'A WALLED AND WOMANLESS PLACE'

‘A WALLED AND WOMANLESS PLACE’
By Dick Meister

Once, San Francisco had hundreds of semi-professional baseball teams, the
best of them traveling regularly to play the excellent inmates' team at San
Quentin Prison across San Francisco Bay. I especially remember a game I
played there as a shortstop for one of the city teams, Johnnie's
Billiards....

The sun reflected almost blindingly off the whitewashed adobe cell blocks
beside the main gate as we approached the prison, carrying satchels that
held our uniforms and equipment, walking along a path surrounded by beds of
the brightest, reddest flowers. A bell rang sharply as each of us passed
through the beam of an electric eye that unerringly ferreted out the metal
buckles of our uniform belts and the steel of our spiked playing shoes.

Then, suddenly, we plunged into a world of men clad uniformly in pale, faded
blue and living in gray shadow, a world of high buildings and clanking steel
doors and gates -- "a walled and womanless place called prison," as Caryl
Chessman, the most famous of San Quentin's inmates, would describe it in the
international best seller, "Cell 2455, Death Row," that he was at the moment
writing in just that location.

San Quentin was the world's largest prison, yet not large enough; four
thousand men were far beyond the number it was designed for. The men were
everywhere, blue figures pacing or talking warily with each other, wedged,
it seemed, into every foot of the central yard. Massive concrete and steel
structures surrounded them, and guards who stared down anxiously from gun
towers and narrow catwalks. The guards, sharpshooters all, cradled shotguns
and swiveled their necks like nervous baseball pitchers with men on base.

The inmates were in the yard only a few hours each day. Most of the time
they were inside. A little exercise and conversation in the yard, a movie
once or twice a week, writing letters, reading, or listening to radio
programs piped into their cells until lights out and the imposition of
absolute silence at 10:30 p.m. -- that was their recreation.

That and weekend baseball games, the prisoners' rare chance to smell and
feel earth and grass, to give and receive cheers, to win the favor of those
who controlled their lives.

The men spent most of their lives in the cells that were stacked tier on
tier, in corridor after corridor. Two men occupied each of the tiny barred
rooms that offered no privacy and no dignity, and barely enough space for a
wooden table and stool, a sink and a toilet on the back wall, and two narrow
bunks, one above the other.

Hordes of seagulls soared above the broad bay that sparkled just outside,
high above the prison, high above the prisoners, high above even their
guards, gliding freely and effortlessly to the San Francisco shore.

The prisoners knew why the gulls chattered so loudly and gleefully, like the
most excited of infielders. And we knew why the prisoners cheered Blackie
Schwamb so loudly and gleefully.

They were shouting encouragement even as we took the field for batting
practice.

"Look at them guys, Blackie ... Dog meat! ... You'll chew 'em up today. Chew
'em up!"

He was even bigger than we'd thought. Blackie Schwamb was, in fact,
six-foot-five, a well-muscled right handed pitcher who threw a baseball very
hard.

Just five years before, Schwamb pitched in a dozen games for the St. Louis
Browns of the American League. He might have been pitching yet in the major
leagues if he and a buddy hadn't ended an off-season tour of bars and poker
parlors on the outskirts of Los Angeles by fatally beating and then robbing
a physician whose wallet had attracted them as they sat drinking with him.

That got Schwamb a life sentence, top billing on the San Quentin All-Stars
and, like his teammates, an easy prison job and the chance to practice
baseball daily. He undoubtedly had the most loyal and vociferous body of
fans any pitcher could claim -- far more, certainly, than any pitcher on the
hapless St. Louis Browns.

Schwamb’s shouting fans in blue, some 2,500 of them, sat behind heavy wire
fencing that covered the front of the wooden bleachers along the baselines.
They were closely guarded; but it wasn't like inside. No one challenged
their right to express their emotions and opinions as loudly as they wished
-- though only, of course, on such matters as how great Blackie Schwamb
looked striking out still another batter from the outside world of the free,
or what a bum the umpire was for not calling a strike.

We got lucky. Schwamb sometimes was as wild as he was fast. With the bases
loaded in the top of the seventh, he walked in what proved to be the winning
run. (Can't say, however, that I had much to do with the victory. Schwamb
struck me out four times, to the great and noisy delight of the inmate
crowd.)

"How about a tour?" our manager suggested after the game.

Our first stop was our last, the squat apple green gas chamber. We stood
fidgeting nervously outside, peering into the grimly barren room through
thick windows set into the front wall.

A guard moved to the doorway. "See those pans in front of the two chairs ...
They pull the levers on the wall over here on the outside ... cyanide
pellets drop from up in the ceiling into a pool of acid in the pans. The
fumes -- the gas -- rises, and they're gone."

I could almost smell the gas, the "sickeningly sweet" odor of almonds and
peaches the guard described.

I didn't talk much about our victory over Blackie Schwamb after that. I was
particularly struck by what the guard had said about why there were two
chairs.

"Man, you hear him?" I asked my teammates. "'So we can do two at a time when
we need to.' Two at a time! And what the hell was that need to business? A
hell of a thing to do to anybody, whatever they did."

Not everyone agreed, but agree or not, it was a question most of us mainly
twenty-somethings had never before thought of raising. Sure, capital
punishment was discussed in those sections of the newspaper we skimmed on
the way to the sports pages, but this was different. We could feel it.

Copyright © Dick Meister

Story ID:	2522
Written by:	Dick Meister (bio, link, contact, other stories)
Story type:	Story
Location:	San Rafael CA USA
Year:	1953
Person:	Blackie Schwamb