BONNIE AND CLYDE

[6518John]

This thread got me interested in learning more and I found this excellent PBS special from the American Experience series. It is free and very good. It is just under an hour.

[ame]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt0UWGxTNho[/ame]

 

[jtcarm]

Hamer's Savage 99 (1899?) was more likely chambered in .303 Savage, and could possibly be a takedown model by its appearance. The .303 Savage was the first caliber offered by Savage and it remained popular for a long time, well into the 1930s. Ballistically, it was pretty much a twin to the .30-30. Savage also chambered the 99 in .30-30 but it was not as popular as the .303. The .303 Savage used a 190 grain bullet and was noted for its superior penetrating capabilities in large game. Just what a lawman needed.

Charlie Askins wrote of carrying a Model 99 .300 Savage in the Border Patrol.

During a shootout with (more like “shooting of”) six Mexican cattle thieves, he described reloading the spool magazine in the dark as dangerously slow. That’s probably when we went to the 1907 .351 SLR.

That little incident reportedly took place south of the border.

I doubt any of Clyde Barrow’s descendants sued, but they were reported none too happy with the depiction of Clyde as gay, or at least not very interested in women.

 

[Watchdog]

This thread got me interested in learning more and I found this excellent PBS special from the American Experience series. It is free and very good. It is just under an hour.

It is a very well done documentary that goes deeper than all the surface folklore we've all heard and seen in the movie.

I've watched it several times. Granted that the Barrow gang was made up of petty crooks and killers, they and that time in America make for fascinating study.

When I was in school, I wrote several papers/studies about Depression-era gangsters and the times they lived in. In the Roaring Twenties and into the thirties, America was not that far removed from the Wild West and its collection of outlaws.

Considering the conditions of the country at that time...the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl years...it's surprising there weren't more crooks like Barrow, Dillinger, and the like.

 

[rockquarry]

The building where the Barrow family lived and ran a service station on Singleton Blvd. in West Dallas, though vacant, was still standing and looked to be in reasonably good repair less than twenty years ago.

Same for the building on Swiss Circle in East Dallas (near Baylor Hospital) that housed the café where Bonnie Parker once worked as a waitress.

 

[Kurusu]

NO KIDDING!
IIRC, the outlaws were fired on with shotguns, BARs, Thompsons, who knows what else! Hard to look you best under those conditions.

The picture with Dunaway and Pyle:
Is that a Colt M1917 with stags? Looks like a 5.5" barrel.

It sure looks like one.

 

[rwsmith]

RAPE?

Great vintage wanted poster.

The man noted as #3 whose identity was unknown to the sheriff was Henry Methvin, a younger member of the Barrow gang. Methvin was described as "just a dumb kid who ran errands for Clyde Barrow." I read somewhere that Clyde and Bonnie bought him that suit he's wearing in most of the photos of him with the gang...they wanted him to look presentable. He was basically a semi-literate punk from Louisiana who was destined to be a career criminal.

Methvin was from Louisiana, and it was his father's logging truck that was used as a decoy for the final ambush that killed Bonnie and Clyde.

Methvin was one of two gang members who were used as models to create the character played by Michael J. Pollard in the film, Bonnie and Clyde.

Henry Methvin is shown in the photo below with Bonnie Parker, and in a 1931 Texas mug shot when he was twenty-years-old. Sheriff Maxey was way off in his description of Methvin, by the way. Methvin was 5'9" and weighed about 190 pounds. He was only about twenty-three-years-old when he hooked up with the Barrow gang.

Henry Methvin served time in prison for murder, then was paroled.

He was killed in 1948. His body was found on train tracks in Louisiana, cut in half. Some say he was drunk and just stumbled onto the tracks and maybe passed out.

Other people speculate that he was the victim of foul play...perhaps knocked out and put on the tracks as revenge for the part he and his father played in the ambush and killing of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker.

I've been over this stuff a lot and I never heard anything about a rape. Do they think Clyde did the deed? Was really any truth to his sexual ambiguity? I thought he had a kind of "take it or leave it" attitude? I believe I read something Bonnie said that vouched for Clyde being 'normal'.

 

[rwsmith]

Sunlight.......

The sunlight was at a pretty awful angle in some of those photos that you commonly see. Still, I didn't know she was THAT attractive.

 

[Watchdog]

The sunlight was at a pretty awful angle in some of those photos that you commonly see. Still, I didn't know she was THAT attractive.

What you say about the angle of the sun is exactly on point with what I said earlier about the Barrow gang not having a pro photographer traveling with them.

In a lot of the photos, the light is just totally wrong. Some shots seem to have been made at high noon or shortly thereafter, which is guaranteed to create shadows on facial features.

