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Cultural and Historical Stories
Devil's Back Porch
May 23, 1934
(From article written by Gary Cartwright in Texas Monthly, February, 2001)
Bonnie Parker was generous, sensitive, adventurous,
compulsive, and doggedly loyal, a small flower of a girl with reddish-gold hair
and profoundly blue eyes, vulnerable and fragile and yet tough as nails and willful
to the extreme. Clyde Barrow was a scrawny little psychopath with jug ears and the
sense of humor of a persimmon, cruel, egotistical, obsessive, vindictive, and so
devoid of compassion that he appeared to care more for his machine gun and his
saxophone than he did for the women in his life. She had the soul of a poet;
he had the heart of a rattlesnake. She wanted a home and children. He wanted
revenge. Yet she loved him desperately, and over the course of their 21-month
spree of robbing, killing, and running from the law, he came to love her too...
Thousands of Bonnie and Clyde devotees connect
through dozens of Web sites. They argue over such minutiae as Bonnie's shoe size
(three), the real color of the 1934 Ford V-8 "death car" (cordoba gray), and who
really pulled the trigger on Hillsboro jeweler John N. Bucher in 1932 (an obscure
Barrow gang member named Ted Rogers). Relics are scattered across the country,
some in the most unlikely of places. The death car is on display in the lobby of
Whiskey Pete's Casino in Primm, Nevada, 45 miles south of Las Vegas, as is Clyde's
blood-soaked and
bullet-tattered shirt. The shirt alone cost the casino $85,000.
A collector in Colorado is replicating the car to the exact condition as when it
was stolen in Topeka, Kansas, in 1934. Another devotee is building a
one-twenty-fifth-scale model of the car, complete with bullet holes,
broken glass, and tiny models of the torn bodies of Bonnie and Clyde. Bonnie's
bloody eyeglasses are owned by a man in Massachusetts. Clyde's sunglasses, one
lens shot away, are part of the collection at the Red Man Museum in Waco, which
also includes Bonnie's makeup kit and a tablet of her poetry. Locks of their hair
and pieces of there clothing, salvaged at the scene of the ambush by ghoulish
spectators, reside in anonymous private collections. (Only quick action by lawmen
prevented one trophy hunter from amputating Clyde's trigger finger.)...
We began the tour by inspecting two locations near the Dallas County courthouse and another
on Swiss Avenue, where a teenage Bonnie had worked as a waitress in the years before
her introduction to Clyde. She was married at the time to a safecracker named Roy
Thornton. When Bonnie fell, she fell hard. In a rush of girlish devotion, she had
her name and his tattooed inside a heart on her upper thigh. Thornton was a lousy
husband who disappeared for weeks at a time. She vowed to friends that she would
never take him back and resolved "to
take no men or nothing seriously. Let all men go to hell!" Two years later, however,
Clyde appeared in her life—they met by accident at the home of a mutual
friend—and it was love at first sight. Too loyal to divorce Thornton, she
continued wearing his ring until the day she died. Clyde Barrow, however,
was truly the love of her life...
The perpetually mean streets of West Dallas look today much as they did in the
thirties. As the tour bus crossed the Continental Street Viaduct (called the
West Dallas Viaduct back then), we were told that this was the neighborhood
where the Barrow brothers, Bonnie Parker, Roy Thornton, Raymond and Floyd Hamilton,
and a lot of other desperadoes grew up. Then it was called the Devil's Back Porch.
Even though it festered in the shadows of downtown Dallas, the city ignored
the disgrace of the Porch for years; West Dallas wasn't even incorporated until
1952.
In Bonnie and Clyde's day only two of the streets were paved. Few of the houses had
running water or electricity, and some of them didn't have doors or window glass. Jobs
were almost nonexistent. Disease and crime went unchecked. Cops who walked the Porch
did so in pairs and never by choice. The Brick Hotel, a two-story beer hall, gambling
parlor, and dope den, was an infamous safe house for outlaws and fugitives such as
Machine Gun Kelly...
Singleton Boulevard, the main drag today, is a jumble of auto repair shops, junkyards,
warehouses, cafes, service stations, and small frame houses with
"Beware of the Dog"
signs out front. The homes and businesses are owned mostly by Hispanics and blacks.
