The Caney Kansas Jail Break: A Memoir

The Caney Kansas Jail Break

A Memoir

Paul Barrett

Print ISBN: 978-1-54393-331-4

eBook ISBN: 978-1-54393-332-1

© 2018. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

I dedicate this memoir to one of the greatest women who ever lived, Anna Elizabeth Barrett, my mother, and to a calico barn cat named Callie. I would also like to dedicate it to my wonderful grandchildren, Georgia and Emerson.

A big thank you to Julie Curts, Myra Deen and my daughter, Dana, for helping me to write the book. I would also like to thank my son PJ, for saving my life.

Contents

Introduction

It All Began

Saratoga

Wild West Shows

On the Road Again

Azaleas in Wilmington

A Wreck in Enid

Providence

Tulsa, the Johnny Lee Wells Stampede

Teaching the Amateurs

Odessa

Snowbound

Vicki Steinberg

Off to the Races

Back Home Again

More Adventures

Bustle Country

Jail Break

The Last Bull

1960

Buzzards Bay

Two Barretts

The Fixer

West Point

The Killing of Carole Segretta

Introduction

One afternoon just a few days before Christmas, I rode the subway to the very last stop. It was late afternoon and the train was packed with all sorts of shoppers. Even though there was no snow, the afternoon air was icy cold. I was surrounded by heavy wool coats as the train rattled down the tracks. At the last stop, I got a transfer and took a bus to the end of the line which left me way out on Long Island just the other side of Jamaica past Idlewild Airport. The night was black as pitch, the countryside had very few lights.

I turned and looked behind me as I got off the bus. Way off in the distance I could see the lights of the city. I was completely enveloped in black; there were no houses for miles around. It was 1950; I was fourteen-years old. I set off on foot and made my way to a small sale barn out in the middle of the country that belonged to Eddie Martin. It was a cold building with peeling green paint and some pens around it, and once every two weeks there was a horse auction. I had saved up sixty-five dollars by working at a fruit stand on Thirtieth Avenue where I helped the stand owner stack and unpack fruits and vegetables. It took me about six months to save up the money.

It was just before Christmas so there weren’t many folks at the sale. I sat and watched the auctioneer rattle through the entries. There were a handful of people hunkered down and cold, sitting on the bleachers all around me. Like most cheap sales they were auctioning tack and saddles as well, the horses were sold last. I sat watching for about an hour when a big, yellow gelding with a strip in his face came into the sale ring. You could hardly see the number painted in white on his hip, that’s how light his coat was. He had a set of britches on him, he might have been seven or eight years old. He seemed broke enough for my intentions, so I bid him to forty-five dollars and won him. Some people that I knew had kept horses at an old man’s barn in Jamaica. I’d met with the old man a week or so earlier and made arrangements with him to board a horse for forty dollars a month.

There was an older boy on the other side of the sale arena who bought some bridles at the beginning of the sale. He paid four dollars for one of the bridles. I told him I would give him five dollars for it so he sold it to me.

At the end of the sale, I walked out to a pen and found the gelding. I caught him up and bridled him, not knowing this horse at all, or whether or not he was going to buck me off. I swung up on his back and rode about ten miles in the dark to the old man’s barn.

I wasn’t sure exactly how to get there, especially in the dark, but I have always had a decent sense of direction so I carefully picked my away across the countryside. There was a little bit of street with some lights, but mostly I followed along a dirt road. It was probably midnight by the time I got to the barn. There wasn’t a soul around.

I put the horse in a stall at the end of the old man’s barn and then walked about half-a-mile to the bus stop. I stood in the dark, alone and shivering until the bus finally showed up – I was the only passenger. The bus took me back to the train station to catch the L Train. I got off the subway at Queens Plaza and walked three or four blocks to 3406 Thirtieth Avenue. It was around three o’clock in the morning by the time I got there. I walked through two sets of doors and up a flight of stairs into the railroad rooms where we lived over a chicken market. No one locked doors in my neighborhood back then, no one had anything to steal.

As I came inside, my mother stirred, Is that you, Paul?

Yeah, Ma. Go back to sleep.

That would be the first of many horses I would own, I called him Frolic.

We were lied to in school,

And we were lied to in church,

But most of all,

We were lied to at the movies.

