Life of Crime: “Willie the Actor” Sutton

Poor Arnold Schuster. The 24-year-old good citizen recognized wanted bank robber Willie Sutton and turned him in to police. Albert Anastasia, mob boss of the Gambino crime family, took a dislike to Schuster, called him a squealer, and ordered his murder. When the biography of Sutton was excerpted for Life magazine in January, 1953, Schuster’s murder had not been solved.

At one time Sutton, who reportedly stole about $2 million from banks over his lifetime and who spent more than half his lifetime in prison, was famous in a way reserved now for mass murderers. Standards have changed. Nowadays a clever bank robber is lower on the pecking order of notoriety than a killer who goes into a building spraying bullets at random victims.

Sutton was apprehended on this day, February 18, 1952. He was released from prison in 1969, and died in 1980 at age 79.

Copyright © 1953, 2012 Time-Life

Gun crazy

Robert Kirby is a columnist for my newspaper addiction of choice, The Salt Lake Tribune (loyal subscriber for 40 years!) Kirby is a humorist, an active member of the LDS Church and a former police officer. He sees things differently than those things would suggest. He has a lot of fun with church traditions (including how boring services can be), and he also takes stabs at behavior he perceives as nutty.

In his column of February 13, 2013, he went after a group of gun lovers demonstrating at the Utah State Capitol building. Kirby describes himself as a gun owner and says, “I own guns in a number generally associated with ‘a lot.’” He also says he’s no fan of big government. But he took issue with the appearance of the gun rights demonstrators. A third of them were wearing camouflage, “conspicuously toting weapons of various calibers and rates of fire, and waving flags and signs daring the federal government to do something about it.”

He continued: “Even a dullard like me with lots of first-hand firearms experience could relate. I watched the crowd and thought, ‘Wow, that’s a lot of scary gun owners. Maybe there’s something to this gun control thing.’

“Among the symbols of pro-gun defiance was a flag featuring an assault rifle and words, ‘Come And Get It.’

“Really? If it came to an actual fight over your guns, do you honestly think it would be a fair one? The government could deprive you of your guns by simply flying a bomb through your window some night.”

Which is something I’ve often thought: what chance would gun owners have against the military or militarized police forces of the United States? My guess is that if an armed insurrection were to be at hand there would be a lot of pushback from the government to end it, and they always win. Some of these folks could take to the hills. Survivalists would be good at that. It would be hard to ferret them out of the woods, but look what happened to Christopher Dorner, rogue policeman who killed four, when he hid out in a cabin at Big Bear Lake, California. He brought down an overwhelming force upon himself. Eventually the government has its way. And really, if they found a camp of self-proclaimed “patriots” and militia-men, what would stop them from flying a drone over and delivering a payload right into the campfire?

Then I thought, how much of what Robert Kirby described was real anti-government sentiment and how much was posturing? I see responsible gun owners who don’t have to wave their weapons around to make a point, and I see a bunch of redneck types who like to make some sort of a show about it.

And as I’ve said before, I don’t think the Second Amendment much enters into the minds of people like that.

This guy describes himself as “the world’s strongest redneck,” and he likes to show off how he can fire two semi-autos at the same time. What do you think he’d say if you asked him to quote the Second Amendment? Do you think he cares what the Second Amendment says? I don’t. People of all types like guns for all types of reasons, but if someone tells you he owns a gun because he believes in the Second Amendment I think he is overstating his case, if not telling a flat-out lie.

Fat redneck

More fun with your .22 rifle

Before the National Rifle Association got taken over by the politics of paranoia, it was an organization for  marksmanship, sports and target shooting and teaching safety with firearms. It put out this undated booklet sometime in the '50s or '60s. It is full of good sense for people who want to use a .22 rifle for something other than defending their household against criminals or phantom government officials who have come to take their guns.

Ashley Judd has golden globes, Karl Rove has brass balls

Karl Rove’s Stupor-PAC, American Crossroads, released a peremptory strike on a candidate not yet declared. Rove hauled out all of his political guns to aim at a potential senate candidate for Kentucky who lives in Tennessee, and works in Hollywood.

We’re talking Ashley Judd, the third leg of the Judd family tripod, the non-singing one who makes a living as an actress. Rove paints her as a Hollywood liberal for Obama, which is ruffling the blue grass and sending shudders through the Republicans of Kentucky. Why else go on the offensive at this time, unless the Republicans are feeling their man is very vulnerable?

