I almost peed myself.
Almost exactly five years ago this very night—on July 30, 2019—I came across the headline of an online news story announcing, “Body of notorious gangster John Dillinger to be exhumed 85 years after FBI agents killed him.”
I had a good reason for nearly losing bladder control upon seeing these words; I had been hoping to see this headline since 1981, when I was 11 years old.
But let’s jump back much further.
Exactly 90 years ago tonight—on July 22, 1934—something happened in Chicago that would become a point of fixation and minor obsession in my life for decades, even though it far predated my life.
On that steamy night in 1934, at about 10:40 pm, John Dillinger—the famous bank robber of the 1930s midwestern crime spree—was shot by FBI agents outside the air-conditioned Biograph movie theater on Chicago’s north side after watching the film Manhattan Melodrama starring Clark Gable, William Powell and Myrna Loy. [FOOTNOTE 1 In the 1980s, explaining who Dillinger was usually wasn’t necessary, at least to anyone over 30. Today, if I were to survey random people on the street (which I hope I never find myself doing), I bet I’d be hard pressed to find five normal 40-somethings in 100 who knew who Dillinger was. Even if I was inflicting my sad poll on people walking by that (still standing) Chicago theater where he allegedly reportedly supposedly “died” died.]
Or so the official story goes.
Ahem.
Dad, Dillinger, and a late summer night
During the summer of 1981, when I was 11 and going into the sixth grade, my father and I watched the 1974 movie Dillinger starring Warren Oates[2 FOOTNOTE — You may vaguely recall him as the sergeant in the 1981 Bill Murray movie Stripes. If you don’t have the slightest notion who he was, you’re likely far more effective in normal society than someone able to spattle off this dead actor’s highs and lows.] At this point I had a minorly tempestuous relationship with my 66-year-old dad, as I resented his waning in vigor and steadiness during the time I was growing into an extremely chubby obese adolescent animal that could yell and break things with growing irritation just about every month. I hated his approaching elderliness and what it constantly threatened for the future as much as I hated being increasingly fat, unathletic, awkward, and unsuccessful in finding any way to convert being book smart and facile with history into some relevant currency that I could use with other kids, whom I felt increasingly antagonized me.
So it’s logical that the most peaceable point of connection I had with my father involved the past. While I had a peculiar interest in it, he had lived it—which trumped the piss out of my interest and allowed me to defer to him without grudge or malice. During the summer nights in 1981, after 11pm, when my mother would go to bed, my dad would sit in his chair and watch TV while I busied myself on the nearby couch fingering through my collection of stamps or coins, or rereading a massive Time-Life illustrated history book or my Boy Scout Handbook or a 1930s encyclopedia or a magazine, or sharpening about seven pocketknives that I endlessly oiled and honed in preparation for outdoor use that they rarely saw.
After the 11pm news ended, we would watch “The Million Dollar Movie.” It was usually a color film from the sixties or seventies, one that had at least one lead actor you’d heard of, but it was rarely a movie that most people would put in the “definite classic” category, like Casablanca or The Graduate. This may have been due to the kind of films that were available to the station, rights issues, cost, the preferences of the TV staffer doing the choosing, or God knows. But early-seventies movies with a hardness, grit and violence notching somewhere beneath, say, Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch but well above the tamer treatments in most 1950 western or noir films, were standard “Million Dollar Movie” fare.*
FOOTNOTE. And in the early seventies, as you may recall, American moviemakers seemed to stroking off fairly feverishly to the nostalgia of the “gangsters and G-men” era of the early thirties. The years of Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, Ma Barker and her gang, Bonnie and Clyde, a guy named Dillinger, and even a whiff of J. Edgar Hoover in there for some of us, wearing a little lacy something under his suit trousers. Maybe in the 1970s people were nostalgic for the bloody, lawless period 40 years earlier because it seemed like you could just Tommy-gun some irritating son of a bitch and throw him in a ditch, rather than sitting through endless Senate hearings.
