Alcatraz_ A Definitive History of the Penitentiary Years - Michael Esslinger [6]
The woman told Carnes that she had been a young girl during the 1946 escape attempt and that her father had brought her to Aquatic Park, where many of the correctional officers’ families had gathered to watch the events unfolding from the mainland. She explained that she had been terrified, seeing the flashes of light and hearing the thunderous guns. She told Carnes that she had hugged her father’s steel thermos, praying that it would block any bullets fired by the inmates and she described how that same fear remained in her thoughts every time she looked at the island. She jokingly commented that after the ’46 riot, she was annoyed at having to give up her bed to masses of visiting relatives. They all had come to hear at firsthand her father’s description of what he had witnessed from the mainland. They were all hoping to catch a glimpse through binoculars of a guard on the yard wall catwalk, or perhaps even the faint figure of an inmate.
The conversation then progressed to Carnes’s thoughts on being out of prison. He commented that when he was inside, he constantly thought and read about what people were doing on the outside, but once he got out, he couldn’t stop thinking about his friends on the inside and what they were doing. He said that the most difficult years of his life had been spent on Alcatraz, and that even now it consumed much of his daily thoughts. The woman made a parting comment that I still remember today. She offered to him that although they had followed different paths, and had lived their lives on opposite sides of the prison’s wall, they were both still haunted by memories of Alcatraz. Carnes nodded and smiled at her, then walked off, disappearing into the crowd of tourists along the pier. It would be several decades before I realized that it was during my conversation with Carnes that I began to write this book.
Each year over one million tourists board the island's ferry to visit what was once considered the toughest federal prison in America. Today, Alcatraz is one of the biggest tourist magnets and most famous landmarks of San Francisco. The island's mystique, which has been created primarily through books and motion pictures, continues to lure people from all over the world to see firsthand where America once housed its most notorious criminals. Cramped cells, rigid discipline and unrelenting routine were the Alcatraz trademarks and it became known as the final stop for the nation's most incorrigible prisoners. On any given day, thousands of visitors can be found wandering the island and taking in its unique history. The cellhouse now abandoned by the criminals who were once housed there, still has scars of the events to which the walls once bore witness. It is a journey into a dim piece of American history and few walk away fully comprehending. The clichéd expression "if these walls could talk" is taken to a deeper level.
Even today, decades after the prison’s closure, the name Alcatraz still evokes a variety of dark, forbidding images for many. In the decades of the prison’s active years, people would wander the shorelines of San Francisco, weaving their own mental images of the horrors that lurked behind the concrete walls and