Willie Lewis, Page 2

Lewis in the Navy

In the middle of 1963, I got into some trouble (basically, I stole a car) and I got caught. I went to trial and I was given the choice of incarceration or the military service. I made the real “iffy” choice of joining the Navy and it turned out to be a very bad choice for me at the time. I had a very serious problem with discipline, taking orders, as well as having people yelling at me all the time, so given the first opportunity, I went AWOL (absent without leave) with a friend of mine. We stole a car and headed back for Colorado. We sure didn’t get very far though. We got stopped at the California/Arizona state line by some rent-a-cops at a check stop to see if anyone was bringing fruits or vegetables out of California into Arizona. I didn’t even know there was a law about such things. I tried to turn the car around a few hundred yards from the checkpoint, but I couldn’t due to the bumper-to-bumper traffic. As we moved forward, I told my friend Bob that we were basically screwed.

We were arrested at the check point and put in jail in Yuma, Arizona, while they all tried to figure out what was going on with us. They contacted the Navy who sent a couple of SP (Shore Patrol) guys for us and they took us back to the Naval station in San Diego, California. The SP’s dropped us off at the front gate and told us to go turn ourselves in and then they left. The thought of going back into boot camp again didn’t appeal to either of us, so when the SP’s drove off, we turned around and headed the other way. We went into downtown San Diego and waited for evening so that we could steal another car. If we had turned ourselves in, we would have had to start boot camp all over again and the thought of that really sucked. After we stole a car, we took off north all the way up California to Lake Tahoe. From there, we turned west and headed into Nevada. We drove quite a while until we got to Carson City, but the car we had stolen was running low on gas. Since we had very little money, we decided to just hang out until dark and then swipe another car to continue on our way. Unfortunately, we had a little accident and the car kind of got the front end pretty-well jacked-up, so we couldn’t wait until dark to swipe another ride. We found a real nice 1962 Chevy. I hot wired it and away we went.

17 years of age

Later that afternoon we pulled into a little one horse town called Fallon City, Nevada. We decided to wait until night time so we could steal another car to take on the next leg of our journey. We needed to do something to pass the time until evening came, so I came up with the brilliant idea of burglarizing a farm house on the outskirts of Fallon City. Hopefully, we would find some money or maybe some food. As was usual for me in those days, it turned out to be a very stupid idea. The owners of the house came home while we were still in it. I had parked the car in back of their place so nobody would see it from the road and guess who was there? When they pulled into their driveway, they had effectively blocked the only way that we might have had any chance at all to attempt to drive out. As a result, we had to make a break for it out the front door. Our pockets were bulging with change we had found in a jug, which was not going to make running any easier. There was an old oil lamp sitting on a table in their dining room. On the way out their front door, I picked it up and threw it against the wall and shattered it. I then used my lighter to set fire to the joint, hoping that would give us enough time to get away. That didn’t work very well at all, because the crazy old dude who owned the house came running out of his front door with a high powered rifle and started taking pot shots at us while we were high tailing it through a field across from his house. His wife had apparently put out the fire and then called the police. The next thing I knew, we had maybe 100 or more policemen surrounding the field we were in and they were all shooting at us. I had found a nine shot .22 caliber target revolver along with a box of 50 bullets for it in the glove box of the car we had stolen earlier in Carson City, so I started shooting back at the police while laying down flat in a irrigation ditch in the middle of the field with bullets flying all around us. I guess we were lucky nobody got killed, mostly us. My partner did take one in the wing and was hurting and bleeding pretty bad, though.

To make a long story short, after I ran out of ammunition, we surrendered, went to jail, broke out of the jail, got re-caught, went to trial and was sentenced to an indeterminate stay at the Nevada State Reformatory in Elko, Nevada. I suppose we were sent to the reformatory because we were both only seventeen years old at the time. We were incarcerated there for about six months or so before the Navy came to get us again. This time they sent a couple of big ugly gorillas (SP’s) and they escorted us right up to our cells at the Alameda Naval Station brig, which is a Navy jail close to San Francisco. We spent about eight months there and then we were transferred back to San Diego and put directly into the Marine “Red Line” brig at Camp Pendleton. We were put into segregation cells there because we were still considered escape risks.