Right now Mitch McConnell is Senator from Kentucky. He is the owlish-looking man who would be almost anonymous were it not for his infamous words in the National Journal in 2010: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” (Needless to say, objective not attained.) McConnell also has the distinction of being the Nation’s least popular senator, as explained by blogger Justin Sink of thehill.com.

Mitch McConnell: He’s unpopular, not good looking, and needs bullies to fight his battles for him.

 Least popular.

By picking this fight Karl Rove could actually be looking out for himself, and maybe this is part of his comeback plan. It might be his way of deflecting the shitstorm of criticism after losing hundreds of millions of dollars for donors to his Super-PAC who didn’t get their money’s worth. Rove had a 1% success rate in the 2012 election, which is another way of saying he had a 99% failure rate. So, Operation Distract Attention goes into effect!

Most OPM (other peoples' money).

Judd would seem to be a good target and an easy mark. She’s (shudder, brrrr) Hollywood, she’s liberal, a Democrat, an Obama supporter. Hell, light those fiery crosses right now, Kentuckians!

Or, put away your Zippo lighters. Unlike the doughy Republican candidate, Ashley is pretty. She has what Mitch McConnell doesn’t have, and that’s good boobs. Maybe instead of telling their secretaries to lie and tell him they’re in a meeting when McConnell calls, senators from both sides of the aisle might want very much to talk with Ashley.

The Right Stuff!

Yes, I know it’s sexist to show Ashley’s breasts, exposed in some movie from years ago, but what the heck. I’m sure she’ll get just as many votes for showing them as she’ll lose from hardcore Republicans for being an Obama supporter.

And really, how much worse could she be, really? I mean, compared to seeing either McConnell or Rove with their shirts off?

Life of Crime: “Catch me before I kill more.”

William Heirens, who died in March, 2012 at age 83, was the longest-serving prisoner in the U.S. He had been in prison since he was a teen in 1946 for the killings of two women and a child.

Whether or not he was actually guilty, or convicted by tainted evidence and a dubious confession, or even trial by newspaper, is the subject of a long article at Wikipedia, William Heirens. It’s one of those fascinating cases that has been much discussed and debated over six decades. It has also been the stuff of morbid fascination based on a message written in lipstick at one of the crime scenes:

 

The cover of this 1956 Shock Illustrated fictionalizes the note, but shows how powerful an effect it had on the public, even ten years after Heirens was arrested.

While the City Sleeps was a 1956 movie, directed by Fritz Lang, inspired by the Heirens case.

Life, in its July 29, 1946 issue, gave the Heirens case two pages, with a tousled-hair photo of Heirens that made him appear wild, and has been criticized as helping to form the public perception of him.

Copyright © 1944, 2013 Time-Life

Even considering Chicago’s reputation as a city with a high murder rate, the brutality of the crimes attributed to Heirens was unusual, and got national attention.

Daisy-twirling Man and the invisible companion

I never knew him by any other name than that which I called him, “Daisy-twirling Man.” I saw him nearly every day of my working life walking the sidewalks within my delivery route. He was always afoot, distinctive with his pigeon-toed gait, his hand extended at arm's length, holding a flower, spinning it constantly. When Daisy-twirling Man was waiting for a light to change so he could cross the street he would rock back and forth in place, front to back, still spinning the flower.

He was tall with long, bushy reddish-blond hair and a matching beard, and every six months or so he would appear clean-shaven with his hair cut close to the scalp. Then the cycle repeated itself and after a couple of months he would again become hairy. I thought he might live in a group home, or with parents who would finally get tired of his hair and beard and cut them off. Underneath the hair and behind the beard he was a nice-looking man, even if it was obvious he had some condition that kept him from being “normal.” He looked to be my age, and as part of my workday for over 30 years he was such a familiar person in the area that when I described him, doing my imitation of his rocking and twirling motions, people would usually say, “I’ve seen that guy!”

I never knew Daisy-twirling Man’s story. There are people like him, everywhere. There is something wrong with their brains, maybe from injury, disease, or accident of birth. They’re people sometimes called the walking wounded; ambulatory, but obviously not all there mentally.

When I’d see him his mouth was usually moving, and because I was out of earshot I assumed he was probably babbling incoherently. I thought it was what my mother’s doctor called Mom’s dementia-speak: “word salad.”

