The Missouri State Penitentiary: 170 Years inside "The Walls"

Pretty Boy Floyd

44 Pretty Boy Floyd I’m not as bad as they say I am, they just wouldn’t let me alone after I got out.—Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, quoted in Jeffery S. King, The Life and Death of Pretty Boy Floyd Some of the most famous inmates who spent time in the Missouri State Penitentiary did not become famous until after their stay in the penitentiary. One of these prisoners was Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd. Before going to prison, Floyd was just a small-time criminal. His exploits after his release made him a legend. Charles Floyd was born on February 3, 1904, in Georgia where his father was a poor farmer. In 1911, the family moved to Oklahoma, and Floyd grew up listening to and reading tales of the famous outlaws of the old west. Floyd quit school at the age of fourteen and started work, first as a harvest hand and later in the oil fields. At night, he frequented local bars where he drank so much Chocktaw beer that his friends called him“Chock.”Floyd loved fast cars and chasing girls, and manual labor did not provide the income he needed for those pursuits. In May 1922, Floyd committed his first burglary. Pretty Boy Floyd 45 Although his accomplice in the burglary testified for the state, Floyd was able to win an acquittal because his father testified and provided an alibi for the young man. Floyd’s father probably hoped that this scrape would be the last. For a time, it seemed that might be the case. Floyd married a local farmer’s daughter, Ruby Leonard Hargraves, on June 28, 1924, and tried to make a living as a farmer. By the summer of 1925, though, he was restless. He traded five gallons of whiskey for a pistol and set off to St. Louis with a man he had met during his work as a harvest hand. The pair held up a payroll clerk and got away with over $11,000. As Jeffery King recounted in The Life and Death of Pretty Boy Floyd, the clerk told reporters, “The fellow who carried the gun was a mere boy—a pretty boy with apple cheeks.” Floyd and his accomplice were later captured because of their lavish spending, and the name stuck. Floyd pleaded guilty to the payroll robbery in November 1925. He was sentenced to five years in the Missouri State Penitentiary and arrived there on December 18, 1925. The penitentiary was a rough place then, and some people believe that the harsh conditions there contributed to Floyd’s later life of crime. When Floyd arrived at the penitentiary, there were more than three thousand inmates imprisoned behind its walls. They worked twelve hours a day, and the guards whipped them when they did not obey. Prisoners did have the hope for an early release, though. At that time, a prisoner’s release date was calculated based on the fivetwelfths rule. Under that rule, each inmate would have five months taken off of his sentence for every year of good behavior. Floyd got into only minor scrapes while he was in the penitentiary. Once he lost sixty days good time for possessing narcotics. In 1927, he hit a guard when the guard yelled at him for moving too slowly in the morning. That stunt cost him another sixty days. He also stole potatoes to make whiskey, but the prison officials were never able to catch him at that. Despite his relatively clean record of behavior while in prison, events on the outside assured that Floyd’s time in the penitentiary would affect him for the rest of his life. Shortly before Floyd was 46 The Missouri State Penitentiary scheduled to be released, his wife filed for divorce. Floyd did not contest the divorce, and he remained devoted to her. This might explain why Floyd went to Kansas City shortly after his release on March 7, 1929. When he first reached Kansas City, Floyd planned to try to make an honest living. But he couldn’t find a job, and then he was arrested for a crime he didn’t commit, simply because he was an ex-convict. Floyd later told reporters that after he got out of the penitentiary he got arrested everywhere he went. “I decided I’d just as well get the goods as have the name,” he said. In early 1930, Floyd...