The place looked much the same in the thirties, except the main drag was called
Eagle Ford Road and the homes and businesses were owned by poor whites. In the
decades between 1920 and 1940 the population of Dallas almost doubled as thousands
of families were forced off their land by the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.
They settled in squatters' camps under the viaducts and along the river bottom
living in tents and cardboard lean-tos. Henry Barrow, an illiterate sharecropper,
moved his wife, Carnie, and their seven children from the small town of Telico,
southeast of Dallas to a camp on Monde Street, next to the West Dallas railroad
track. Clyde was eleven at the time and never forgot the humiliation of his
squatters' camp initiation. He enrolled in the sixth grade at Sidney Lanier
Elementary School but quit after about a week, moved in with his older sister,
Nell, and took a job at a candy company. Nell spoiled him. Her husband, a
musician, taught Clyde to play the saxophone, which, along with guns, became
a lifelong obsession. Soon he was supplementing his income by stealing bicycles
and hubcaps.
Meanwhile, Henry Barrow built a three-room house for his remaining family and
hacked out a meager living picking up scrap metal in his horse cart and selling it.
When his horse was killed by a car while crossing the Houston Street Viaduct, Henry
sued and won a small sum. With the money, he moved his house to a vacant lot on
Eagle Ford Road and converted the front room into a service station and store.
The building that used to be the Barrows' home and their service
station-store stands today at the corner of Singleton and Borger. In the thirties
Eagle Ford Road (now Singleton) was a well-known escape route for Clyde and his
gang. They called it the back door.
After a holdup or during a police chase, Clyde would accelerate whatever car he
happened to be stealing across the West Dallas Viaduct, down Eagle Ford Road,
across the Trinity's west fork at the old ford, then negotiate the rutted dirt
road to Irving and disappear into the vast isolation of North Texas and the
Great Plains. Similarly, the Barrow gang used the back door to sneak back
into West Dallas when Bonnie could no longer stand another day away from
her beloved mother. Clyde maintained favor with the neighbors by distributing
large sums of cash, buying not only goodwill but also silence. In one of
Bonnie's poems the old neighborhood is celebrated as the Great Divide:
From Irving to West Dallas Viaduct
Is known as the Great Divide
Where the women are kin, and men are men,
And they won't "stool" on Bonnie and Clyde...
Around the corner from the old gas station sits a small frame duplex that was
used in the thirties as a safe house for outlaws; on its front porch Clyde blew
apart Tarrant County deputy Malcolm Davis, who was a member of a posse that
surprised him one night. The home of Barrow gang members Raymond and Floyd
Hamilton sits nearby. Up the hill on Fort Worth Avenue, in one corner of a
picturesque pre-Civil War cemetery called Western Heights, is the Barrow
family plot. Clyde is buried next to his older brother, Marvin "Buck"
Barrow, who died after a shootout with the cops in Dexfield Park, Iowa, nine
months before Clyde got it. Their joint headstone reads "Gone but Not
Forgotten". The headstone is embedded in a foot
of concrete to prevent trophy hunters from carrying it away. "Someone used
to steal it every Texas-OU weekend," Phillips told us. "One time the police
recovered it from the home of a prominent businessnan who was using it as a
coffee table to entertain his weekend guests."...
The bodies were put on public view, first at an Arcadia furniture store, which
doubled as a funeral parlor, then again in Dallas. At the coroners inquest
someone stole Clyde's diamond stickpin. A photographer took pictures of
their naked bodies. A man offered the Barrow family $50,000 for Clyde's
body, which he wanted to mummify and take on tour with a traveling tent
show. An estimated 10,000 people crowded into Clyde's funeral, nearly wrecking
the old Belo mansion on Ross
Avenue, which had been converted into a funeral home. An airplane chartered
by racketeer Benny Binion flew over Clyde's grave site and dropped a floral
wreath. Bonnie's funeral the following day was more orderly. She was laid
out in a silver casket dressed in a blue silk negligee, her head wounds
partly covered by her permanent wave. The newspaper boys of Dallas, who
had benefited so handsomely from her infamy, sent the largest wreath...
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