Unguarded Moments Prologue
The
Way It Really Was
He was six feet and 350 pounds. He was naked, he was a convict, and he was hollering threats of revenge.
I was a little nervous.
But my coworker was laughing, and he was the one Gritter[1] was coming after.
I had just started working in the Missouri State Penitentiary plumbing shop, and Gritter was one of the convicts assigned to work for me. A big old country boy, he didn’t normally go streaking. He was exiting the shower and had just picked up his undershorts when, from around the corner, my coworker Richard Baumann appeared with a bucket of ice water.
To escape, Gritter dodged—naked—out an open door and into the winter cold. Baumann slammed the door shut and laughed as Gritter bawled to be let back in. A few minutes later, we heard Gritter coming down the stairs from the front of the building, all the while hollering that he was going to get Baumann.
Finally, Gritter stepped into the shop, and Baumann collapsed with renewed laughter at the sight of him. At no point in Gritter’s trek—from the back of the building, around to the front door, and then down the stairs to the shop—had he bothered to transfer his shorts from his hand to their rightful position.
This, I was shocked to learn, was no extraordinary scene inside the Missouri State Penitentiary in the 1980s.
A lot has changed in Missouri Corrections in the thirty years since then. Now, the only scenes inside the Missouri State Penitentiary are of tourism. The old institution closed on September 15, 2004, when operations moved to the new Jefferson City Correctional Center across town. Much of the Missouri State Penitentiary, or MSP, has been torn down, and what remains is a sort of museum. Visitors come to get up close to a violent history.
Promotional materials for MSP tours promise stories of infamous prisoners—such as Sonny Liston, “Pretty Boy” Floyd, and James Earl Ray, to name a few of the favorites—as well as tales of riots, escapes, executions, and even the paranormal. Such draws work well on brochures, but once inside the walls, most visitors will begin wondering about daily life. They will view the cold, empty buildings and want to know, “What was it like to live and work in such a place?”
Few visitors can imagine scenes like the one of Gritter bouncing from the shower out into the winter cold to avoid a staff member’s practical joke. Or of a rookie maintenance supervisor taking convicts bearing wrenches and saws into the gloom of an underground plumbing tunnel, home to roaches and rats. Or of prisoners lining up for a pancake restaurant that two entrepreneurial cellmates launched from their shared cell. But these are the scenes I recall from MSP.
I began working at MSP on February 21, 1984, and was there through the institution’s close. I began at the bottom rung in maintenance and finished my career in February 2010 as the chief engineer at the new institution. While my later positions offered much more prestige, it was in my early years, when I worked directly with the inmates, that I made my favorite memories. Long before MSP shut down, I started writing down some of my experiences to share in the MSP personnel club’s monthly newsletter, State Pen. Several of my coworkers expressed interest in seeing the stories put into a book, so after I retired, with the help of my daughter Anita Neal Harrison, a professional writer and editor, I did just that.
Rather than writing one long narrative, we have chosen to make this book a collection of stories. One point to note is that in these stories, I do not attempt to answer what life was like behind the MSP walls from all perspectives or at all times. These stories are all told from the perspective I had in the early part of my career as a maintenance worker, with most of the events taking place between 1984 and 1996. Because I was a “square man”—convict slang for a staff member who is not an officer—the inmates did not consider me an enemy but someone who was there to make their lives better. I got to be friends, or at least friendly, with many of the workers assigned to my crews. These relationships afforded me a close view of what life was like for them locked up in MSP, and I’ve shared that view in these stories.
Working in maintenance also afforded me an intimate view of the old institution itself: the housing units, service buildings, tunnels, towers, and walls that were MSP. The State of Missouri opened the MSP at the very time the Alamo was under siege in Texas in 1836, a quarter century before the Civil War, and the facility was one hundred years old by the time the prison at Alcatraz opened. Its past was never farther than a shovel scoop away. I found the history fascinating and wrote several descriptions of its buildings when MSP was still in use.
A few of my coworkers whose histories at MSP didn’t extend so far back as mine doubted the truthfulness of some of my tales published in State Pen. Others reminded me of things I should write about. Some of the maintenance staff complained from the beginning that I ran down the Engineering Department, which was in charge of all of maintenance. One officer said to me, “If even half of those stories are true, you’re telling on yourself an awful lot.”
He was right. I only confessed to things I did to explain how it was back then, rather than in defense for doing them. I’m sure it sounds odd to some, but in the twenty years I worked at MSP, I came to love and admire the old institution, and having witnessed major changes in its operations, I realized no one would be able to guess what life used to be like inside MSP. Some of it was hilarious, some was tragic, and some of it was just mind-boggling. But life inside MSP was always interesting.
[1] Names and identifying information of all prisoners and some staff have been changed.
He was six feet and 350 pounds. He was naked, he was a convict, and he was hollering threats of revenge.