A few weeks ago I was in a thrift store within the area of my old route, looking at used books. I heard a man speaking. When I looked up Daisy-twirling Man was standing in the next aisle, also looking at books. I saw he was in his cleaned-up state, with a buzz haircut and no beard. He was rocking back and forth with a book in his hand, talking to himself. He was saying things like, “Now this is interesting,” and then he’d read a sentence or two out loud, so I knew he could read, and well. I watched him out of the corner of my eye for about five minutes and it was obvious  he was carrying on a conversation with a person I couldn’t see or hear. He was saying, “The author claims…” and then he went into a short description of the first months of the Civil War, giving a history lesson. My three decades assumption that he was babbling was shot down. There was nothing wrong with his speech or the way he constructed sentences. It was just that he was carrying on a conversation with a person who did not exist. The conversation wasn’t contentious, although he did correct the party he was speaking with a couple of times, based on some point that person had apparently raised.

When I left I had a new appreciation for Daisy-twirling Man. I had always seen people he was walking toward give him a wide berth, as if such a benign individual was dangerous rather than just odd or afflicted. I felt almost happy to see him talking to someone, anyone, even if the person was invisible. I thought how convenient it would be to have someone always there off whom one could bounce ideas, or just pass the time of day.  In that way Daisy-twirling Man, who had always been on his own for all the years I saw him out walking, was actually strolling with a friend.

Dr. Spectros, the cowboy-magician

My friend, Clark Dissmeyer, is a true original. He’s a man I’ve known since he was a teenager in the 1980s, when we collaborated on some cartoon projects. Clark lives and works in Nebraska, where he is also a book collector.

Clark is not a computer person. He does not own a computer, and when he needs one he uses one at the library. I do not hold it against him. Clark normally uses the Postal Service. He mails out photocopies of his cartoons and his thoughts. I recently got this interesting mailer, called Cadsheet #2, about finding an obscure occult Western novel. I asked Clark if I could transcribe it. Clark not only does not like computers, he does not like typewriters, so he hand letters his missives. Clark doesn’t need a lot of editing, although I have trimmed his editorial here and there, but am otherwise presenting it as Clark wrote it:

CADSHEET #2 PRESENTS

BOOKSTORE ROUNDUP

Or

EIGHT HUNDRED ON THE HOOF!

By Clark A. Dissmeyer

Copyright © 2013 Clark A. Dissmeyer

I have 800 Westerns in the back of my car.

Ed is closing Bookends [a local used bookstore]. For the last couple months he’s had boxes of shabby old Westerns up front, on sale at the bargain price of 25¢ or 5/$1.00. I’d been picking up some now and then, but when I told Pat about it, her eyes lit up. “Ask him how much he’d take for all of them!”

I asked him, and he said 10¢ apiece. When I told her that, and asked if I should get them all, she didn’t think twice before saying yes! I figured there were 4 or 5 hundred.

Turns out there were 800.

I managed to leave them alone in the backseat and trunk of the car, figuring I’d just leave them there ‘til I could transfer them to Pat’s in Riverton, for a whole day; until taking a break from David Copperfield I could stand it no more! and felt compelled to go out and start hauling them in, to organize them according to author, series, etc., About half of them were more modern series books that didn’t interest me much  the Stage Coach Station series, say, or this guy J. T. Edson  and the other half was older, cooler stuff  some vintage ‘40s pocket books, another half dozen by Peter Fields (aka Davis Dresser and Brett Halliday), Luke Short, a ton of miscellaneous, and amidst the chaos of boxes and stacks covering my floor, I discovered THIS gem:

Just when you think you’ve seen everything:

As someone who spends an unhealthy amount of time at used bookstores, thrift stores, library sales, etc., there’s hardly a variety of paperback I haven’t run across at one time or another, in whatever genre, but this was a new one to me, a horror-Western about a gunfighter-sorcerer?

The back cover has an amazingly concise, detailed catalog of the wonders in store for us inside:

Note the sidekicks  very much in the tradition of Doc Savage and Captain Future!

Our hero, Dr. Spectros, was a cowboy  I should say gunslinger  shanghaied and washed up on the shores of India, where he learns to become a magician, a la Dr. Strange or another pulp hero, the Green Lama. He does this in his quest to save the woman he loves.

