Guilty of two counts of battery to a police officer, I was sentenced to concurrent sentences of one and two years. The bailiffs took me to an elevator where I had a last chance to wave to my family and supporters. All of us, including Mom, were holding up the clenched fist. My best friend, the ever practical Mike Rosen, came close to my ear for a final word, “Can I have your coat?”
The next day I was driven shackled at the wrists and ankles to Green Bay State Reformatory. I had no idea of what to expect. What would the other inmates be like? For my first appearance in the chow hall, my pimp walk was so extreme, bordering on ridiculous.
At the lunch table, there were instigators just waiting for the new guy. Passing a cup of coffee to the other end, I made the mistake of holding it with my hand over the top. “Hey, are you going to let that guy pass your coffee like that?” they said. Welcome to Green Bay. Don’t listen to Jon Melrod’s version of the story. For years, he told a version that had one of the inmates sticking a fork in my hand.
I had violent nightmares in those first weeks of incarceration. New Year’s Eve in the cell hall was a night that no one slept. All night inmates tossed garbage from their cells amid raucous yelling and screaming. We all were listening to the same songs with headphones. Every time Tony Orlando and Dawn sang “knock three times on the window if you want me, twice on the pipe if the answer is no“, all the young cons would bang in unison of the bars.
I settled in to my work assignment, running apples and potatoes from storage to the kitchen. My work mates included a couple of whites, a couple of blacks, and a Mexican guy. All we had was time, talk, and everyday problems. I learned up close that not all prisoners are career criminals – just people like me who had made mistakes. It was a penitentiary for offenders under the age of 25. The week before I arrived, the inmates had staged a protest. They had refused to vacate the rec field when it was time to return to the cell hall. It took guards with shotguns to get them back in the cells.
I made friends with a group of Mexicans – a couple of them doing time for murder. Their leaders had been childhood buddies with Gil Arroyo, a good friend of mine in Milwaukee. We started a small study group. But that never got off the ground. I was soon transferred to the main state prison for adults, Waupun.
When they transfer you, there is no advance notice. Trouble can break out when others know you are getting transferred, especially if you owe someone a carton of smokes. Cigarettes were the substitute for money. When your door doesn’t slide open at lunch time, only then do you know that you are being transferred.
Waupun is a formidable place. It has tiers of cells just like Green Bay. But the criminality quotient is a bit higher. The first night I was there, wafts of smoke came into my narrow cell. I heard the next day that someone had celebrated Angela Davis’ birthday by burning down the prison laundry. I was assigned to the tailor shop where I learned how to make cuffs for prison shirts.
I spent hours – just listening to senseless cell hall banter. I particularly remember hearing two guys trying to stump each other with trick questions. They would debate if a bald eagle was actually bald and whether a fish swims or wiggles. One guy asked another, “Ok, who invented wine?” On thinking for what seemed like 5 minutes, the other replied, “Mogen David!”
The guy next to me in the tailor shop was a sex offender. He told me that on getting paroled for rape a few years earlier, he had not even made it back to Algoma without raping again. Though I was in a different cell hall, I got to talk once to Garvin Gordon. Garvin had been involved with the Draft Resistance Union’s outreach in Eau Claire in the summer of ’68. Now he was doing hard time on a minor marijuana beef. He had been framed up because he was a protester.
My cell door stayed shut again at chow time about 6 week later. So my total experience in high security prisons was only about 3 months. My next destination, Fox Lake Correctional Camp, was medium security. We had keys to our own dorm rooms, classes, recreation, and even miniature golf. I could get any book that I wanted from the state lending library. I learned welding, machine shop, and blueprint reading. I taught a small political study group and made copies of our notes on carbon paper.
In our dorm wing we had memorable characters. I remember “Elevator Man”, “Ring My Chimes”, “Big Head”, “Preach”, “Stash” and “Peeky Boo”. The joint was about half white and half Black – with some Mexicans, Winnebago, Menominee, and Chippewa. Not able to play round ball against basketball beasts like “Elevator Man”, I played hoops with a couple of “Chiefs”, Dale Garvin and Maynard Funmaker. Maynard loved to laugh at me when I made a move for the basket proclaiming, “Here comes Earl the Pearl Monroe.” There was always at least one Bid Whist or Sheepshead card game going on. The day room always filled up for Soul Train.
The lines in the chow hall were mostly segregated. The Blacks would form one line; everyone else, another. Every now and then someone would break the pattern without facing any hostility. I could always say “Hey, this line is shorter”. In those days, whites were more than half of the prison population. Pork liver and onions was one of the most common dishes.
