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144 Chapter 11 The guard with the flashlight, Frederick H. Coleman, worked the overnight shift. He went out to the Farm in his khaki-brown uniform around midafternoon each day, and he did not return home until the sun was up the next morning. He was already in his late sixties by 1948, and this was just a job in retirement that he took after years toiling as a housepainter and wallpaper hanger. He was a big man, about six feet four. He weighed at times up to 250 pounds. He had blue eyes and shock-white hair and on his forearm a tattoo of a young woman’s figure. To amuse his grandchildren he would flex his muscle and make the girl wiggle and dance. Fred Coleman was the one who took my grandfather to the Hole. He would have been the last to see him alive, and the first to see him dead. City directories at the downtown library, which recorded his job as “guard, Municipal Farm,” identified his wife as “Cath O.” As luck would have it (for me, at least), her death certificate was among those available online, only because she has been dead fifty years or more. As it turned out, Catherine Opal Coleman died of a hemorrhage at home in November 1948, just six months after the incident at the jail. She was fifty-eight; her husband was ten years older. Her obituary told me little. She was a housewife. She had two children; her husband had two children from a previous marriage. She was buried at the Forest Hill Cemetery, and when I telephoned the graveyard a clerk confirmed they not only had Catherine but had Frederick, too, right beside her, and that he had died in October 1970. I pulled his obituary. He was eighty at death, and he had died at the Veterans Administration hospital in Kansas City. He was born in the small Iowa town of Guthrie Center. He was an Episcopalian. But oddly enough, the obituary did not list any occupation, a rare 145 My Grandfather’s Prison omission in obituaries for men. I know because I started my newspaper career writing obits. But it did note that he was a member of something called the Camp Ord Chapter of Spanish-American War Veterans. This guy was old. At the National Archives building in Washington I found his military service record. Fred Coleman might have lived a long life, but in his youth he was quite the scrapper. In May 1898 he was mustered into Company L of the Fiftieth Iowa Infantry. Only eighteen, he lied and said he was twenty-one. They sent him to Camp Cuba Libre in Jacksonville, Florida, where he was twice “confined” for going AWOL and twice sentenced by his field commander to “two days hard labor.” He suffered from acute diarrhea and spent days in the company hospital. On a furlough in Des Moines he found himself in worse trouble. This time he was arrested by civil authorities at the state capital for “drunkenness and disorderly conduct.” He was tried and convicted and drew fifteen days in jail—exactly as my grandfather did some years later. Des Moines at that time had several local newspapers, yet from microfilm rolls that I reviewed I could find no mention of Coleman’s arrest or conviction. I did learn that when soldiers were furloughed to Des Moines, they brought with them a good deal of trouble. One morning several soldiers who were home on leave “tottered” into police headquarters and complained they had been robbed. One soldier leaned on a buddy’s arm; another sported a bloody shirt. A second group of unnamed soldiers was arrested “after a hard night . . . of intoxication and disturbing the public quiet.” A rather busy bunch, they were. Porkey Larson was jailed for ten days for being drunk. Charles Mitchell was given “one hour to get out of town.” Walter Ray drew thirty days for drinking and thirty more for carrying concealed weapons. He had been frightening pedestrians by firing off his revolver at First and Walnut streets. Other miscreants were not identified, and Coleman could easily have been among this crowd of soldiers, the anonymous infantrymen picked up by the police for any number of offenses fueled by alcohol. “A few plain drunks and a couple of vagrants completed the list at the forenoon session of the court,” reported the Iowa Daily Capitol. 146 Richard A. Serrano “One of the...

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