That was a real fun place that I would recommend to anyone who’s guts I hated. We spent about eight or nine months there, waiting for the Navy to determine the disposition of our case. We were both finally given “undesirable” discharges from the Navy on about June 6th and I came back home to Denver. I had some spare cash, so I caught a short flight airplane to Grand Island, Nebraska to go visit my friend Bob, who was the guy I’d just been though all the trouble with. Needless to say, his parents were NOT real glad to see me. I hung out around there for a couple of days and then went back to Denver. I was home for about six days before I stole another car. Of course I got caught doing over 100 mph down 16th street at around 3 am. I went to court and was given a sentence of two years at the Colorado State Reformatory by the very same judge who’d given me the choice of jail or military service the first time. I went to trial on June 15th, 1964 and was sent to the Colorado State Reformatory in Buena Vista on the 19th of June to begin my sentence. During all this insanity, my mother just sorta lost it and took off for Oklahoma after telling my Aunt to empty out the house and give everything (including all of my records) to the Salvation Army. When I found out about that, it stressed me some, to say the least!

During the two years I served at the state reformatory, I worked in the hospital for almost a year. That was pretty easy time since I had learned how to pick a lock and was supplying about half of the population with various needs. I won’t get into what those needs were for obvious reasons, but as usual, I got caught coming out of the “pill room” one day by a trustee and he turned me in. I got two weeks in the dungeon or hole which is what we called the isolation cells there. When I got out of isolation, I was put to work on the labor gangs. It wasn’t near as “prestigious” (or as much fun) as working in the hospital was and I really didn’t like the work very much. We did various things inside and outside of the institution every day for the most part. Sometimes however, we had “long term” jobs, meaning jobs that lasted more than a day or two. We “bucked” hay for a few weeks during hay season. We picked potatoes for a few weeks when it was potato harvest time. I carried a whole lot of 94 pound bags of cement, used to construct various buildings outside in the yard around the institution. We wacked a lot of weeds or whatever they could dream up for us to do that represented the pits in menial labor. I didn’t think too much of that sort of work and so I continued to get into various types of trouble and got to spend (all together) maybe eight months out of the two years I was up there, in solitary confinement. I didn’t mind the solitary part so much, but the bed we had to sleep on was just a concrete slab with no blanket or clothes at all. That might sound a little harsh, but it seems that a few of the less solitary minded guys had either attempted to, or had succeeded in committing suicide by hanging themselves with the pajama bottoms that were being issued, so we were put into the cells naked. It got pretty cold in the winter time and the guards would open up the windows outside the cells when it was maybe 15 or 20° below zero. There was no heat into that part of the building, so we really had to work hard not to freeze. In some of the cells there was a sink with hot and cold water, a slab and a toilet. The water from the sink drained directly down into the toilet, so when it got really cold I would run hot water down into the toilet and then put my feet in it. Then I would use toilet paper to stop up the sink, fill it with hot water and put my arms and hands into it. It wasn’t the perfect solution, but it did keep me from freezing to death more than once.

The worst of the cells had no sink or toilet, just a hole in the floor. That’s why we called it “the hole”. You had to do some serious stuff to end up in one of those cells. I got the dubious privilege of spending 60 days in one of them. We were limited to a maximum of 30 days in the hole, but since they didn’t like some of the things I did they gave me 30 days, opened the cell door so I could walk out and then threw me back in for another 30 days. I also got to eat a great big tray of nasty spinach once a day, yuck! To this day I won’t eat anything green! But then again, a body tends to adapt to their environment and that’s what I did. When my sentence had been finally served and I was released, I really did not want to leave the joint. I had become institutionalized and I don’t think that I was ever more afraid of anything in my entire life as I was at the moment they opened up the main gate and took me to the bus station. All of a sudden, I had to go out and face the world again. I would bet the farm that is why there is such a substantial recidivism rate among convicts. The minute they handed me my bus ticket, I would have done about anything to get back into the facility again. However, since I had served my entire sentence, I had no parole and no possibility of having parole revoked, so I couldn’t go back. If I messed up again, it was going to be for sure some real hard time at the State Penitentiary in Canon City, Colorado for me. At least that’s what I was told before I got sprung from the place and I believed them.

Cover of Rockin’ Fifties Magazine showing Willie Lewis’ prison ID

Continue to Page Three of Willie Lewis‘ story.

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