Leavenworth,1962: A more innocent time?

Not really.

Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary

Bad things were happening in town every day.  They happened while Fawn and I were dancing in her bedroom.  They happened on the street outside of Teentown.  They happened in a park off Halderman Street after school.  They happened at the bowling alley downtown around the pinball machines in the back.  They happened at night at the hamburger drive in called Smaks on 4th Street south of Lansing.  There were gang fights, clubbings, stabbings.  Leavenworth, Kansas, had made a list in LIFE Magazine in 1959 or 1960 of the towns in America with the worst juvenile delinquency problems.

Leavenworth was the only town in America that had five prisons within five miles of each other.  On the post, there was the Disciplinary Barracks where soldiers who committed serious crimes were sent for long sentences.  On U.S. 73 just outside of town there was Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary.  Just to the west of that was The Farm, the minimum-security facility where convicts nearing the ends of their terms were kept before they got out.  Just south of town was Lansing State Prison, and not far from that was Lansing State Women’s Prison.

My mother used to say that in Leavenworth, everybody’s father was either an Army officer, a prison guard, or a prisoner – and it was close to being true.  Fawn’s father was a two-time loser doing a long stretch in the Federal Pen.  I was assigned to be a squad leader in ROTC at Leavenworth High School.  Out of 10 guys in my squad, five of them had fathers who were in prison.  One of them, a guy named Charley Y., had a mother and father who were both doing time.  He slept on a cot in the corner in one of the bays he had screened off with hanging blankets in a local gas station where he worked after school pumping gas for a couple of bucks a day and to pay his “rent” to the owner.  One day after our squad had won an ROTC drill competition, he took me around town at dawn and showed me the locations of all the breadboxes, where bread and rolls and pastries were delivered to delis and diners and restaurants before they opened.  He got his breakfast every morning stealing rolls and pastries from the breadboxes.  Another guy in the squad, Kenny P., took me out one night and showed me how to break into Coke machines using a screwdriver.  His mother was an alcoholic and his father was doing time in Lansing State Pen.  He ripped off Coke machines so he could eat.

It was possible to be a kid and keep clear of the gangs and fights and crime that was going on in town, but not if you were a guy and a sophomore, because a law in Kansas required all 10th grade boys to take a year of ROTC, and that was the great melting pot where the “college prep” kids like me and the “shop” kids like Kenny and Charlie and another guy in the squad, Commodore W., met up once a day. 

A talent for the Army stuff was baked into my genes, which is how I got assigned to be a squad leader and given ten squad members, every one of whom the Major who ran the ROTC program had labeled a troublemaker.  Commodore was the most notorious guy in the squad.  All the rest deferred to him as a matter of respect because he was the leader of a local gang that had about 15 to 20 members.  Not all his gang were in school with us.  Some were drop-outs and there were a few, I had been told, who were in their 20’s, and yet their leader was this skinny little Black kid with freckles who was 15 years old just like I was.

Commodore and his guys dressed the same every day:  they wore black sharkskin suits and white shirts with skinny black ties and chincy-brim hats and they all wore diamond stick-pins in their ties that made them curve out at the top from their snap-tab collars.  When it got cold, they wore black London Fog raincoats, and every day, rain or shine, they had tightly furled black umbrellas over their arms which they carried as weapons. 

I learned this one night after a football game against our long-time rival high school from Lawrence, Kansas.  The game had gone back and forth and Lawrence was ahead by just a few points near the end of the 4th quarter.  There was less than a minute in the game when one of the Leavenworth linemen tackled a running back from Lawrence and he fumbled.  Another Leavenworth lineman picked up the fumble and ran for a touchdown.  The Leavenworth stands went crazy!  Leavenworth hadn’t beat Lawrence for something like seven years!  Then a referee ruled the ball dead and the touchdown was disallowed.  With seconds left on the clock, there was a big argument between the coaches and referees at the end of the field where the touchdown had been scored.  I was watching from the stands when I saw a solitary figure in a black London Fog and a chincy-brim hat carrying an umbrella over his arm begin to walk across the field. I could tell it was Commodore even from the back. The rest of his gang poured out of the stands behind him, and the Lawrence stands started to empty. As Commodore approached the first fan from Lawrence, he flipped his right arm and as the umbrella arced into the air, he grabbed the handle and crashed it down on the Lawrence guy with an audible crack. 

Pandemonium. 

The next afternoon’s Leavenworth Times said dozens were treated at the local hospital and arrests were made.  But when Monday came around, there was Commodore in his black suit and tie and chincy-brim, standing with the rest of the squad ready for drill practice.

