May 23, 2005
Violence
Seventy-one years ago today, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were shot to death in an ambush as they were driving a stolen Ford Deluxe along a road in Bienville Parish, LA. The sedan was so full of bullet holes, it looked like a colander on wheels. It toured the regional fairgrounds on the back of a flatbed truck like this for years afterward.
The public animus of crippling fear, fascination, even admiration, toward these two and their fellow bad guys — John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, et al — swept across the Southwest of the early 1930s like the poison of a nuclear fallout. Hardly a day passed that their murders and robberies didn’t make the headlines. Commerce ground to a standstill.
Frank Hamer was one of the Texas Rangers who participated in the ambush that literally shredded Bonnie and Clyde along with their car. At the time, he and his colleague became public heroes.
Some twenty years later, I was given the opportunity to interview him in his home. Ironically, he seemed a gentle man. He sat with his back to the corner of the room so that he could face all the windows and doors. He said that he did this everywhere. He held in his lap a large, loaded six-shooter.
Violence and its bedfellow fear never cease, it seems, ever so effectively to work their revenge, even internationally.