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119 Chapter 8 Once the guard’s flashlight spotted my grandfather’s body in solitary confinement, the word quickly began to make the rounds. It spread fast, real fast. It circled first among the guards and then up around the jailhouse cell blocks above the basement Dungeon and then swiftly out onto the streets of the city, too. The news landed hard on skid row. The next afternoon another man was arrested at Fifth and Main streets. Eugene Boston was handcuffed and taken to the eighth floor on top of the city police headquarters downtown. Police were booking him for public drunkenness, another transient from skid row, they presumed, and just like they had my grandfather only a week earlier, they told him he more than likely was bound for the Kansas City Municipal Farm as well. Eugene Boston was twenty-three years old. He instantly knew what that meant. Completing all the paperwork was taking time, and Boston was growing anxious. Around eight o’clock he asked to use a telephone. According to police sergeant Harlie Atchison, they escorted Boston to an office so he could phone his family. Boston dialed, but the line was busy. Sergeant Atchison sat nearby, fingerprinting a female prisoner. His eyes were on the prints and not on Boston, who slid up out of his chair and scooted quietly down the hallway. He walked to a window and pushed open a chain attachment. Because he was young and small enough yet, he managed to squeeze through its six-inch opening. Then he jumped. A second policeman at the booking desk heard the thud. He ran to the window, looked down into the darkening night, and spotted Boston far below, splayed across a railing on the north side of the building. His right arm was severed, torn straight off. Both his 120 Richard A. Serrano legs were broken. Police took him to General Hospital, and doctors began working on his severe internal injuries as well. Ninety minutes after the suicide attempt, police called Boston ’s family. This time the line was not busy. They reached first his mother-in-law, Mrs. Frank Bardwell, and her son, Frank Bardwell Jr. They rushed to the hospital. His wife stayed home. Just ten days earlier, on May 17, she had given birth to their second child, a girl. Mrs. Bardwell told reporters that Boston had been out of work for several weeks. That morning around half past seven, she said, he had left home trying to obtain employment but found a bottle instead. His last job of work was on a railroad section gang. But he also was keenly aware of the ways of the police and the routine inside a jail, and he knew what could happen after an arrest . He knew about the Kansas City Municipal Farm. More than likely he had heard what had just happened to a prisoner in solitary confinement out there. He knew these things because during the war Eugene Boston had served as a military policeman. He was discharged in January 1946, and his war service, Mrs. Bardwell said, “had left him nervous.” He did not like the police, and he did not like jails anymore. But how he had gotten himself drunk, she could not say. “He had no money to buy liquor.” Another vagrant, Ray Irvan Zellers, fifty-six years old, was taken around that time to city court after he and five other men were picked up for loitering and sleeping in the lobby of the downtown bus depot on McGee Street. According to police, none of the men had any money or a job or a place to live. Standing before municipal judge Edmund B. Smith, Zellers said he had been working in Morris, Kansas, for a commissary company on a construction project. He also had worked as a welder in the past, and he originally hailed from Joplin, Missouri. He said that shortly after arriving in Kansas City he spent what little cash he had and slept nights at the bus station. Judge Smith fined Zellers a dollar and ordered him held at the Farm for one day; then he would be released for having served out his fine. As Farm prisoners go, he was getting off lucky, or so it seemed. Officers moved him briefly into a holding cell with fifteen other prisoners on the fifth floor of police headquarters, and moments later they heard the sound of a falling body. Thud! Zellers had dropped...

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