Further reading for Alcatraz, which means pelican.
Escape from Alcatraz by J. Campbell Bruce
Stroud’s Digest on the Diseases of Birds by Robert Stroud
No prison in America has a reputation like Alcatraz. Opening in 1933, right at the beginning of the criminal wave of the 1930’s, it ended up in the headlines of salacious true crime magazines along with names of notorious gangsters and bank robbers like Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine Gun Kelly, and Al Capone. It was the ultimate home of notoriously weird criminal, Robert “Birdman” Stroud, who penned a series of dubious manuals of bird biology and came to have a reputation as an unbeatable prison. Once you went in, you didn’t come out on your own. That was the legend, at least.
Alcatraz, which means pelican in Spanish, began life as a Mexican military fort before it came into the possession of the United States military as a military prison and ending up in the hands of the US Department of Justice, where it began it’s short life as a federal penitentiary. Thirty years later, after several wardens and numerous escape attempts, some of which were likely successful, the DoJ closed the prison and it became an artifact of San Francisco’s tourism industry.
Though, only open for thirty years, the prison gained a reputation for two things. Its cruelty, having been in the hands of a warden as evil as its worst prisoner. Its solitary confinement pit was a literal pit and it took practically nothing to land you in it. Its other Its other reputation was earned when numerous prisoners made several spirited attempts to break out. The official record states that none made it successfully, crediting the Bay’s temperature, current and the distance from the island to the shore but one incredibly well thought-out plan in the early 60’s. The escapees were never seen again but their bodies were also never recovered and there have been numerous unconfirmed sightings of them over the years.
Episodes: 488-450