My best friend was a guy named Doug Fellenz. He was doing life for killing someone during a drunken fist fight. His story was unusual. He was a Jew who had been raised by a single mother in a small packing town. A kosher slaughter house had imported Jewish workers. Far from the intellectual Jews that I knew from Madison, this guy was a straight-up greaser. After I was released, Doug escaped into Horicon Marsh and made his way to Madison. He woke up one morning in a YMCA room staring up the barrel of a police shotgun. After I got out, I visited him a few times in Waupun, but lost touch. He became good friends with the two Black Panthers, Booker and Jessie.
That was the year of the rebellion at Attica in New York. I still have a scrap book of clippings from those terrible days. Wisconsin treated us to a live, outdoor concert from B.B. King. The blues man made his guitar, Lucille, squeal with “Every Day I’ve Got the Blues” and “Keys to the Highway”. We had some awesome musicians among the population. I loved to listen to Robert Spiller practice on his sax.
Once, Lawrence “Big Head” Wedgeworth asked me to pick up some Hostess Cup Cakes for him at the canteen. On the way back, I got tempted and ate one of them. He was livid. I kept saying, “Hey, I’ll pay for both.” That wasn’t the point.
We used to pick up mail from the guard on our wing. One day in May of 1971, I got a letter from my brother saying that his classmates were all set to walk out of high school to protest mandatory ROTC. This had been one of the issues of our “Waukegan Movement” two summers earlier. Then the guard handed me my Waukegan News Sun which was more recent than Johnny’s letter. The headlines read, “Hundred Students Arrested Protesting ROTC”. It was on the anniversary of the Kent State killings. The mayor, Bob Sabonjian, angrily confronted my dad when Dad came to bail out Johnny, “You taught these kids to break the law”.
My mom and dad used to visit me almost every weekend. Mom would bring me a sour cream coffee cake and a large bag of beer nuts. Very few of the other inmates got visitors even once a month. I realized that I had started copying the way most guys referred to their homes, “my mother’s house” – not mentioning my dad.
I turned 24 in Fox Lake. At least for me, there was no huge drama. I got in one fight on a basketball court. I didn’t start it and it didn’t last more than a minute. Another time, I was sent to solitary confinement because I refused an unfair work assignment. Once, I shared peach moonshine that some guys had fermented in a garbage bag. I knew of an incident in which a Mexican “snitch” had his ear sliced off. In those days there weren’t noticeable gang factions and nothing like the Aryan Nation. Though, I did see a guy with a swastika tattoo between his eyes.
After all these years, nobody ever asked me the question that most people have about prison, “Weren’t you afraid of getting raped?” In my one year of incarceration I never felt any threat.
Maybe now things have changed. Maybe things are different in overcrowded, understaffed, long term, gang-dominated joints. I did hear bravado about “blood on my knife or s**t on my dick.” But it was all talk. The vast, vast majority of inmates never had anything to worry about. I had friends. I had self-esteem. I was a college graduate. I was known as a minor political prisoner. I did my time. I wasn’t dressing up in female underwear like a cross dresser named Tony, who posed seductively in the first cell on my tier in Green Bay.
One day, Willie Bosket wanted to show me how to develop film in the prison dark room. I was more interested in trying to learn something than worried that someone would start a rumor. I knew I wasn’t a sissy. Willie was a very intelligent guy who in later years graduated from college with a Phi Beta Kappa while in Leavenworth. I could see that he actually wanted to show me what he knew. I had enough confidence to be seen being alone with a muscle bound double lifer.
Willie Bosket later became famous in the book, All God’s Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence by Fox Butterfield. Three successive generations of Boskets had been murderers. Bosket eventually escaped from Fox Lake. In later years he wound up in Leavenworth. But for a wrong turn in a hospital hallway, he would have escaped from there. Cornered, he ended up taking the life of a female accomplice and then killing himself.
I was released on parole on December 17th, 1971 exactly one year after my first walk through Green Bay’s gates. At a party to celebrate, old friends filled me in on their projects. They were working closely with a Free Health Clinic run by former members of the Panther Party.
I was showing off all of the ghetto and prison slang that I had learned – terms like “Jodie” for the back door man who’s visiting a brother’s old lady while the brother is locked up. “Shot through the grease” roughly translated to “got the wrong end of the stick.” “He pulled my coat” meant someone had shared some good information. “Gray dude” meant a white guy who was cool.