Dillinger. Melvin Purvis: G-Man. Thieves Like Us. And others. All made in the early seventies, and all played a few times on the Million Dollar Movie as I loosely recall now. On Channel 6 in Philly in 1981, after 11:30 pm, you got the theater leavings of the Nixon years, which in turn, were fondly looking back to the Depression and Dust Bowl era. This may also be an error of memory, as I also recall watching The Jolson Story or Jolson Sings Again with my father, which were made in the late 1940s and very early 1950s. But my brain is telling me that I saw a lot of muted “golden hour” color shots of meadows and skies, on-a-dime transitions from laughing men to violent death, a little too much casual cursing for a TV movie, banjoes seen or heard, and gunshots meant to sound like explosions from hell that destroyed any idea of a benevolent God. These mean “early seventies films” to me.*
*Footnote — That these films had debuted in theaters less than a decade previously to being run as the late-night Million Dollar Movie in Philadelphia, and likely across other areas of the country, was lost to me. I regarded them as museum pieces made during some ancient, unreachable epochal age, which meant any time before my memory, with the times they depicted and their production dates in the TV guide—my eye always found those paragraphical blips revealing “(1971),” “(1943)” etc. before anything else—being evidence that the past had everything one could want, with the sumptuous safety of knowing what would not happen.
Dillinger with Warren Oates is a quintessential early seventies movie. This isn’t to say that I recall it being a particularly good movie; it just happened to be one that did a fairly rare thing; it caused my father to spontaneously utter something he remembered from his youth without me prodding or prompting or annoying him, or getting an unsatisfying answer which was often a beg-off to avoid more questions, typically pleading he couldn’t remember many details anymore or never knew them in the first place (which was probably true in several cases, given the nature of my questions). In fairness, he was hard of hearing by his early 60s, I was easy to anger, and the combination could make conversing rather unpleasant.
So when he started talking briefly about Dillinger as the movie scraped and shot its way off the TV, I might have looked up from, say, my Boy Scout Handbook (where I was probably reading yet again how to shape biscuit dough with dirty hands by using two big, green leaves as nature’s latex*) and regarded him oddly. He said something like:
“Every day there’d be something in the newspapers about Dillinger. People wanted him to get away. But he got betrayed. He was set up by a woman in red, who double-crossed him.”
He said something like this. I no longer have the actual words in my mind, or remember his voice saying them, and I wish I did. “Every day” and “woman in red” come through in his salty, slightly hoarse baritone, but I could be piping that sound into my head.*
*FOOTNOTE I hear “betrayed,” too, which may be one of the earlier imprints I got from my father that stoked my suspicions that the beguiling co-inhabitants of earth known as females were treacherous, never to be trusted, or at least as much a source of ruin as salvation in the real world, where decomposition, mental instability, and outside wolves from the county who might be set on doing their hard job of helping were continually in mind. But that’s another story.
Though I had 27 years with my father before he died, and a full 20 years during which his remaining health allowed us to talk (strokes ended that by his late 70s), I can only summon maybe seven or eight sound bites of his voice from my memory today. I’d venture—I hope—that thousands more are still in my gray matter, waiting to be reassembled by a trigger, even if I will never be able to access them. Now, however, I can only conjure a few glints of the sensory images from this likely brief talk during that late summer night in 1981. I remember them only because it contained a rare gambit of him attempting to say something to his 11-year-old son that did not involve some logistics of the current moment or someone in the family, and perhaps even purposely intended to target some ancillary interest of mind that this TV movie had, this night, made a fleeting point of connection, when the quiet and silence of the dark outside made me comparatively placid, and the images from the rabbit-eared Zenith spoke to his time and not mine.
As I contemplated his words about the early 1930s, my mind kicked up thoughts of people reading a newspaper, the feel of newspaper in my hands, an unidentifiable woman with thick lipstick wearing something dark grey and looking something like a flapper. She’s mustily perfumed and laughing under a loud cracking hiss, like she’s in another room and the radio right beside me is between stations. I say my mind created these thoughts as he spoke, but it likely assembled them later; their traces are trying to come through when I strain to think of that 1981 night now. It’s interesting to see what my memory tries to piece together now; how’d I love to compare it with my attempts to remember 25 or 35 years ago, let alone the day after that night.
My father was 19 when Dillinger was on the loose in 1934, robbing banks and becoming famous through newspapers and movie newsreels and certainly radio broadcasts, though the latter was not in my conception at all. My dad remembered these happenings. I knew he remembered them. To an 11 year-old, an unknown 19 year-old is a man in full, old enough to be fully alive in the reality of his life, having embarked on the real journey instead of wallowing in school pressures and anxiety and hesitancy, yet still young enough to not comprehend regret or be able to take anything from the past that isn’t positive and foundational to plunging forward toward some colorful destiny that, one day in the inconceivably distant future, have certainly surely happened long ago. Even if it is only suggested in photos, 8-millimeter movies, vague stories, or random things on TV that beg for a question or remark, all enfleshed by an adolescent imagination.
