Reveling in a Big, Happy Family on ‘The Rock’

When she was 9, Dena Freeman carefully carved a gun out of a bar of Ivory soap and painted it black with liquid shoe polish. It was the perfect toy for playing wardens and inmates.

But her childhood on Alcatraz Island as the daughter of a correctional officer was far different than that of most others her age. For one thing, toy guns were forbidden.

A guard caught her playing with the fake gun and told her father. She was scolded, and her father promised the warden she’d obey the rules.

“I would rather have been struck with a bullwhip than have to listen to my father yell at me,” recalls Freeman, who lived on the island from 1945-55. “Toy guns were not OK, and I knew that. I got every reason in the world why guns were contraband and how an inmate could use them to hold officers hostage.”

Today, tourists flock to the infamous former maximum security island prison in San Francisco Bay. But visitors learn little of the families of dozens of guards and officials who shared the island with some of America’s most notorious criminals, including Al “Scarface” Capone and George “Machine Gun” Kelly.

Although the federal penitentiary has been closed for 34 years, the island’s onetime non-prisoner population has remained a tightknit group.

They belong to the Alcatraz Alumni Assn., which holds a yearly picnic reunion in the Sonoma County wine country north of San Francisco. At this year’s meeting on Aug. 2, they passed around black-and-white photos and told stories about their life on “The Rock.”

Their perspectives of the island are wildly different from those of the inmates, says Freeman’s daughter, Teri, who is co-producing a two-hour TV documentary titled “The Children of Alcatraz.”

“To be raised on Alcatraz and to live just a few hundred yards away from these criminals was a unique experience,” she says.

“These were people who were far more bonded and loyal to each other than your everyday community, even in those days. These kids literally grew up a lot like an extended family, and they stay in touch like an extended family.”

Guards and their families lived in apartments and cottages on the eastern side of the island. When their fathers went to work, the children boarded a 65-foot ferry to San Francisco, where they went to school while their mothers remained behind.

Hide-and-seek in the fog was a popular game on the island. Some children strapped on roller skates and, lifting a huge white sheet, let the whipping, frigid wind carry them along.

Families occasionally encountered prisoners gathering laundry or delivering milk, but they rarely feared for their safety.

“The truth is, we were safer on the island than in San Francisco,” recalled alumni president Bud Heart, who spent his junior high and high school years on Alcatraz. “Our standard comeback in the old days was that all of our bad ones were locked up.”

His family never locked their doors.

“I don’t even think we owned a key,” he says.

And though the children had few fears, the threat of a prisoner breaking out and taking a child or spouse hostage was always a possibility.

“There was that lingering possibility of violence,” Teri Freeman says. “It never happened, but it was always a concern.”

One escape attempt that had tragic consequences was the “Alcatraz Blastout” on May 2, 1946. It was a day Pat Rothschild hasn’t forgotten.

Rothschild, whose father was guard captain for nine years, was with classmates at St. Brigid School in San Francisco when six inmates took nine officers hostage in the deadliest escape attempt ever at Alcatraz.

When the uprising ended the next day, two officers and three prisoners were dead. Bill Miller, one of the officers killed, was the father of one of Rothschild’s best friends.

“I remember the nun coming down the aisle and tapping Joanne on the shoulder,” Rothschild says. “They walked back to the entryway of the church. That’s when I found out he had been killed.”

Such escape attempts were rare, although Rothschild’s father says family members were allowed on only five of the island’s 12 acres. Still, Phil Bergen says his family never complained.

“The restrictions were tight, but not so tight as to make it uncomfortable,” says the 92-year-old Bergen, who has attended every reunion since they began in the late ‘60s.

Bergen says there were lots of things for children to do--bowling alleys, pool tables, card rooms, a stage for dances, a movie hall, a gymnasium, playground and handball court.

As for any concerns of escapes, Bergen says, “The thing was so well organized that the possibility of them getting loose on the island was very remote.”

Security wasn’t always foolproof, says Bill Dolby, whose father was a correctional officer. Dolby was playing near a barbed-wire fence separating the residential area from the prison when he discovered that a Popsicle stick could open the lock.

“It popped right open,” says Dolby, who felt guilty and later told the associate warden. “A couple days later, there were all new locks around the prison.”

As for everyday life on the island, one former child resident told of accidentally dropping her schoolbook into San Francisco Bay while riding a ferry to the mainland. Try explaining that to your teacher.

Pets also were forbidden, so one girl hatched a pigeon egg and kept the bird hidden under her bed.

There were some advantages to living on the island. It allowed then-16-year-old Dena Freeman to make a quick escape onto the ferry back to Alcatraz before her date had a chance to kiss her good night.

“He was such a dweeb,” says Freeman, now 61. “I left him puckered, standing on the gangplank and his eyes closed.”