But let’s let Mr. Winters’ [Logan Winters, author] prose speak for itself:

It’s actually pretty well plotted, and it has everything: cowboys, Indians, damsels in distress (several), shape-changing sorcerers, inscrutable ethnic types from distant continents…

What’s sort of odd for a pulpish adventure is how much “backstory” is only hinted at. We know that Spectros seeks out a “master” to teach him magic, but that part is not elaborated  presumably saved for future flashbacks in future novels. This, the first novel, begins with Spectros already having pursued Blackschuster for who know how long  we take up the pursuit in the setting of the old West. Who knows how long he trained to be a magician? Where did they chase him before they ended up in the West? Again, questions presumably answered in future flashbacks. For now, we only know Blackschuster has kept her in in a hermetically sealed glass coffin, as the villain moons over her in another florid, morbid romantic passage I can’t resist reproducing:

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*I would also note that at a time when Westerns were becoming more and more sexy and sleazy, Spectros is remarkably chaste. It could almost have been written in the ‘40s.
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I have no idea what the editors at the shabby, marginal paperback publisher Tower Books were thinking. Did they really think it had a chance of success? Well, for an outfit like Tower they were probably hoping at best for something more like subsistence-level sales. Whatever spawned this one wonders, too, did “Logan Winters” approach an editor with the idea, or did an editor come up with it and farm it out?  one can only be glad that it did.

Of course I googled (Yahoo’d, actually) Logan Winters. No biography that I could find, no Wikipedia entry. Doubtless it is a pseudonym, but couldn’t someone say so? (I did find another Logan Winters  a happy-go-lucky 18-year-old. It couldn’t be him  unless Spectros was also a master of time travel.)

I found Western writers woefully under-represented online as compared with science fiction writers, even, say, Lee Floren, who wrote dozens, has no Wikipedia entry. Who are these people? I’ll have to try to find a book about Western writers. Bill Pronzini has to have written one, don’t you think?

There are at least three more in the Spectros series, and those are available online. I want them all! I’ll get them, one way or another.

Part of the point here is that it’s doubtful I’d ever had heard of this book  or hundreds of others  if I’d relied on the Internet. Never having heard of it in the first place, I’m not going to google “Logan Winters” or “Spectros” or “occult Westerns.” That is the wonderful thing about used bookstore browsing  not only do you not know what you might find, you frequently don’t know you were looking for it in the first place.

[Despite the closing of the local used bookstore] . . . I think there will always be used bookstores  there will always be “antique” stores  but more and more they will be limited to larger cities, and will be devoted more to a wealthier clientele who are looking for “good,” pricier, snob appeal books. Goodwill and the Salvation Army and garage sales will increasingly become the refuge of the rest of us (and I haven’t seen too many good garage sales lately, most of the old people of taste being already dead or in homes).

And there will never come a day “everything,” every book ever printed, is available for download online. Only what someone else has decided is worth making available. And like it or not, that someone won’t have heard of “Spectros.”

Above is a picture of CAD.

Postino here: In a follow-up letter, Clark told me since writing the above he found out Logan Winters is veteran writer Paul J. Lederer.

Happy 75th birthday, Snow White

Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was released on February 4, 1938. So happy birthday (a day late), Snow!

This Life article, from the December 13, 1937 issue, helped grease the promotional wheels. Besides his artistic vision, if there is anything that Walt Disney can be remembered for it was his talent for being able to sell what he did to an eager and adoring public.

Copyright 1938, 2013 Time-Life

America’s greatest athlete

On Super Bowl Sunday, when we mortal Americans worship religiously at the altar of the true god of our nation, commerce, and, oh, by the way, watch a football game, the question usually comes up (okay — it never comes up, but let’s pretend it does): “Who was the greatest athlete in the history of America?” Personally, I’d give it to Frank Merriwell, who was fictional, but who could do anything. He could play baseball (or base-ball, as it was known in those days) and football for dear old Yale (there being a paucity of pro teams in that era), and I’m supposing if he put his mind to it, he could have played basketball and outdunked everyone, or run the three-minute mile in track, or won Wimbledon in tennis.

Frank Merriwell was a superman at sports, and not only that he was modest and moral, two attributes many professional athletes seem to lack. The story of Frank Merriwell, and the prolific author who created him for the half-dime and dime novels of the era was told by Stewart H. Holbrook in the June, 1961 issue of American Heritage. Dime novels are mostly forgotten now. The authors and readers have mostly passed on to that big lending library in the sky.

A few months ago I featured more about dime novels here.

Copyright © 1961 American Heritage Publishing Co., Inc.

Inmates running the asylum

I am not against gun ownership. I own guns. I am not against other people having guns, except the people who might point them at me. I am against guns in the hands of people who, despite being honest in every other way, might be tempted to use them in situations not requiring a firearm.

I am not a member of the National Rifle Association, which I believe is a right-wing group using fear to galvanize the unstable into believing that anarchy is waiting right outside the door, or that the government is poised to swoop in and take their guns. I am against the current policy of the National Rifle Association to use fear plus smoke and mirrors to make it seem as if President Obama has a personal agenda to disarm all honest gun owners, leaving them to the mercy of criminals or worse (shudder), the government.