And remember...these are film images, images made with cameras that had only manual adjustments if they had any adjustments at all...there were no "auto" settings on cameras in the thirties, unless you were shooting with one of the box cameras like the Kodak Brownie. Some of the shots were exposed wrong. Then the end results depended on the skill of whoever processed the film and made the prints.

I've shot with vintage cameras because I like the look those classic lenses give to a print. But it's often trial and error.

 

[Kurusu]

This thread got me interested in learning more and I found this excellent PBS special from the American Experience series. It is free and very good. It is just under an hour.

That was a very interesting and well made piece. Thank you for bringing it to us.

 

[6518John]

Rape of Clara Rogers

I've been over this stuff a lot and I never heard anything about a rape. Do they think Clyde did the deed? Was really any truth to his sexual ambiguity? I thought he had a kind of "take it or leave it" attitude? I believe I read something Bonnie said that vouched for Clyde being 'normal'.

They were likely completely innocent of that crime. They simply could not have covered the distances involved to have committed the crime.

Clara Rogers

 

[the ringo kid]

No. You should read this book:

Texas Ranger: The Epic Life of Frank Hamer, the Man Who Killed Bonnie and Clyde: John Boessenecker: 9781250069986: Amazon.com: Books

I saw a copy for sale at the gun show Sat, forgot to get it meant to Sun-but was asked to work late-so missed out. However, same seller will be back in a few weeks,.

 

[the ringo kid]

Phil—Many still despise them in the area where I grew up. They murdered a beloved town Marshal whose descendants still live in the area. He still has a nice memorial in the town.

It’s always surprising to me how frequently murdering scum like this can be glorified in our society. I guess Oscar Wilde was right about many taking their hero’s from the criminal classes.

Doesn't surprise me any, hollywierdland always HAD a history of glorifying criminal thug pigs like those two. Al Capone, John Dillinger and Billy the Kid are just a few to come to mind.

 

[loknload]

No matter what they were and what they did and in that particular time frame, it’s all American History and that’s why people keep coming back for more!

 

[the ringo kid]

^^^^^All too true. Ill take your John Dillinger and raise you an Al Capone.

 

[Watchdog]

Correction to my Post #28

In my post #28, I mistakenly identified the man referred to as #3 on the wanted poster as Henry Methvin. I got my hoodlums mixed up.

He is actually W. D. Jones, sometimes called "Dub" and sometimes called "Deacon".

He was an early friend of Clyde and later became part of the gang for about eight months in 1933. He had a record going back to when he was fifteen-years-old.

What I posted about Methvin is true, and that is his Texas mug shot in Post #28. But in an interview with Playboy magazine in 1968, Jones stated that he was the "dumb kid who ran errands for Clyde Barrow".

It was Jones and Methvin who were models for the C. W. Moss character in the film.

There's a lot of info online about Jones, but basically, he was just another two-bit hoodlum like so many other criminals of that era.

He did go to prison, and when he got out, spent most of his life in Houston.

He did say the film glamorized Bonnie and Clyde and their life on the run. Some media people took him to see the movie, and it's said he told young people at the theater not to believe everything they saw onscreen. He said the film made it look like it was fun at times, but he told them "It was hell" being on the run.

Jones died in 1974, shot to death by three shots from a 12-gauge. He's buried in Brookside Memorial Park in Houston.

 

[mrchuck]

If you scroll back up to the photo of them standing in front of the car,look at the 2 front tires. There's NO tread left on either front tire.
A blowout would be happening real soon, running down all those pot-hole roads.
There is a town named Kemp, Texas, that is 12 miles from me.
They have an old 8'x8' jail there that Bonnie and Clyde broke out of.
Their claim to Fame still.

 

[Watchdog]

If you scroll back up to the photo of them standing in front of the car,look at the 2 front tires. There's NO tread left on either front tire.
A blowout would be happening real soon, running down all those pot-hole roads.
There is a town named Kemp, Texas, that is 12 miles from me.
They have an old 8'x8' jail there that Bonnie and Clyde broke out of.
Their claim to Fame still.

It was Bonnie Parker and Ralph Fults who were captured and put in the Kemp jail. Clyde had escaped a posse, but Fults was wounded and captured along with Bonnie. This was in April of 1932. Bonnie was using the alias of Betty Thornton. Thornton was actually her real surname, as she was still legally married to Roy Thornton.

Fults went to prison for five years, but Bonnie Parker was not charged with a crime, and apparently released.

The Kemp jail is shown in this photograph, courtesy of Gordon Youngblood.

 

[the ringo kid]

Looks like Mr. Howell:

 

[jtcarm]

They may look alike, but Bonnie Parker was 4' 11" Faye Dunaway was 5' 7".

Last I heard, Faye still is, though she may have shrunken a bit since ‘66.