Freud need not be summoned via seance to gather that I was largely fascinated with history, and specifically the 1920s through early 1950s, because these times housed a human I badly wanted to know in a condition I badly wanted to see; my father in his black-haired youth. Maybe something in my brain reasoned that I could find him by employing a Swiss-cheese method of attack, eating holes through everything but the one thing I could not see or touch. If I consumed all that was interesting to me in those times, enough of what I believed had encased him, maybe he’d slowly be revealed, like Michelangelo getting rid of stone to find his Davide.* Once I chiseled through enough of that dusty matter, or at least extracted the remedial high points and fascinating minutiae that made me good at Trivial Pursuit, perhaps I figured my dad just had to be there. Alternatively, maybe a little of him would even be scattered throughout that black-and-white heap, in crevices, like lode gold. Perhaps I’d see him in the stands in a photo of a 1932 Yankees game, literally, or he’d somehow poke through during some scene or dialogue in a 1937 film, metaphorically.
*I’m making this metaphor now at age 54 while typing on a laptop at 12:29 pm in a cafe in Salerno, Italy. I did not have any such thought at age 11, as I didn’t know what the Davide was and may have only correctly but incompletely identified Michelangelo as “some genius Italian painter.” My interest in history did not extend to art or really anything European, even though my father was born in Sicily and my mother’s relatives came to U.S. from elsewhere on the continent (I’m not precisely sure where, I’m embarrassed to say, though Germany, Ireland and Scotland pop to mind) maybe only a couple of generations before she was born in 1934.**THIS CONNECTS TO THE BELOW FOOTNOTE WITHIN A FOOTNOTE >>>>
** FOOTNOTE WITHIN A FOOTNOTE Yes, I’m aware that my mother was born the same year that Dillinger was allegedly rendered unalive by G-men. She was born in April, a bit more than three months before the July night when FBI agents converged on that theater in Chicago…but she was at least on the planet and breathing at the same time the event happened. This fact made me want to regard her as an arguable “witness”, or “survivor,” like she was some infant on the Titanic. But it was just too remote of a link. And, worse, I don’t recall her remembering a goddamn thing about Dillinger (though she did remember the night in 1938 when Orson Welles gave part of the U.S. an interesting experience with his War of the Worlds broadcast, which I’ll write about another time).
That said, given that the year marks my mom’s birth and is in the dead-center crosshairs of my Dillinger fixation, 1934 has had a special patina to me since I was an adolescent. I still take unusual notice whenever those four digits appear in my daily travels (which it does a lot, surprisingly).
As an even wider aside, my personal connection to the year grew immensely stronger at some moment in my 20s or 30s, if only for that moment, when I somehow belatedly learned that all female humans are born with their entire supply of eggs (if you learned this during grade school or high school, or even your college years, you would surely be the authority on reproductive health if you and I were alone in a room and that title had to be conferred on one of us). This bizarre biological ditty meant that I—I, me—had actually been physically present on earth in some real cellular form during the night of the Biograph theater shooting. I immediately decided that I was therefore personally connected to this event—but I could only fake that genuine feeling for a second. Because if it had the slightest morsel of defensible truth, it meant that every goddamned asshole I went to school with who was also born in 1970 was also personally connected to the night of Dillinger’s fateful trip to the Biograph theater, which made it wholly unspecial. Much worse, I would have been forced to defer to the dickheads at school who were born in 1969, given they were more mature gametes than I was in 1934 and obviously that much more personally connected to the night. So I decided that this wasn’t a thing.
