape were the leaders in the scheme. O’Donnell getting the saw by the string route through the window and the other man hiding it in his mattress.

Chief Constable Draper and Inspector of Detectives Murray expressed appreciation of the work of Detectives Alexander and Skinner in rounding up the alleged confederates.

Persuades Two to Surrender A brother’s determination that law and justice should not be flaunted, resulted in the apprehension last night of Hugh Barclay, 17, Earnbridge Ave., and Albert Murphy, of 21 Cayuga Ave., Mount Dennis, two of the four youths who escaped from the Don jail on Thursday night.

Barclay’s brother, residing on Rhodes Ave., persuaded the two to surrender to the authorities after they appealed for aid.

‘There is not going to be any further nonsense,’ the brother is reported by the police to have told the fugitives. ‘I am going to call the police and that’s the end of this.’

When asked their reasons for attempting to escape when they were only short-term prisoners, they are alleged to have replied:

‘I guess we were fools. We didn’t want to at first, but when Kemp and O’Donnell asked us we didn’t like to appear to be yellow.’

Seized Alleged Abettors An hour prior to the capture of Murphy and Barclay, Detective-Sergt. Alan Alexander and Detective Fred Skinner of headquarters staff, arrested Frank O’Donnell, 16 of 1174 Queen St. E., and James Smith, 16, of 116 Kingston Rd. After two hours of questioning they were placed in custody at Dundas St. W. Station on charges of aiding and abetting the four youths to escape from the jail. O’Donnell is a brother of Basil O’Donnel, who was captured early Friday as he attempted to escape, in company with Fred Kemp, from the home of Tilly Desjardins on Angus Pl.

Following other clues and information Detectives Alexander and Skinner arrested Patrick Introcaso, 16, of 138 Hewart Ave., on a charge of aiding and abetting them to escape and later brought two young girls, one a juvenile, aged 15, and the other, Betty Kits, aged 17, of 3 Malton Ave., to headquarters for questioning. They were later placed under arrest on charges on conspiracy. Of the four that escaped, only one Fred Kemp, is at large. He is being sought for by squads of police officers.

Eleventh Arrest Made Early to-day Detective-Sergt. Alexander and Detective Skinner arrested Joseph Smith, 16, in his home at 103 Elm St., on a charge of aiding and abetting in the escape of the four men. He is no relation to James Smith, who is also arrested.

Joseph Smith was in jail in the corridor with the same gang and it is said, was given $2 by Basil O’Donnell to buy a saw when he was released. He bought tobacco instead and had it tied on the string. Smith, it is said, with others stood below the window at night and sent up notes. His arrest is the eleventh in connection with the case.

Frank O’Donnell, Pat Introcaso, Betty Kitts and the fifteen-year-old girl actually had the saw that was used by the four in cutting the bar on the jail window, police say. They stole down to the jail on the night of March 11, and tied the saw to rope lowered by Basil O’Donnell from the corridor window, it is said. The younger girl is said to have admitted that she took the saw from the cellar of her father’s home and handed it to Frank O’Donnell and Introcaso.

Smuggled Tobacco First The escape, it is understood, was effected after nine days of planning and preparations. The idea was developed through the ease with which tobacco was smuggled into O’Donnell and Kemp at night time, it is said.

It is alleged that the pair had their friends tie packages of tobacco and cigarettes on the end of a rope that was lowered. Then they struck on the idea that a saw could be just as easily hauled up in the same manner. A request was sent out to friends, and nightly, for a week prior to March 2, the rope was lowered in the hopes that a saw would be attached, as it finally was.

James Smith was not with the girls and youths when the saw was tied to the rope. he had, however, been in jail in company with Kemp and O’Donnell on a week’s remand and is said to have known of the conspiracy and to have studied out the plans with the other captives.

Police say the youths started to saw the bar five days before they effected their escape. They took turns and did the sawing while the guard was absent at meal times. As one was sawing other prisoners in the corridor on the third floor whistled and sang to drown the rasping of the saw. In fact, police say, that the whole seven prisoners in the corridor floor were contemplating to effect an escape.

Sawing Bar Took a Week The upper part of the bar was sawed through in an hour’s sawing, stretched over two days. But it took five days to cut through the lower part of the bar. To conceal the marks when the guards were inspecting the quarters the prisoners rubbed soap over the weather-corroded bars.