Watching National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre’s testimony before Congress the other day was a good example of deflecting criticism by pointing at something else. As it has been since the tragedy at Sandy Hook, according to LaPierre, the fault lies in society for not following through on “gun laws already in effect”* (and where does the money come from to enforce laws? The taxpayers, and who wants their taxes raised?); or in allowing mentally ill people** to have firearms, rather than a multi-billion dollar industry and gun laws with loopholes big enough to drive a 155 mm self-propelled howitzer through  providing easy access to weapons.

There was also that old Second Amendment thing, which the gun lobby hauls out when cornered, as another means to deflect criticism. I don’t really believe the most ardent members of the NRA care about the Second Amendment at all, except it allows them to buy really cool guns. By throwing up the Second Amendment at every argument aimed at them it makes it easier to obscure what the NRA probably doesn’t want people to think about, that they are a lobbyist for the gun industry. They are dependent on gun makers. That includes Bushmaster, who made the weapon used in the Newtown killings. The donations from the NRA’s four million members (out of over 300 million Americans) could not possibly cover all of their lobbying, PAC donations and public relations campaigns.

The NRA didn’t always shield itself with the Second Amendment. When the organization was founded after the Civil War it was for the purposes of teaching people how to use guns for target shooting, hunting, and in case they got called to war. According to the article, “Gunsmoke, the Surprising Unknown History of the NRA”*** by Steven Rosenfeld  in Salt Lake City Weekly for January 24, 2013:

“The NRA was founded in 1871 by two Yankee Civil War veterans, including an ex New York Times reporter, who felt that the war had dragged on because more urban Northerners could not shoot as well as rural Southerners. The NRA’s motto and focus was not fighting for constitutional rights to own and use guns, but ‘Firearms Safety Education, Marksmanship Training, Shooting for Recreation,’ which was displayed in its national headquarters.”

As a matter of fact, as the article goes on to say, many of the gun control laws of the Twentieth Century were helped by the NRA. Lee Harvey Oswald had bought his mail-order rifle through the NRA’s own magazine, The American Rifleman,” and after that event leadership of the NRA helped draft legislation to ban such sales. Up until that time anyone could buy a gun through the U.S. mail.

But then a radical element of the NRA grabbed power in 1977, in a move that reminds me of what the tea party was able to do, displacing less conservative public officials with far-right radicals. The story is in the article, which you can see here.

It was a surprise to me to find out that in the late sixties the main group evoking the Second Amendment was the Black Panther political party. Members carried guns on the street for self-protection. The Panthers caused panicky white politicians to pass more stringent gun control laws in California, and those tighter laws helped promote a backlash amongst right-wing elements of the NRA.

 What goes around comes around! Blacks proclaiming their right to protect themselves eventually led to the NRA’s radical turnaround. And now the NRA has a liberal black President to deal with. I believe the Black Panthers were telling the world they were ready for the Ku Klux Klan or an oppressive government to come at them, and force would be met by force. It doesn’t sound much different to me than the talk that goes around in my home state of Utah, where the rumblings are that if the government comes in to take their guns, those armed patriots will be ready for them with deadly force.

What a crock. I’m not only referring to the 2013 white tea party radicals, but the 1968 Black Panther party, too. How does any group, no matter how well armed, stand up to the U.S. Army, Marines, Air Force, National Guard, not to mention the militarized police, with their SWAT teams and heavy munitions? Anyone engaging in armed combat with the U.S. government will lose.

What the NRA and its most vocal supporters need to do is tone down the rhetoric, stop hiding behind a constitutional amendment and do what poll after poll tells them the public wants. That is to reduce danger from high-powered weapons, not add more to the stockpile. With people like LaPierre unwilling to talk anything but more guns, with politicians beholden to the gun lobby for their jobs unwilling to give an inch or compromise to any meaningful extent, it frustrates the public, leading to more dissension and more problems than it is ever going to solve.

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*Some gung-ho rookie Utah legislator, Brian Greene (Republican), has introduced a bill that would allow local deputies to arrest federal officers enforcing federal gun laws. Ha! I’m sure someone will remind Brian that the federal law trumps the state law when it comes to federal offenses.

**For the record, Adam Lanza, the shooter and killer of a couple of dozen people, obtained his weapons from his mother, who had bought them legally. She couldn’t be called to task for providing them because he killed her first. Also, so far as I know, he was never evaluated and found mentally ill.

***The article originated at AlterNet.com.