Incidentally to the wider aside, I’m waiting for World War II documentaries to start grasping at bullshit connections like this some time soon. Right now I’m coming across documentaries that mainly interview the kids and grandchildren of soldiers, holocaust survivors and resistance fighters, because it’s the early 1920s and naturally most of the original participants are fucking dead. Long-lived outliers now nearing 100 years old, with busloads leaving for the grave every single day now. Not to shit on family members of participants, but if you don’t personally remember something from the actual event in question, you probably don’t belong in documentary. Relaying personal conversations you had with the primary source, or overheard, can be a loosely justifiable exception if it offers something highly relevant to the topic. For example, in 1999, I interviewed Moe Howard’s son Paul for an article I wrote about The Three Stooges. I interviewed him because 1) Moe was born in 1897 and had already been dead for 20-plus years, rendering him unable to do an interview, and 2) I was interested in learning what Moe was like personally, and as a dad (spoiler: the lead Stooge was a distant dad, not a hugger, not much for “I love you,”s, and generally not a whole hall of a lot different than the ill-tempered comedic guy he portrayed in all those slapstick two reelers). Plus, Paul agreed to talk to me, which was no trifle as 1990 was a few years before he began embracing being a child of a Stooge (he relayed that as a kid he told his friends he worked as gas-meter reader, if I recall correctly). Though Paul is still with us now in 2024—which is becoming more admirable by the day, and probably enviable to many dead people, as he was born in 1935—future reporters may have to settle to speaking to one of Moe’s grandkids, who may have fleeting if any memories of him. I did a version of this to get a quote (any live quote at all) about Moe’s brother, famed Stooge Curly, when I interviewed his daughter, who was a baby when he died in the 1952 and had scarcely any recollection of him. But, anyways. I can imagine there will be World War II documentaries in 2060 that proudly interview someone who was, amazingly, actually alive during the war’s end in 1945. Then in 2165, there will be a documentary will interview someone who actually existed on the earth as an ovum or whatever the fuck inside her mother during the war’s end in 1945. Do not, however, imagine in wonder just all things you could be interviewed about if you just manage to not die before age 125 or so. World War II is still pretty singular as far as a documentary topic, I would say. Here’s hoping it’ll still warrant a smidgeon of attention in 2165.
I never found him. But still, anytime I watch a historical documentary on something in the 20thCentury, or see any kind of footage or recording whatsoever of the 1920s through early 1950s, I always have the split-second thought of my father pedestriating about the earth somewhere when this sensory imprint was made. (Artifacts from the 1960s never interested me, perhaps because I envisioned that, by then, my father was already turning into the human that resembled the one I first met in the mid 1970s, thus there was less of an untouchable angle to fuel my interest in his yeoman goings-on in the post Ike years.)
Anyway, Dillinger. After my father said these few words to me, I probably peppered him with questions about life in the early 1930s and why a bank robber was a figure people rooted for, and he probably answered them as best he could, which would have left a gulf of mystery for me to grope over in the wake of his responses.
I didn’t find the Warren Oates character in the film appealing or worth delving into historically. I would have likely forgotten the entire subject, and perhaps even what little of the living-room conversation my brain bothered to retain (even though my father’s instigating it gave it a specialness thousands of other exchanges lacked) except for two moments of discovery. One was fairly piddling and one was major.
The first came that September (again, 1981) when walking the epic 1.5 miles to the secondary school along a busy road with my friend. I walked along the dangerously trafficked Browning Road in stiff new jeans or corduroys, going to 6thgrade in a school new to me, where a seeming billion new faces still swarmed in massive, locker-lined hallways that had the threatening officiousness of a state prison and the smell of new cleansers and new plastics and cologned kids still hit my nostrils as novel.
During that morning walk to school with my friend, Chris, I must’ve mentioned the Dillinger movie.
“They say he didn’t get shot, that another guy was killed. Did you ever hear that?”
My friend said something like this in response to whatever arcane point I was probably trying to make by torturing whatever four tidbits I thought had internalized about 1930s bank robbers.
“That’s not true,” I said reflexively. My brain stopped. He had jumped ahead of me by about nine leagues by saying something I did not know about a topic I had likely chosen, of which he was supposed to know nothing. I must have walked in blinking silence for five beats. My father had said nothing about this twist. The movie showed nothing about it. There was no ambiguity in the ending. The cunning hero bank robber gets shot to shit by FBI henchmen outside a movie theater after that bitch wearing a red dress set him up. That was the story. That was the history. Now my friend was uttering some baseless bullshit that challenged my status as the information officer of the galaxy, which included resident expertise on how this 1930s bank-robber dude got shot outside a movie theater.
The subject probably changed. We had long talks about the new television show “Knight Rider” during those long walks. I graciously ceded some intellectual room to him on this subject because I sensed Chris actually knew a lot more about cars than I did. Plus he had seen the fucking pilot episode, which I had missed. The idea that an extremely fast, impervious-to-all-forces car that talked like a funny little over-educated guy most people could beat up would somehow empower its driver—who typically had to get out of the car to do any goddamn thing—to humiliate every richer bad guy packing teams of armed men not only seemed wholly plausible, it seemed restrained. The driver guy was passing up countless opportunities to make hot women take their bras off because he had that car, so he had to be funneling that power into something.
