A Rock and a Hard Place

Alcatraz is a deeply familiar place, virtually an icon of popular culture, but everything we think we know about “America’s Devil’s Island” is based on what we’ve seen at the movies.

“Few subjects have been the focus of more disinformation than the former U.S. penitentiary at Alcatraz,” insists National Park Service archivist John W. Roberts in his introduction to George H. Gregory’s “Alcatraz Screw.” “The Rock remains as elusive as it was during Alcatraz’s scant 29 years as a federal prison.”

Gregory, however, was an eyewitness to what actually happened on “the Rock” during the last 15 years of its existence as a federal prison. He tells his story with intimacy, candor and a hard-boiled sense of humor in “Alcatraz Screw,” a posthumously published memoir that shows us what Alcatraz looked like to one of its veteran prison guards.

Indeed, Gregory’s life story reads like the scenario of a film noir from the 1940s--he started working as a prison guard during the Depression, turned down a deferment and enlisted in the Marine Corps during World War II, sustained a serious wound from sniper fire during the landing on Iwo Jima and returned to his career as a correctional officer after the war. He was transferred to Alcatraz in 1947, and he continued to serve there until 1962, shortly before the prison was shut down.

Alcatraz, as Gregory allows us to see, was always a treacherous and perilous place. On his very first day on the job, for example, he came to the rescue of a fellow guard who was scuffling with a prisoner in one of the cells: “It appeared that the convict was trying to stick the officer’s head down the toilet,” the author wryly notes, “and was having some success.”

“Alcatraz Screw” is an insider’s tale, full of the politics and pettiness of prison life, the general tedium and the occasional terror, the lively trade in sex, drugs and alcohol, the constant tension that sometimes spurred a convict into an act of violence. Gregory quickly acquired a reputation as an especially tough “screw”--”One-Man Goon Squad” was his nickname--but he allows us to understand that guards always felt themselves to be at risk of life and limb in what was advertised as a maximum-security prison.

“You learned to walk wide around the corner of a cellblock,” Gregory observes. “Someone not exactly interested in your good health could be waiting for you around the corner.”

Gregory introduces us to a few of the more notorious inmates of the famous prison, none of whom he finds very impressive. “See that fellow? Machine Gun Kelly,” says one of his fellow guards. “J. Edgar Hoover says he is a very dangerous criminal.”

But the words are strictly ironic, as Gregory explains: “Translated, that seemed to mean Machine Gun Kelly was not all that dangerous. He had the stately and distinguished bearing of a successful banker.”

Robert Stroud, the celebrated “Birdman of Alcatraz,” is similarly debunked.

“His involvement with birds was a ruse to get alcohol,” Gregory insists. “He claimed he needed the alcohol to make slides of bird tissues. Officers who had the opportunity to know say that he drank the alcohol and that they never saw a sick bird become healthy as a result of Stroud’s treatments.”

Gregory delights in revealing the craft and cunning of the convicts whom he guarded. Ginger filched from the prison kitchen could be snorted as an intoxicant; bread or fruit could be brewed up into the prison moonshine known as “pruno.” But the greatest inventiveness was applied to the making of weapons:

“A Molotov cocktail could be made by stuffing the heads of matches in a small glass bottle and inserting a piece of cotton for a fuse,” he explains. “Stout string coated with resin or pieces of sandpaper could be used to cut bars. Anything that was rigid enough to penetrate human skin and tissue could be made into a shiv.”

Much of what Gregory shows us in “Alcatraz Screw” is perfectly consistent with the movie version of the Rock. Now and then, however, he reveals a scene that has never been depicted on the silver screen--the brutal way that the guards dealt with a prisoner on a hunger strike, for example, an act so revolting that it can readily be described as torture. At its best moments, Gregory tells us stories that are strange, shocking and yet somehow charming.

One inmate whose nickname was “Suitcase Sally,” for instance, was caught with a stash of contraband, including a pair of panties belonging to the warden’s wife, a prize that the con had filched from the prison laundry and hidden away in his cell.

“Where did you get those puce panties?” demands Gregory.

“Mr. Gregory, those are pink,” retorts the inmate, “they’re not puce.”

Gregory is baffled when the warden reprimands him for searching the cell where the panties were found: “A man’s cell is his home,” says the warden. Later, Gregory discovers that Suitcase Sally had earned the warden’s gratitude when he found and turned in a weapon that had somehow been smuggled into the prison. “A fully loaded .38 could have made widows of six officers’ wives and left their children without fathers,” Gregory concludes. “[T]he warden’s wife’s panties seemed a small price to pay.”

Long before Alcatraz was the site of a prison, it belonged to the Native Americans known as the Coastanoan people. And when the last prisoner was taken off Alcatraz in 1963, a group of Native American activists declared the island to be their own once again.

“Well,” said the caretaker who found himself face to face with the first party of Native Americans who landed on the island in 1964, “I guess if you want it, you can have it.”

Thus began the “invasion” of Alcatraz, a saga that is recounted in “Heart of the Rock” by activist Adam Fortunate Eagle (formerly known as Adam Nordwall), in collaboration with journalist Tim Findley. The first landing party quickly retreated, turning instead to the courts to press their claim, but returned in force several years later, during an era when San Francisco and environs were ground zero of the counterculture, the antiwar movement and various other manifestations of the New Left, including a restive Indian community that called itself “the Little Res.”

“Searching for a focus, looking in our way for something that might give us the kind of identity that was so insistently obvious among blacks and students,” writes Fortunate Eagle, “we were frequently drawn ... to the unresolved issue of Alcatraz.”

On Nov. 9, 1969, a tiny flotilla embarked from Sausalito and headed for Alcatraz, where 92 men, women and children would, in the weeks after, come ashore. This time, the Native Americans stayed for about two years, taking up residence in the very place where men like George H. Gregory once lived, turning it into a kind of pilgrimage site for Native Americans and their supporters.

“The old Devil’s Island symbolism of the sinister cell block was in contrast to the simple but still more comfortable construction of the apartment house for guards,” recalls Fortunate Eagle. “It became, as intended, a communal center for the families on the island.”

Eventually the Indians decided to end their occupation of Alcatraz, but Fortunate Eagle and his collaborator, both of whom participated in the invasion, insist that their exploits changed the way America looked upon Indians and the way Indians looked upon themselves.

“Taking back a bitter symbol of repression and punishment for which the United States had no further use was not only appropriate, it was outright daring and inspiring,” writes Fortunate Eagle. “The taking of Alcatraz, the brash and bold action of young people themselves who were willing to go beyond mere theory and debate, riveted the attention of the public--and rallied support for its still unclear but obviously promising implications about the future.”