I was a little nervous.
But my coworker was laughing, and he was the one Gritter[1] was coming after.
I had just started working in the Missouri State Penitentiary plumbing shop, and Gritter was one of the convicts assigned to work for me. A big old country boy, he didn’t normally go streaking. He was exiting the shower and had just picked up his undershorts when, from around the corner, my coworker Richard Baumann appeared with a bucket of ice water.
To escape, Gritter dodged—naked—out an open door and into the winter cold. Baumann slammed the door shut and laughed as Gritter bawled to be let back in. A few minutes later, we heard Gritter coming down the stairs from the front of the building, all the while hollering that he was going to get Baumann.
Finally, Gritter stepped into the shop, and Baumann collapsed with renewed laughter at the sight of him. At no point in Gritter’s trek—from the back of the building, around to the front door, and then down the stairs to the shop—had he bothered to transfer his shorts from his hand to their rightful position.
This, I was shocked to learn, was no extraordinary scene inside the Missouri State Penitentiary in the 1980s.
A lot has changed in Missouri Corrections in the thirty years since then. Now, the only scenes inside the Missouri State Penitentiary are of tourism. The old institution closed on September 15, 2004, when operations moved to the new Jefferson City Correctional Center across town. Much of the Missouri State Penitentiary, or MSP, has been torn down, and what remains is a sort of museum. Visitors come to get up close to a violent history.
Promotional materials for MSP tours promise stories of infamous prisoners—such as Sonny Liston, “Pretty Boy” Floyd, and James Earl Ray, to name a few of the favorites—as well as tales of riots, escapes, executions, and even the paranormal. Such draws work well on brochures, but once inside the walls, most visitors will begin wondering about daily life. They will view the cold, empty buildings and want to know, “What was it like to live and work in such a place?”
Few visitors can imagine scenes like the one of Gritter bouncing from the shower out into the winter cold to avoid a staff member’s practical joke. Or of a rookie maintenance supervisor taking convicts bearing wrenches and saws into the gloom of an underground plumbing tunnel, home to roaches and rats. Or of prisoners lining up for a pancake restaurant that two entrepreneurial cellmates launched from their shared cell. But these are the scenes I recall from MSP.
I began working at MSP on February 21, 1984, and was there through the institution’s close. I began at the bottom rung in maintenance and finished my career in February 2010 as the chief engineer at the new institution. While my later positions offered much more prestige, it was in my early years, when I worked directly with the inmates, that I made my favorite memories. Long before MSP shut down, I started writing down some of my experiences to share in the MSP personnel club’s monthly newsletter, State Pen. Several of my coworkers expressed interest in seeing the stories put into a book, so after I retired, with the help of my daughter Anita Neal Harrison, a professional writer and editor, I did just that.
Rather than writing one long narrative, we have chosen to make this book a collection of stories. One point to note is that in these stories, I do not attempt to answer what life was like behind the MSP walls from all perspectives or at all times. These stories are all told from the perspective I had in the early part of my career as a maintenance worker, with most of the events taking place between 1984 and 1996. Because I was a “square man”—convict slang for a staff member who is not an officer—the inmates did not consider me an enemy but someone who was there to make their lives better. I got to be friends, or at least friendly, with many of the workers assigned to my crews. These relationships afforded me a close view of what life was like for them locked up in MSP, and I’ve shared that view in these stories.
Working in maintenance also afforded me an intimate view of the old institution itself: the housing units, service buildings, tunnels, towers, and walls that were MSP. The State of Missouri opened the MSP at the very time the Alamo was under siege in Texas in 1836, a quarter century before the Civil War, and the facility was one hundred years old by the time the prison at Alcatraz opened. Its past was never farther than a shovel scoop away. I found the history fascinating and wrote several descriptions of its buildings when MSP was still in use.
A few of my coworkers whose histories at MSP didn’t extend so far back as mine doubted the truthfulness of some of my tales published in State Pen. Others reminded me of things I should write about. Some of the maintenance staff complained from the beginning that I ran down the Engineering Department, which was in charge of all of maintenance. One officer said to me, “If even half of those stories are true, you’re telling on yourself an awful lot.”
He was right. I only confessed to things I did to explain how it was back then, rather than in defense for doing them. I’m sure it sounds odd to some, but in the twenty years I worked at MSP, I came to love and admire the old institution, and having witnessed major changes in its operations, I realized no one would be able to guess what life used to be like inside MSP. Some of it was hilarious, some was tragic, and some of it was just mind-boggling. But life inside MSP was always interesting.
[1] Names and identifying information of all prisoners and some staff have been changed.
Excerpted from Unguarded
Moments: Stories of Working Inside the Missouri State Penitentiary by Larry E.
Neal and Anita Neal Harrison. Copyright © 2014 Truman State University Press. All
rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without
permission in writing from the publisher.