Dillinger: Dead or Alive?
The second moment of discovery—and a far more impactful one, which actually changed the course of my life—came while it was still autumn, likely in October 1981. I was in Mr. Quemore’s classroom, for spelling class.
Mr. Quemore was an eccentric, long-legged, sixty-something jazz-daddy of a dude who probably ran under the rain tarp of teaching in the 1950s or 1960s to get benefits and some steady bread. He had a taut, sprouty salt-and-pepper goatee and wore zoot suits and saddle shoes, remnants from a former life he allegedly spent playing the saxophone. But he was also quiet as a church mouse . Tall and thin and iron-haired, he was disarmingly docile, with kind, small eyes set in his thin, Lincoln-like face. He only interacted with the class when he absolutely had to, and he let the spelling book do any bit of work the rest of the time; like an older relative being resigned to watch unruly kids for forty minutes. He was a harmless grandfatherly weirdo to the sixth-grade hellions around me, of whom he had not a whit of control. But he was more like a harmless fatherly weirdo to me, maybe because he was around the same age as a my dad. I would have likewise peppered him with questions, except he wasn’t the talking type. During the first spelling class, he pointed to the first letter in his last name, written on the chalk board. “That’s a Q,” he said. “It’s kwee-more, not queer-more.” We shortly began calling him “Mr. Q” or just “Q,” which seemed to be his preference. He spoke very little after that.
On that autumn morning in 1981 things were running amuck in his pre-lunch spelling class, as was now usual. I moseyed toward the books lining the shelves under his windows to get distance from the cabal of kids yelling and whooping in the back of the room. It was a sunny day, and I had to shield my eyes as I scanned the titles. I spied one book with a dirty, pale lemon-yellow spine and the title, “Dillinger: Dead or Alive?” I quickly pulled it out. As I opened the cover, several pages of one of the three photo section inserts fell into my hand, having detached from the binding.
I immediately saw the black and white photo a bloodied dead man. A man with his face seemingly shot up. Laying on a bloody steel table with an upturned lip around it, and a crowd gathered around him. I probably stared at that photo for ten seconds before rifling through the book to see if there were any others that would surpass it in morbid, cool-as-fuck sixth-grade gore. None did.
I flipped back to that photo. Whoever this shot-to-shit thoroughly dead man was supposed to be was…allegedly, not dead? I needed to know about this.
The book came home with me. I never considered it stealing. It was just put there for me to find it and have it. What the fuck would a book like that be doing on Q’s bookshelf? It had no purpose until I found it. It was just an out-of-place trove of fascinating, mysterious potential that couldn’t be properly unlocked or appreciated by anyone but me, and therefore belonged to me well before I found it. It had always been my book, even if I didn’t find it until that morning in Q’s room.
Anyway, I stole that book and devoured it like it was oxygen smothered in peanut butter over the next weeks. And then again and again during the next two years. I fucking loved that book. It split the past wide open for me like an over-ripe cantaloupe and spilled out diamonds and gold nuggets I could stuff in the pockets of my brain, for now and later.
That book almost singlehandedly made me want to become a writer. I had no inclinations of scribbling shit intended for other people to read before this, at least that I can recall. I think I had envisioned “writers” were men who impressed people and maybe got girls because of how well they said things on paper. The fluttering quill dude, but made all drunk and deep some time after quills went out of style. They were like poets but didn’t write poems, and they could somehow force themselves to sit still and keep writing for a really long time.
But after consuming that damaged, pale yellow book I nicked from Q’s bookshelf, I thought writers were men who found out secrets that almost nobody else knew, men who knew the real story. Men who could change the motherfucking world any time they wanted. While the regular idiots who tinkered around in their lives believing all the bullshit they encountered was true, a writer could crook his finger at you, look around for unwanted ears (a phrase I read in the Dillinger book) and say, “that’s not even close. Here’s what really happened.”
I wanted to be a part of that. A part of secret knowing.
