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remained almost relentlessly cheerful. It was what people remembered for years afterward—the courtesy, the easy wink, the whiff of manly joie de vivre. The times he grew depressed were usually when he thought about his family. He was thirty years old, but he still valued the approval of his father and sister. If he was going to be an outlaw, he wanted to be the type of outlaw people admired. He wanted to support his family during hard times. Above all, as the son of a remote man who never paid much attention to him, Dillinger craved respect.

Unlike Baby Face Nelson and other Depression-era criminals, Dillinger was not a product of poverty or neglect. He was born in a middle-class Indianapolis neighborhood on June 22, 1903, the son of a drab, stoic grocer, John Wilson Dillinger, and his wife, Mollie, who died following a seizure when John was four. The Dillingers were well off. John Dillinger, Sr., owned his own store, ferried bags of groceries around their neighborhood, and put away enough money to invest in real estate, buying four houses. By all accounts the elder Dillinger worked long hours and showed little interest in his son. In his father’s absence, Dillinger, like Clyde Barrow, was raised by his older sister. Audrey Dillinger, a red-haired girl thirteen years older than John, married in 1906, but she and her husband lived with her father for several years, until the elder Dillinger remarried in 1912.

Like Machine Gun Kelly, Dillinger resented his new stepmother, a feeling that appears to have deepened as she and his father began having children of their own. These emotions manifested themselves in a streak of adolescent rebelliousness, though on reflection, his friends and teachers saw nothing that caused real concern. At Public School 38, Dillinger was a boisterous, joshing kid but a dreadful student. His D’s and F’s sparked increasingly angry arguments with his father.

By the sixth grade, Dillinger was the nominal head of a group of rowdy boys who called themselves the Dirty Dozen Gang. Their idea of mischief was snatching watermelons from a farmer’s field or stealing buckets of coal they sold to neighbors. At one point, Dillinger was arrested for a coal theft but got off with a lecture from the judge. His father was less forgiving. According to John Toland, who interviewed several of Dillinger’s boyhood friends in the early 1960s, the elder Dillinger chained his son to his grocery wagon for a time in an effort to rein him in. A firm hand only stoked Dillinger’s rebelliousness. One friend told Toland that Dillinger embarked on a series of petty crimes as a teenager, stealing whiskey and terrorizing another boy with a buzz saw. None led to more trouble with the law.1

At sixteen Dillinger quit school and worked various jobs around Indianapolis. A year later, in March 1920, his family moved to a farm outside Mooresville, fifteen miles southwest of the city. They soon moved to a larger spread, sixty acres on Highway 267, north of town. Mooresville was a sleepy little burg, and it bored the teenage Dillinger to tears. Avoiding farmwork, he spent his days hunting squirrels or handling second base on a sandlot baseball team, his nights shooting billiards at the Idle Hour poolroom or similar haunts in Martinsville, fifteen miles south. Like Pretty Boy Floyd, he met and befriended older men at the pool halls, hard men he strove to emulate.

Dillinger spent several years passing time in his hometown, throwing dice, shooting pool, hunting, living off his father’s hard work and the occasional odd job. In 1923 he turned twenty, and he hadn’t the slightest idea what to do with his life. Like Floyd, Dillinger considered joining the armed forces. Dillinger, however, actually signed up, with the navy. When his basic training ended on October 4, 1923, he was assigned the job of fireman third class on the U.S.S. Utah, a battleship anchored in Boston Harbor. Like Clyde Barrow, Dillinger grew homesick in Massachusetts. Three weeks after joining the Utah, he briefly went AWOL. He was courtmartialed, given ten days solitary, and