Paul Barrett

It All Began

When I was a little boy growing up in New York City in the forties, my Aunt May took me to the World Championship Rodeo at Madison Square Garden. Back then all kids loved going to the rodeo; it was just like a trip to the circus. There were five rodeo events and a wild horse race, and contract acts, too. Those were the trick riders and Roman riders and there was also square-dancing-on-horseback. There was always a celebrity, either Roy Rogers or Gene Autry. Rodeo announcer Pete Logan once said, It was the best of rodeo and the best of Broadway.

It was evening as we climbed the stairs out of the subway. The early autumn air mixed with the perfume of floor cleaner, sawdust and manure. That smell permeated the crisp night air. It smelled like no other scent in the world. It was something you remembered your whole life.

When I walked into the Garden, I could hear Jimmy Cimarron’s twenty-two-piece band playing People Will Say We’re in Love before the performance started. There were bright lights everywhere, and sawdust, and bucking horses jumping out of chutes. The whole thing was so intoxicating and I knew right then and there that being a rodeo cowboy was what I wanted to do.

Aunt May brought me back every fall and I would study the cowboys. I watched carefully the way they set their ropes and mounted their bulls. I watched the bulls too. If one was a gate-rattler, then the cowboy would sit on the fence and put his foot in the middle of the bull’s back before he climbed on. Some years there were over forty performers. When I went home at night, I would play all the small details over in my head as I tried to fall asleep.

My home was Astoria, New York, and my first love was Valerie McHugh. I was all of nine or ten years old. Valerie was everything that any man could want. She had beautiful, blonde hair and she was Irish. My neighborhood consisted of some Irish, but mostly Italians and Greeks. We would go into an Italian apartment and it was always filled with the smell of spaghetti sauce. The living room would have a perfect white couch covered in plastic, where no one was ever allowed to sit. In the morning, men would leave their three-story tenements with brown paper bags heading to the L Train to go to work.

In those days there were still vacant lots in Astoria, and from time to time an evangelist would come and set up a tent. His name was Jack Coe. People would come with crutches and in wheelchairs so that he could heal them. After he laid his powerful healing hands upon them, they would miraculously cast off their crutches or vault from their wheelchairs. Jack was the precursor to the modern televangelist. We later heard that he had died of stomach cancer.

When you are a boy in New York city you had a whole network at your disposal called the subway. You could put a nickel in the turnstile or jump it, either one, and go anywhere. I would go to Manhattan and walk by Jack Dempsey’s Bar and Restaurant which was across from Madison Square Garden.

There was a western clothing store one flight up, and on summer afternoons when I would go by the bar, Jack would be standing at the door. I remember that he had pictures in the restaurant windows of Irish Jimmy Flood fighting 128 rounds on a barge at the turn-of-the-century. Another picture was of a triple dead-heat in a horse race. Sometimes I would stop and talk to an old man in a long, tweed coat who sat on a fire hydrant across from Fay Wray’s. He lived in a small apartment on Second Avenue. I asked Johnny Jones, a leather tooler who made belts and holsters, if he knew who the man was. He said that the man’s name was Jim Thorpe and he had once been a great athlete.

Growing up, it was just me and my mom. She had me fairly late in life. I was the product of a love affair between her and a married man I only saw once or twice. He drove up once in a black limousine. He was a tall man, with a long black coat and fur collar and he was wearing a gray homburg hat and gloves. He was extremely wealthy and we had nothing.

My mother was a saint -- not a better woman ever drew breath. Always the good Catholic, she lumbered her way down to church on Sundays. She was hard-working, and had spent years at Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital for her nursing degree. She didn’t have any money for college but you could intern at Saint Elizabeth’s hospital to earn a certificate. Even though she was a registered nurse, she took a job cooking for the nuns at Our Lady of Mount Carmel church where I went to school because she wanted to be closer to me. She never owned a car, and I don’t know if she ever owned a phone.

One Christmas Eve, my mother was sitting in her chair in our railroad room tenement that we rented off the Greek, a guy named Lambrino, when suddenly the ceiling fell in. My mom couldn’t bring herself to sue the people who owned the apartment. Whenever I brought it up, she just said, No, No, I can’t sue those people.

There was another time when she found a wallet. I remember that I was half asleep in the other room and I heard her go outside and put a dime in the payphone to call the people who owned it. Two gentlemen came, older gentlemen who were very well-dressed. I think the wallet had something like two-hundred dollars in it; a carload of money in those days. The only thing I remembered them saying was, We’re not going to insult you by offering you any money. God, I hate the rich.

My mom had been on her own for some time when I came along. She had two brothers she