Dillinger: Dead or Alive? was written in 1970 by crime writer Jay Robert Nash* FOOTNOTE — Hell, I just glanced at this Wikipedia page and see that he died on April 22, 2024, exactly three months ago today. I had no idea. Damn. RIP JRN. I wasn’t going to mention the phone call I had with him around 2005, after finally working up the nerve to reach out to him. I wasn’t going to mention it because it was a bit disillusioning to me, or at least to my inner 11 year-old who was on the phone with him via proxy of my 35 year-old self holding the cell phone. I guess I can talk about this call from 20 years ago without rankling him now, as he’s now in the realm of the unrankle-able. I’ll add that soon, just not sure when
and a guy named Ron Offen. In short, it fleshed out the idea that John Dillinger, the Indiana bank robber who staged dozens of well-orchestrated heists and even a couple of theatrical jail escapes with a gang of similar roving thieves in the Midwest during the Depression—and was popularly troublesome enough to make J. Edgar Hoover name him “Public Enemy Number One”—was not shot to death by the FBI agents outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago on the night of July 22, 1934 after being fingered by the infamous “woman in red,” as famously reported nation-wide. Rather, the FGI killed a patsy named Jimmy Lawrence, a dolt who looked a lot like the 31-year-old Dillinger and had the poor luck of befriending a prostitute from Rumania facing deportation charges named Anna Sage. She contacted the FBI through a cop friend shortly after this Jimmy guy moved into an extra room in her apartment, and worked out a deal with “G-Man” agent Melvin Purvis to reveal Lawrence in a catchable spot if the FBI would help with her legal troubles. On that Sunday afternoon in July, when Lawrence suggested that he take Sage and her friend Polly Hamilton (whom he was dating) to an air-conditioned movie theater that evening to get out of the 100-degree Chicago heat, Sage quickly got word to Purvis, and even availed herself to wear a brightly-colored dress so Purvis could spot her in the crowd. Supposedly, her orange dress appeared to be red under the marquee lights of the theater, and a new name for betrayal was born (the “woman in red”).
Killers and robbers we can relate to
Most Americans over age 45 have at least a glancing familiarity with a few of the Depression-era thieves who became famous during the brief crime spree during the early and mid 1930s, mostly because of the colorful nicknames I’ve already mentioned and the films made about them much later. Again, there was Dillinger, certainly, but also Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker and her boys, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, and a few others. These criminals captured headlines in 1933-1935 and most rocketed to national fame in newspapers, movie reels and radio news reports, often because they were given a fabled backstory that seemed poetic or tragically irresistible. Like a bad young couple in love and on the run (Bonnie and Clyde). Or a tough mother just trying to keep her wayward boys safe (Ma Barker). Or a short, little guy who got pushed around so much he started killing everybody who crossed him (Nelson). Who couldn’t relate?
Dillinger became the most interesting and persistently famous of these murky figures in the usual way; through random happenstance. There was nothing special about him to start with; he was just another lowlife from bumfuck (actually Mooresville, Indiana), sent to prison for a violent theft in his youth, blessed with quick and serviceable intelligence directed toward all the wrong things, and slinking his way from being a shitty little degenerate to an older nobody neither regarded nor remembered. He spent his twenties locked up with scores of other pissed-off ne’er-do-wells badly deficient in book learning and self-control, from both better and far worse families and economic conditions. He was simply one young-buck asshole in prison among thousands of others in the 1920s, including several criminals he’d go on to rob banks with in 1933-34.
But chances are, you’ve never heard of any of the other dozen men who came in and out of the gang he robbed with (except for Baby Face Nelson, who was killed by FBI agents four months after Dillinger was shot).
Ever hear of Harry Pierpont? Or Charles Makley? Homer Van Meter? Russell Clark?
Bueller?
Dillinger stuck in societal memory for several reasons. The first is one is the result of a tactical campaign; the FBI singled him out and told the press that he was the leader and brains of “the Dillinger gang,” which he was not (they were all more or less equal, and different criminals flowed in and out of the gang for reasons mundane and homicidal). This was supposed to make the other bank robbers pissed off and create infighting, which might make them get sloppy and easier to catch.
Why’d they pick Dillinger? Probably for the second reason we still remember him: “John Dillinger” is a poetic name. Those syllables and sounds hit the brain and ear in a certain pleasing way, far more so than the names of most of his cohorts and other criminals from that period. (Though I would have pegged Buck Barrow, Clyde’s brother, as a likely contender to be remembered given his nicely alliterative name.)
