Woman who grew up on Alcatraz remembers infamous prison break
When 15-year-old Jolene Babyak woke on a warm June morning to the wail of a siren, her first instinct was to put on her dressing gown, arm herself with a paring knife and go into the basement of her family home to check for intruders.
Her neighbourhood, after all, had more than its fair share of unsavoury characters, given its location on a tiny island alongside America’s most infamous prison: Alcatraz.
Babyak’s father, an employee at the jail, had already rushed to work after hearing the siren, which signalled to the islanders that there had been a breakout.
The dramatic events of that 1962 morning were later immortalised in the 1979 film Escape from Alcatraz, starring Clint Eastwood.
Now, 61 years after the prison closed on March 21, 1963, Babyak is one of the dwindling number of Alcatraz islanders still around who experienced the strange nature of life on “The Rock” – including the escape.
“The siren woke me up,” Babyak, now 77, said. “I had never heard it before, but it was so loud and so prolonged that I knew what it was.”
Babyak’s mother told her there had been a prison break and that they had to search the house. The teenager went into the dark basement, knife in hand, only to find it deserted.
The island was soon placed under lockdown. Her father, who was acting warden, “was busy for the next 12 or 15 hours. I didn’t see him all that day”, Babyak said.
She went to school as usual in San Francisco, taking the ferry that she often shared with FBI agents.
The fate of the three convicts who broke out of their cells – John Anglin, his brother Clarence and Frank Morris – remains a mystery. It will never be known whether they managed to make it to dry land after reaching the jail roof through a ventilation shaft and – as the story goes – taking to the water on a raft fashioned from more than 50 raincoats.
In their beds, the prisoners had left dummy heads made of plaster, paint and human hair that fooled the guards for hours. The FBI, which closed the case in 1979, believes the men fell victim to the currents and cold of San Francisco Bay.
Life on Alcatraz was seldom as eventful as the morning of the escape. Babyak describes an idyllic upbringing and a close-knit community among the families of those who worked on the island. There were weekly film screenings, monthly pot luck dinners, and dances for the teenagers.
“The adults paid attention to the kids because they wanted to make sure we weren’t getting into trouble and going into areas where we shouldn’t be,” said Babyak, now a semi-retired author who lives across the bay in Oakland.
Amid the Christmas parties and Western-themed costume events, it was easy to forget that they were living next door to a 336-capacity jail, although there were frequent reminders.
Babyak recalls watching prisoners working outside under the watchful eye of guards, or inmates on the back of pickup trucks being driven to the dock.
“I was curious but not too curious,” Babyak said of the criminals she shared the island with. “They would wave, and I’d wave back shyly. That was kind of neat.”
Tight security measures were a necessity, however, given that Alcatraz, which opened in 1934, held some of the country’s most dangerous criminals.
Alcatraz is now a museum and tourist attraction. Babyak, who takes the ferry to the island three times a month to sign books for visitors, hopes that the prison can now serve an educational purpose.
She compared it to South Africa’s Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was held, and the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, as a site that can make tourists think deeply about a topic – in Alcatraz’s case, rehabilitation for convicts.
“It’s not like Disneyland, where you go to have fun,” Babyak said. “You go to learn something – and you go to feel something.”
– The Times