I’ve written elsewhere about how I convinced the squad we could win the drill competition at the end of the year if we trained hard enough, and after some serious grumbling and not a small amount of resentment that they had to take commands from a “college boy” like me, that is what we did.  We won the squad drill competition in the last month of school under the lights on the same field where the fight had taken place after the game in the fall.  That was when Kenny and Charlie and another squad member, Golden R., took me out, one by one, and showed me how to commit low-level crimes to put enough money in your pocket that you could get by.

It was different with Commodore, of course.  One night, a black sedan pulled up outside our house on 16th Street and one of Commodore’s guys came to the door and said he had been sent to pick me up.  He drove me down to a block of warehouse-like buildings somewhere on the east side and escorted me to the door.  I walked in to discover it was Commodore’s own nightclub, complete with a bar, gambling, and pool – all completely illegal of course, since Kansas was a “dry” state where liquor couldn’t be sold by the drink, not to mention games of chance being well outside the law.

I was patted down for weapons by an enormous bouncer.  When he was finished, I noticed that mounted on the wall behind him was a kind of “pigeon hole” rack like you’d find behind the desk in an old fashioned hotel.  Stuck into some of its compartments were several revolvers and semi-automatic pistols and a whole bunch of wallets.  Commodore told me they took the wallets at the door so they could remove however much the customers lost at the tables when they left.  I played a few games of pool and drank a few beers and was driven back home in the same car that picked me up, all “on the house” as Commodore said proudly when his driver came around to open the car’s back door for me.

School was out a month or so later when I ventured out to go to a carnival that had come to town.  I say “ventured out” because another gang had put out the word that I would suffer a beating if I showed my face in town because my friend Ricky Kettler and I had gotten in a turf fight with a couple of gang members over a pinball machine and Ricky had broken one of their arms.  It turned out that the broken arm belonged to the younger brother of the gang leader who had recently been released from doing a stretch at Lansing State for holding up a gas station.

I don’t know what came over me that I decided to go to that carnival.  I knew it could be trouble, and as I walked down its little midway, that’s exactly what happened.  The kid with the broken arm and his brother and about five or six other gang members approached and told me to come with them.  I figured this was it, I was going to get beaten badly, maybe killed, when suddenly Commodore appeared out of nowhere next to me in his suit and tie and hat.  We walked a few steps surrounded by the other gang, and Commodore turned to me with a smile and said, “Friends of yours, Lucian my man?”  “Not exactly,” I replied.

Commodore signaled the other gang leader, who towered over him, to follow and they walked a few feet away.  I couldn’t hear what was said, but the other gang melted into the crowd and Commodore walked over and said it would be a good idea if I went home, but he explained that the threat to beat me up had been dealt with, and it was safe for me to go downtown any time I wanted.

The next time Fawn and I went dancing at Teentown, Commodore and some of his boys came in.  They were all wearing their suits and London Fogs and accompanied by girls who were similarly attired.  Out on the dancefloor during a slow dance, Commodore and his girl glided over next to Fawn and me and he gave me a nod and said something like, “Enjoying your evening, Lucian my man?”  I said yes, and as he glided away, he executed a little spin so I couldn’t miss that he had his arm inside his girl’s London Fog with his hand right on her butt.

The Army moved us to Pennsylvania when dad came home from Korea later that summer.  I ran into Commodore a few years later when dad was reassigned to Fort Leavenworth and I was home from West Point for summer leave.  I asked around for Fawn, but it turned out she had moved when her father got out of Prison. Commodore had just gotten out of Lansing, and one of the conditions of his parole was that he attend a “Great Society” jobs program called the Neighborhood Youth Corps I was volunteering for that summer.  There were about 50 young people in the program, and the first time I saw him, he was sitting in the back of a meeting for “counseling” that was held every week before the program director and I paid them. After it was over, Commodore walked up to greet me, and we asked each other how we’d been, that kind of small talk.  I asked him if he was going to be a problem in the program, and he said, no of course not. 

At the end of the summer, the young people in the program held a picnic to thank me for working with them.  I arranged for us to get access to the “Hunt Club” on the post at Fort Leavenworth for the night.  They strung lights outside on the patio and brought dishes from home and somebody plugged in a record player and some of the girls were teaching me the latest dances when I saw Commodore come out on the dancefloor in his London Fog and chincy-brim hat, with a girl who very definitely was not in the program.  The seas parted when he twirled her across the floor, moving like they were on a cushion of air.