The third reason, I believe, is purely aesthetic; Dillinger’s most famous mugshot was a goddamned great picture of him, seeming to mix Clark-Gable handsomeness with a “fuck you” smirk that likely made vaginas lubricate across the land. That shot was a one-off; John Dillinger was an okay-looking dude, but he didn’t appear nearly that cool or cutting in other photos. So the most prominent and frequently used image of Dillinger is a lucky awesomely-good photo, with a bit of Farrah-in-the-red-suit quintessence (minus nipples).
Plastering Dillinger’s name and face on newspapers and movie newsreels seemed to fail to cause any usable ruckus in the gang, from what I’ve gleaned, but it did make Dillinger kitchen-table famous during his brief run. And a lot of Americans who were broke and scared during the depression, and getting hassled and foreclosed on by the bastards at the bank were (at least in casual spirit, if not ) rooting for him to fuck those sons of a bitches hard and to keep getting away from the police and government thugs in suits (who were on the banks’ side, no doubt).
And Dillinger himself seemed to fill that role beautifully. His reported actions cemented his image as a jeering, mocking, authority-fighting anti-hero. News stories claimed he taunted some police precincts (and the FBI) by mailing in photos of him standing with cops and smiling. Henry Ford got a note from a John Dillinger praising the speed of his company’s V-8. Some or all of such stories may be inventions, and some or all of the notes may be fakes, but it didn’t matter.
Dispatches praising his physical agility were probably a bit more reality-based. Witnesses of his bank jobs would describe him as athletically vaulting over bank counters in his conservative suit, making jokes while moving with business-like efficiency, and sticking to a ruthless time limit in the bank along with the rest of his cabal. And then there were the anecdotes that suggested Dillinger had benevolent bone. Some came from people the gang nabbed as “just in case necessary” hostages taken during robberies. They were stuffed into cars for the slow, inconspicuous getaway ride, and some claimed that they were treated kindly, and even dropped off at their homes or handed a $100 bill for their trouble. Whether such witnesses actually named Dillinger as being the main “nice guy” in these little adventures wasn’t really relevant; the housewife or work-a-day guy quoted in the paper was talking about the “Dillinger gang,” or perhaps a group of bank robbers including John Dillinger, and he received credit for performing or ordering the good deed, warranted or not. This made Dillinger an irresistibly good poster-man for everyone’s inner cool-bad-guy yearnings, then and now.
Finally, Dillinger also made some theatrical escapes, slipping out of impossibly tight spots from lake lodges and jails with others and alone, leaving hordes of armed lawmen exasperated and sometimes fearing for their jobs. The true reports of these escapes read like good fiction today, and the embellished newspaper stories back then often whipped them into riveting thrillers that probably outdid whatever Cagney was doing down at the local movie theater.
All of these elements became interwoven in Dillinger’s reputation and legacy, and his death by female betrayal struck a final perfect note that oozed with eternal universality (with a twinge of misogyny) that fixed him in the societal imagination.
So it’s no wonder that the Dillinger presented in Jay Robert Nash’s 1970 book was a good person. An unusually smart and cunning small-town farmer’s son who got a raw deal, and became embittered because he given a too-harsh sentence for his role in act of thuggery/armed robbery (his counterpart used a lawyer and got a much lighter sentence). Then he became truly hatefully embittered because, get this, after spending too many years in prison he still wasn’t let out in time to see his dying mother. And—this is important—he never killed anyone.
All are more or less true(ish) in Dillinger’s case. At least in Mooresville, Indiana, and in prison, he didn’t seem to have a reputation for being an unusually nasty, horrible asshole, and he was apparently kind to his family and valued those relationships close. Which is to say he was an utterly unremarkable yokel until he started robbing. He did have one murder charge pinned on him, committed during one of his jail escapes. He was never tried for it, but the evidence implicating him has some holes and there’s a fair chance he didn’t do it.
That said, Dillinger’s lack of being a solidly-proven murderer is likely due in no small part to luck and circumstance; he was a thief, a criminal, and a man who’d readily shoot at cops, lawmen and other paycheck-earning types if it would help him get out of a jam. People who idolize Dillinger (and there are still many, I assure you; just do a search for Facebook groups) should probably save their imaginary honorary “good guy” medals for other long-dead humans who didn’t do these things, or maybe did them a lot less often.
And he…got away?
