I didn't believe in heaven nor hell until I had finished the back-breaking labor on my first day on a road gang. By the day's end, I was half-Christian because I had at least experienced hell. I am still waiting for heaven.
I had my doubts about this one when I spotted it at Value Village on Capitol Hill. I'm leery of any book with Ronald Reagan on the cover and the endorsement from clergy on the back had me fearing this true crime memoir was bound to devolve into the moralizing parable of a rightwing born again Christian. But the fact that it had been self-published locally made me think it might not fit any simple category so I took a chance on it and I'm glad I did. It turns out the author was a Democrat and though involved with his local church there is no sermonizing or exhortations to instant salvation by accepting Christ as your savior. Whew.
Nathan Glenn Williams was born to apparently well-to-do and well-connected parents in the apple-growing community of Wenatchee, Washington in 1915. Despite his privileged upbringing, he turned to petty burglary at the age of 11 and was heisting banks at gunpoint by the time he was 17. He was in and out of various penal institutions, but as he reveals in hundreds of pages of wild stories, he was unable to go straight and always relapsed into incredibly reckless criminal ways. Robbing banks, taking hostages, forging checks, and impersonating an Army officer earned him a life sentence in a Washington State penitentiary at the age of 23, but after serving only a few years he was granted a full pardon by the governor which he attributed to a pay-off from his father. He married and had a daughter and tried to go straight but was tempted into one last bank robbery which ended with his getting sent up for 25 years after someone close to him ratted him out to the FBI. The state pen is bad enough, but when he is suddenly transferred to the notoriously cruel Alcatraz federal prison in San Francisco Bay, it is all he can do just to keep from going insane.
Williams has a distinctive voice and a flair for telling a gripping story. He displays the enhanced vocabulary of an autodidact, which is kind of endearing. At over 400 big small-print pages, it's quite a tome but it never flags as he vividly and with great sensitivity describes his audacious crimes, hellacious punishment, and ultimate redemption--not through finding God, but by devoting himself to aiding prisoners and their families and creating an organization to assist at-risk youth. The early part of the book provides an interesting snapshot of the outlaw life in Depression-era America and the author's later good works are an object lesson showing that even the most seemingly incorrigible criminals have the potential for turning their lives around if given some encouragement and a chance.
Rating: 19 years served out of a 20-year sentence.
Get it at amazon.com.
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