They finished the cutting Thursday and the word was passed around to make the escape at 8:30 p.m. They were with the aid of men who stayed behind, police say, to be lowered down by the rope they had constructed from blankets

Barclay, who is said to have stolen a pair of trousers from the hospital ward in the jail at supper time, hastily rid himself of the striped jail trousers, and, with Murphy, ran into the Don Ravine. They were passing the Isolation hospital when they saw two constables removing a patient and taking fright, they doubled back up the ravine again.

They passed a number of back yards and in one of them saw some overalls and trousers hanging on a line. They stripped the clothes line and donned the garments.

Without money, the pair, it is alleged, begged 20 or 30 cents on Dundas St. With this money they boarded a street car and went to Murphy’s home on Cayuyga Ave., Mount Dennis. Mrs. Murphy refused to let them stay, but gave her son $4 and told him to go away.

They left the house Thursday night and made their way to the train tracks on Dufferin St., where they crawled into a freight car on the north siding of the embankment and slept for the night.

Girls Are Part. The Kitts girl and her young friend are of the ‘flapper type.’ When The Star passed them on their way into the city hall, they said in passing: ‘Hello, we are going in for a chicken sandwich.’

The arrests last night were due to the alertness of Detective Fred Skinner and his partner, Detective-Sergeant Alexander. yesterday Skinner was bringing Basil O’Donnell down the city hall steps when he noticed a young man wave a hand in greeting.

After he had delivered his prisoner in court, Skinner came out and talked to the young man, who was still lounging about. he asked if he was a friend of O’Donnell and when the youth answered in the affirmative, the officer asked him if he would like to see him.

“Why yes, but they won’t let me,’ stated the youth.

Skinner arranged a visit and allowed O’Donnell to talk wit his friend. When the visit was up, Detective Skinner cross-questioned the young man, and learned, it is said, that he was out on parole and was aware of the plot hatched in the jail.

Armed with this information, Skinner and Alexander arrested Smith and Introcaso around 4.30 p.m. Later, they obtained a full confession, they state.

The four arrested youths appeared in police court to-day and the two girls in juvenile court,

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“Sentenced Imposed On Jail-Breakers,” Toronto Globe. March 29, 1930. Page 16. ----- Two Boys Who Sent Saws Into Jail Go to Reformatory ---- Three of the four prisoners who escaped from Toronto Jail appeared before Magistrate R. J. Browne at a special setting of the Police Court yesterday afternoon, charged with escaping from custody. The prisoners, Basil O’Donnell [TOP], Albert Murphy [MIDDLE] and Hugh Barclay [BOTTOM], pleaded guilty, and were sentenced to terms of two years each in Kingston Penitentiary.

O’Donnell’s 16-year-old brother Frank, and Patrick Introcasco, same age, were then arraigned, charged with aiding and abetting the four to escape by sending a saw into the jail. Both were given terms of one years, plus one year indeterminate, in the Ontario Reformatory.

Nine prisoners brought from the jail were charged with aiding and abetting the four prisoners to escape, were next put on trial. Joseph Plaxton, Herosh Stockley, Mike Bellick, William Roberts, and Joseph Flynn pleaded guilty. They were given terms of one year, plus six months indeterminate, in the reformatory. Four others, Robert Gage, William Webb, Edward Fiddler, and Thomas Kerr, pleaded not guilty, and the Crown withdrew the charges. Tillie Des Jardines, held as a vagrant following the arrest of Basil O’Donnell in her home, following the escape, was alleged to go, as was Betty Kitts, aged 16, who was with young O’Donnell and Intracaso when the saw was sent into the jail.

[AL: All three teenagers had escaped on March 14, 1930, and all been recaptured except for Fred Kemp, the fourth escapee, who was captured in April 1930. O’Donnell completed his reformatory term first, and was taken to Kingston Penitentiary in October 1930. As inmate #1894, he worked in the Tinsmith Shop then the Excavation Gang. He supported the 1932 riot in October, and demanded cigarette papers, recreation, newspapers, pay for inmate labour so upon release “we won’t have to steal,” the abolition of corporal punishment, though he had never had it, and an end to the silent system and petty reports of officers.  He was transferred to Collin’s Bay in November and paroled in December 1932. Murphy (#2039) also finished his reformatory sentence before coming to Kingston in December 1930. He worked in the canvas shop and was released October 1932 on parole. Hugh Barclay (#1892) also arrived in October 1930 after finishing his reformatory term, and was paroled September 1932. He came back to Kingston Penitentiary as inmate #3046 in April 1933.] 