None of these colorful anecdotes or supposed characteristics would have meant much to me without the legend. When you add that final big ingredient, the notion that Dillinger actually did not get killed by the FBI outside the Biograph Theater on July 22, 1934 as famously report—meaning, the fucker got away with it—the whole thing became some reservoir of anti-authority porn for an adolescent history geek’s imagination. (Well, mine, anyway.)
Yes, Jesse James had a somewhat similar story and “the wrong man was shot” legend, but he was a cowboy (yawn) and lacked the connection with my father. So Dillinger was just the man to light up my “cool past” imagination as an 11-year-old. And become extremely intimate and impassioned with the concept of it did not happen the way they say it did hit my brain clay at just the right time. I became a conspiracy theorist, at least in my mental approach to giving the benefit of the doubt to almost every it did not happen the way they say it did notion I encountered.
Now, in the 1980s, I could find next to nothing in the news or even in libraries on the old legend that John Dillinger was actually not killed at that Chicago movie theater in 1934. The lone exception occurred on the July 22 anniversary of the shooting every year, when you’d typically find a small “on this day” item that usually just noted the shooting, but very occasionally one would mention the dusty intrigue. On round-number anniversaries ending in 0 and 5 (the 50th anniversary in 1984, 55th in 1999, 60th in 1994, etc.), you’d often find slightly lengthier treatments in newspapers that had a paragraph or two on the “wrong man” legend.
Other times, heaven would issue a random serendipitous dispatch that wasn’t tied to the calendar. I believe it was in the spring of 1984 when I came across a newspaper story in the Philadelphia Inquirer noting that a copy of Dillinger’s long-lost autopsy report had been found in a brown bag somewhere in Chicago’s Cook County Coroner’s office, where it was originally filed in 1934. The report had seemingly gone missing almost immediately after the autopsy, which had long served as one of the key I-beams in the “it wasn’t Dillinger” legend, for many doubters and people skeptical of the FBI’s official story, fanatics and casual observers alike.
The brief newspaper article contained nothing I didn’t already know. Because I had already read the autopsy in Jay Robert Nash’s book. Dillinger’s autopsy report had been located more than a dozen years before. Why didn’t Jay Robert Nash get credit for finding the autopsy? I’ve wondered that my entire life. The article did talk about the famous (well, famous to people like myself) discrepancy in eye color; Dillinger’s eyes were known to be gray or blue, while the autopsy specified that the corpse had brown eyes. But this was quickly explained way by a quote from the current (in 1984) coroner, saying that the corneas can become clouded after death and make it hard to distinguish eye color. I remember thinking, “even 50 years later they’re still trying to cover it up.”
Still, I had a problem. The Dillinger thing was fucking arcane. I was convinced that Dillinger was not the man shot outside that Chicago theater due to Nash’s book, and my own romantic need to believe it, and I had very few people to talk to about this because no one fucking cared.
Enter the exiting JFK
So the JFK assassination had to serve as a poor Dillinger-not-dead proxy for me. Now, the whole Kennedy thing captivated me far less because it was already carpet-bombed with attention. I would often meet people who, infuriatingly, knew more than I did about the whole affair (which meant they were usually assholes or mentally troubled). Perhaps most fatally, the JFK assassination held no real connection to my young father, the man I didn’t know. In the early 1980s, I could readily recognize my living dad in the home movies from 1963. Sure, he was a damn sight stronger and spryer in those silent 8mm reels than the older man who occupied the comfortable chair in the living room, but he was not the black-haired young man I imagined and was searching for.
But again, the JFK conspiracy theories would have to suffice, because books and magazine articles on them were much easier to find in the pre-internet days of the Reagan years than anything on Dillinger, to say the least. And critically, I had a few friends who enjoyed talking about the fantastical forensic world of Kennedy’s killing but did not know as I much as I thought I knew about it.
I was soon happy to dwell in those theories, though Dillinger was always there, always waiting for the day when the world finally woke up and gave my primary fixation the love and respect and friendship it deserved.
My education and outlook on the JFK assassination, as an adolescent and young adult, never entertained the slightest possibility that Oswald acted alone. This was telling.
All of this is a long, long way of saying I had a conspiracy theorist’s mind. I probably still do. I innately understand that perfectly logical, whole-hog buy-in of the “it did not happen the way they say it did” narrative, the need to believe there is something else, something unseen, that changes the entire story and makes it meaningful, profound, contrarian, or just plain fascinating…and unknown to most other mortals. Those poor, sick rubes.
More to come.