3 days ago
An old ex-con recalls his days at Alcatraz. His biggest complaint: ‘Boredom'
There are only two people left in the world who really know what it was like to be a prisoner on Alcatraz, the legendary island in San Francisco Bay. One is Charlie Hopkins, who lives in Florida. The other is William Baker, who lives in Toledo, Ohio, and is spending the summer in San Francisco.
Hopkins, a kidnapper and robber who spent three years on Alcatraz, is 93. Baker, a counterfeiter and escape artist, spent four. Baker is 92. 'As far as I know, we are the last two Alcatraz prisoners still around,' Baker says. Hopkins was interviewed on BBC in May at his home in Florida. I had lunch with Baker last week at Sam's Grill on Bush Street.
Baker is spending a lot of the time these days on Alcatraz, where he appears at the bookstore on the island. He's there to sign his book — 'Alcatraz #1259,' the story of his life, which is mostly a story of 30 years behind bars. 'I guess you might say I'm a career criminal,' he writes.
He's also a rarity: a survivor, a convict who managed to make crime pay. When he arrived at Alcatraz in the winter of 1957, he was a 23-year-old tough guy — 'a bad boy' with a reputation as a troublemaker, a jailhouse rioter, someone who was always trying to escape. He nearly got away more than once. Almost, not quite. 'You could see freedom,' he said of one near escape.
At Alcatraz he got a job making gloves. But he learned another trade as well. This one was counterfeiting payroll checks, which he learned from Courtney Taylor, a convict who was the master of the trade.
After Alcatraz, Baker spent years working with payroll checks. He made a good living, too. 'I'm the best counterfeit check casher there is,' he wrote. But technology and computers tripped him up, and he spent his post-Alcatraz years in other prisons.
But then he turned to another trade he learned in prisons. He became a writer. 'I did always want to write,' he told me over lunch.
He took creative writing courses at a South Dakota prison and began to write short stories. One of his stories, 'The Old Man and the Tree,' won first place in a nationwide prison writing contest. When his prison days were over and he was paroled in 2011, he wrote 'Alcatraz #1259' and sent it to the Park Service to have it approved for sale. Marcus Koenen, the supervising ranger at the time, liked it.
There are lots of Alcatraz books, but Baker's has the ring of an insider, the reality of prison life.
The book is a good read and a bestseller, too. Baker published it himself, and the Golden Gate Conservancy, a park service partner, handles sales. Baker is on hand three days a week to sign autographs and pose for pictures. He's living history, the Alcatraz legend in person.
His book has done well. He's sold thousands of copies. 'We sold 302 on Memorial Day alone,' he said. 'Not bad.'
'I do this trip because I need the money,' he said. 'I've got a wife and a house and a dog to support. I'd sell my book on the street if I had to.'
Baker is a bit gaunt. He wears thick glasses, and his hand trembles a bit. But he still has a bit of that tough kid who first landed on the Rock years ago. To celebrate a San Francisco lunch, he bought a brand new Stetson Stratoliner hat, the kind Howard Hughes liked. A new coat, too.
But never mind the new clothes. We talked prison. What was the worst thing about Alcatraz? 'The boredom,' Baker said, 'Being locked up with nothing to do. The routine. Every day was the same. Not having freedom. But a writer can't write about boredom. So I wrote about people.'
He wrote about Robert Stroud, the Birdman. Baker didn't know him; Stroud was in solitary. But he'd see him. Stroud was a prison hero but something else, a presence. He describes an encounter: 'What I saw in that brief moment was a dark cell with a gray shadow of a man peering out at me with bright white eyes streaked with the coal fires of hell.'
Baker knew Roland Simcox, who was quiet, polite and 'a cold-blooded killer' who fatally stabbed another inmate. 'He killed him in the shower room in cold blood with a guard looking straight at him,' Baker recalled. That one stuck in Baker's memory. 'The guard threw a roll of toilet paper at him and yelled, 'Hey, break it up.''
Escape? 'Everybody talked about it all the time,' Baker said, 'but they didn't do it.'
One friend of Baker's who did try was Aaron Burgett, who was involved in a prison liquor escapade and played baseball in the yard. One day on garbage detail Burgett and Clyde Johnson, another prisoner, overpowered a guard and jumped in the bay. They'd made flotation devices, but they weren't good enough. Johnson was caught and Burgett drowned. 'They found his body but his soul was long gone,' Baker wrote.
Alcatraz is in the news these days. President Donald Trump is thinking of turning the island back into a prison. Is that possible? Thirty years as a prisoner made Baker guarded about prison policy. 'I don't know,' he said. 'It would be very expensive. It's crumbling, too. The last escapers used a spoon to get away. And they never came back. Besides, they already have a high-tech maximum security prison in Colorado.'
They call it the Alcatraz of the Rockies and Baker described it in detail, the cells, the security, the exercise yard built like a pit where all an inmate can see is the sky. Nothing else.