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“Nine Prisoners To Stand Trial In Escape Plot,” Toronto Star. March 27, 1930. Page 11. ---- Police Say Inmates of Don Admit Making Rope and Watching Guards --- TWENTY IN DRAGNET --- Nine inmates of the Toronto jail awaiting transfer to Ontario prisons will be brought to court to-morrow to testify in charges arising out of the jail break a week ago.

The nine men are: Joseph Claxton, Herbert Stockley, Mike Billick, Edward Fidler, Thomas Keir, Wm. Roberts, Joseph Flynn, William Webb, Robert Gage.

They will be charged by Det.-Sgt. Alan Alexander and Fred Skinner headquarters division, with aiding and abetting Basil O’Donnell, Fred Kemp, Hugh Barclay, and Frank Murphy to escape.

With these nine the suspect list now soars to twenty implicated in the plot and escape, including three girls.

Det.-Sgts. Alexander and Skinner went to the jail and interviewed the nine men who were in the same cell corridor as the quartet which escaped. The nine men, it is said, made certain admissions to the police that implicated them in the plot.

These nine men told the police that they helped to make the string that was to haul in a saw from thread they secured to repair their garments.

They also stated they helped to tie up the blankets for the men to slide from the third floor to the ground. They also admitted they took turns in standing guard at the end of the corridor.

Basil O’Donnell, one of the escaped inmates, who was recaptured, will also face a charge of shopbreaking. He is charged with breaking into the Mayfair Dance Club, Bay. St., February 22, and stealing a number of musical instruments which the detectives found in the house of his sweetheart when he was arrested.

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“F. Kemp, Jail Breaker, Is Given 2 1/2 Years,” Toronto Star. May 21, 1930. Page 03. ---- Goes to Portsmouth to Join Associates Serving Similar Term ---- The end of the most wretched of all trails, the criminal trail, was reached in men’s police court by Fred Kemp, young jailbreaker, to-day, when he was committed by Magistrate Jones to Kingston Penitentiary for a term of two-and-a-half years for escaping from Toronto jail on the night of March 20. Three others who escaped at the same time, are now serving similar terms. The young man looked a pitiful spectacle in the dock. He is only nineteen, but the last few years have been crowded with arrests, convictions, and jail terms. Probation was tried more than once, but did no good. Now, beaten at every turn, he stood frowning darkly at the mess he had made of everything. Mother was in the corridors, but was not called.

 ‘Breaking her heart?’ queried Magistrate Jones.

‘Yes,’ admitted the young prisoner.

Bracing himself up in the our of his nemesis, he blurted out that it was all ‘no good; foolish; he had got nothing out of it.’

‘Nineteen years behind you, mused Mr. Jones.

Major Hedley Basher, governor of the old jail, recalled the ‘breakaway.’ Kemp and the others had filed a bar, the file being hoisted into corridor six by means of a brick trhust. Kemp, he added, had been arrested at Montreal.

Crown-Attorney McFadden handed in Kemp’s long record which included terms for theft and shop breaking.

Penalties imposed varied from probation to one year plus one year. Even after convictions he had been placed on probation in this benevolent city.

‘With all that behind you, what’s ahead of you?’ asked the magistrate.

‘I hope this is a rest,’ concluded the magistrate.

‘I got nothing out of it all just, just foolish,’ replied the prisoner.

‘And your mother breaking her heart,’ said Mr. Jones.

‘Yes,’ was the sullen reply.

‘Are you any different from the others?’ ‘No.’

‘His criminal record is worse,’ said Mr. McFadden.

Like his three companions in the successful break-away from the Don Bastille. Kemp, apparently broken in spirit, was sent to the penitentiary for two and a half years, to run consecutively to the term he was serving when he escaped.

[AL: Kemp came to Kingston Penitentiary as inmate #1893. He had been in the reformatories at Burwash and Guelph before, and obviously had escaped the Toronto Jail. He worked in the Bake Shop in the kitchen at Kingston Penitentiary. He supported the demands of the rioters in October 1932, wanting more cigarette papers, more letters, more recreation. He had “given up hope of writing” and had no idea if his parents were writing - he was terrified she had died outside. He had been reported a number of times for smuggling, insubordination, and talking. He was released December 1932, This was not his last time in Kingston - he came back for a 3 year sentence in 1937.]