“You heard about them Scott Boys?”
Now, I have to admit, sitting where I am sitting…I am not sure what is coming next. We are deep in the heart of the country where a good-ole boy is either about to tell us a tall tale, or else two other good-ole boys may pop their heads around the corner just in time to corroborate the teller’s facts.
“Aww yeah…I tell everybody from the interstate this one, anyone who blows a tar and shows up out front.”
Out front is where Larry points to as moves toward the door.
The sign beside the door reads: Larry’s Tire and Auto Repair, but if you phone him from the interstate he would answer with a simple “Larry’s Tar”; the pronunciation of “tire” telling you that you are indeed in Willisburg, KY.
My nephew and I rise from our seats and try and get a better view, though I am sure he has heard this one before. He is sipping at a root beer that he pulled from the fridge, up towards the front of the shop.
“Right over yonder, ‘tween them two street signs, there used to be a general store and them Scott boys—now I never knew them; they was older than me—but now R.C. Divine and Thomas Cecil used to come into the shop and those two had come up with them…now them Scott boys were bad guys—they never kilt nobody—but they was in that evil way.”
Larry gave me a sideways eye, making sure that I caught his meaning. He then returned his stare back across the road to the 15 feet of grass between two road signs—Sportsman Ln. and Circle Dr.
“Now that general store had a safe in the back, and them Scott Boys liked explosives…R.C. said he remembers that there was money floating up and down the street that day…and them Scott Boys made off with most of it.”
This is the point in the story where if Larry was a smoker he would have, taken one last drag for dramatic effect and stamped the butt of his non-existent storytelling prop into an ash tray before delivering the goods.
“Well, The Law caught up to them of course, and put the older brother in Alcatraz. Yeah…I reckon Clint Eastwood played one of them brothers in the movie. You seen that right? Escape from Alcatraz?”
Now, I did not see that coming!
Here I am…10 miles from nowhere, and find out it is home to 1 of 5 guys in the world that came close to escaping one of the most inescapable prisons in history.
Pulling some research from the Wikipedia page a few nights later I read this:
Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay was the site of Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary between 1934 and 1963. There were a total of 14 escape attempts from the prison made by 34 prisoners during this time. Two men tried twice, making for a total of 36 individual escape attempts; fifteen were caught, eight gave up, seven were shot and killed, one was confirmed to have drowned and five are listed as “missing and presumed drowned”. Faced with high maintenance costs and a poor reputation, Alcatraz closed on March 21, 1963.
…
John Paul Scott and Darl Lee Parker were the last two prisoners to attempt to escape from Alcatraz [on December 16th, 1962]. Scott and Parker used a makeshift saw to cut through the bars on a kitchen window in the cell house, then ran to the edge of the island and jumped into the water. Parker was found alive 81 yards from the main island on the rock formation Little Alcatraz. Scott reached Fort Point beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, where he was found by teenagers, suffering from hypothermia and exhaustion. After recovering in Letterman General Hospital, he was returned to Alcatraz. It is the only proven case of an Alcatraz inmate reaching the shore by swimming.
The next time I spoke to Larry we chatted a bit about this…and Larry had this to say:
“Now ole R.C. Divine spoke to several reporters and journalists over the years, but he never told them that he was the one who learnt them Scott Boys how to swim.”
Six months before this last successful attempt, in June, was the attempt made famous by the Clint Eastwood’s Hollywood classic “Escape from Alcatraz”. There were two other brothers (the Anglin brothers), as told in the film, that Clint tried to lead to freedom.
Ole Clint didn’t have nothing on that Scott boy though! In the movie Clint’s character, Frank, and the Anglin brothers had built a makeshift boat to aide in their escape, while John Paul Scott decided December was a swell month to swim for it.
I would wager to say that if John Paul had swam for it six months earlier, when the water temp was 10 degrees warmer, then maybe J. P. Scott would have been the one sitting at Larry’s Tire telling the patrons an even more astonishing tale—a story to hang their hats on!