Almost 100 Years Older Than Alcatraz

Called the 47 bloodiest acres in America, it is almost 100 years older than Alcatraz and was once the largest prison in the world.  It is the Missouri State Penitentiary; the first prison west of the Mississippi River.

By 1888, the Missouri State Penitentiary was the largest prison in the world.  It was decommissioned in 2004, and is now a tourist attraction. 

I went on a tour, and my favorite part was the early history of the penitentiary.

  

When Missouri first became a state, Jefferson City was a nervous capital city.  It was afraid that St. Louis to the east or Kansas City to the west would steal the capital from this little town on the Missouri River.  So, Jefferson City built a penitentiary.  It was a sign of permanence.

The inmates in the prison were was a source of free labor for the town.  Inmates did road construction in Jefferson City.  Every morning, the inmates would be issued shovels and sticks of dynamite, basic tools for building roads.  When the crews returned in the evening, there was not a good accounting of what happened to the dynamite issued in the morning.

So, the Missouri State Penitentiary lost a few inmates every once in a while --- when they blasted their way out of the prison walls.

Free labor led to clothing factories being built right inside the prison.  And there were shoe factories. 

For most people on the prison tours the highlight is the gas chamber, which was used for executions between 1937 and 1987.  However, no matter how eager you are to see the gas chamber, all the tourists have to pass through the gift shop.

I realized the psychology: the tours are run by volunteers and they need money to maintain the buildings.  Catch the tourists when they are most hyped up: at the doorstep to the site of 40 deaths by lethal gas.  Hyped-up tourists will buy more souvenirs than calm tourists.

The gas chamber has two execution chairs.  I started to think about 'two executions for the price of one', but 40 framed photographs on the wall told me this was no laughing matter.

People who were incarcerated in the Missouri State Penitentiary include:

  STAGGER LEE SHELTON (whose murder of Billy Lyons in St. Louis inspired a blues song).

  PRETTY BOY FLOYD (served a 4-year sentence before going on a spree of murders and bank robberies).

  KATIE O'HARE (a Socialist, imprisoned for giving a speech).

  EMMA GOLDMAN (an Anarchist, imprisoned for advocating birth control).

  JAMES EARL RAY (who escaped from the Missouri State Pen one year before assassinating Martin Luther King, Jr).

SONNY LISTONn was also incarcerated in the Missouri State Penitentiary, and the tourguides let me go in his cell.  Standing there was an antidote to having visited the gas chamber.  The person who had been in this very cell turned his life around and went on to become the World Heavyweight Boxing Champion. 

I was standing in the cell of someone who showed that incarceration could do more than punish, it could rehabilitate.

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A 5-minute YouTube tour of the State Pen: soundtrack is Tom Waits singing "They're serving fish in the jailhouse tonight, oh boy."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49deQ_-WVU

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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath.  Price = $11.  You can purchase a copy at  http://www.puppyoutofbreath.com

Symmetry Could Be A Deal-Breaker

When I lived in Kano, Nigeria, one of my friends was from Minnesota.   One day, International Telephone and Telegraph sent this guy a hundred dollars, with instructions that he must spend all of it.

Specifically, he had to spend the money on Nigerian handicrafts that he thought would sell in America.  ITT had made lots of money selling telecommunications equipment to third-world countries, and they wanted to do something to help out these countries.  Their goal was to create business by importing Nigerian handicrafts and benefited local artisans.

I gladly accompanied my Minnesota friend on his handicrafts spending spree

I had been in Kano long enough to know that there were no goods being produced simply as decoration.  Everything for sale in the market had a purpose, such as a bowl for your food and a cover to keep flies out of the bowl for your food.  The bowls were made from gourds and the covers were hand-made straw mats.  The gourds were decorated with carvings on the outside; the straw mats had designs made by using different colored straw.

A bowl cost about 42 cents; a straw mat cost about 28 cents.  I wondered how we were going to spend all of the hundred dollars.

My Minnesota friend and I covered the large markets in the city and a few of the small once-a-week markets in the countryside.  We managed to spend all of ITT's money.  (Buying blankets helped since a hand-woven cotton blanket could cost $3 and a hand-woven camel's hair blanket could cost $6).

We used the most reliable shipping company in the city, Panalpina, to ship the crafts back to ITT.  Panalpina was a Swiss company.  I still wonder what a Swiss company was doing in our corner of Africa.

And I still wonder if ITT had thought about all the obstacles to importing handicrafts.

Take, for example, importing 5,000 straw mats from Kano.  How do you get the local artisans, who are used to producing at a leisurely pace, to produce such a large number?  How do you guarantee that they will produce 5,000 mats in a hurry without any flaws?

Who are the middlemen who will see that the mats do get produced?  How much money will filter down to the individual artisan?

I had been in Kano long enough to know that symmetry was not important to the local craftsmen.  A blanket would be woven with a yellow stripe and a red stripe at one end, and three red stripes at the other end.

Whenever I see an African item that is non-symmetrical, I call it genuine.  However, when most Americans see an item that is non-symmetrical, they call it crude.  Would they be willing to buy it?  Was symmetry a deal-breaker?

We never heard back from International Telephone and Telegraph.  Perhaps that was a sign that they had started thinking about the obstacles.

It took many years, but, eventually, some people figured out how to handle the obstacles.  I don’t know if ITT was involved in creating The Fair Trade Movement, but you can now find shops all over America selling Fair Trade handicrafts from third-world countries.  

Maybe that hundred dollars worth of goods that we sent via a Swiss shipping company was the start of something noble. 

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Here is a upbeat 2-minute YouTube video explaining Free Trade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pkIW30EJs8

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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath.  Price = $11.  You can purchase a copy at  http://www.puppyoutofbreath.com