Montana Spray Paint Caps

Chapter 1 of Jerry's Riot: the True Story of the disturbance Montana Prison 1959

A Ghost Whisper

A board falling flat on the floor is thunder to the heart. And so, when a prison guard Clyde Sollars heard a hard blow, he stiffened in fear. For some seconds he listened, panting. Sollars looked at his wristwatch, a birthday present from his wife. The hands have almost four hours. He arrived in the canvas bag he had carried out in the prison office across the street. Inside the tiny mailroom that was nothing more than a cubbyhole with shelves, wedged at the end of a short hallway, he sorted last letters of the day. This sound, strong and urgent, echoed in his head. The convict carpenters working with hammers and saws near the office of Deputy Director must have dropped a board. The day suddenly felt used and the cold, frost, like a flower. A thrill he could not understand, it worked faster.

An hour earlier, Sollars waited outside the stone walls of the prison, in the street, while his wife Helen's last letters censored. She was the matron of the new Unit woman behind a small fence to the main prison. They told her that if she worked with the superintendent mail for a few weeks, it would be better prison. Every morning, she and another matron walked eleven of thirteen women held in their neighborhoods to their jobs in offices outside the prison walls. Clyde had the chance to see her during working hours. It was one of the two transport officers and mail, alternating with another guard on road trips to go to the parole violators Deer Lodge. The most recent assignment was in North Dakota. The other guard asked for it, hoping to visit relatives in transit.

On this Thursday, April 16, 1959, Clyde Sollars could drive hundreds of miles to the east, free as a bird in the plains of perpetual eastern Montana. Instead he stacked in a mail bag, looked at his watch and decided that before he finished his shift, he walked once more in the Montana State Prison. "Go home, Mom," he told his wife. It was what he sometimes called Helen. They had two daughters grown and gone, and it felt good to talk to his wife that if children were still at home.

He came to the prison in 1957. Like many guards before him, who have found their way to Deer Lodge sawmill and mining and timber crews, he arrived at the prison on his heels land. After leaving the army after the Second World War, he went to work in silos Charlo, Ronan, Polson, Pablo and Paradise, all cities in northwest Montana. Sollars was an ordinary blue-collar worker, as naked as the other guards who filed in and out of those imposing sandstone and granite walls. It was about how men in civilian clothes take a new value in a crisis.

He threw the canvas bag on his shoulder and walked forty paces in the main street and in the lengthening shadow of two powerful houses of cells. The fortresses were four floors. turrets of the castle-ike scratching the pale sky of each of the eight corners. A house of cells were built before the turn of the century, the other, during the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt. They did a great spectacle for travelers driving through the city on Highway 10, a two-lane ribbon of asphalt, and stopped and said their Brownies to take pictures. Prison prohibiting, by some accounts one of the worst in the country, makes for an interesting vacation snapshots alongside the most pastoral of Montana, as steam spraying from Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone National Park.

Like most prison guards, Sollars seen little romance in the architecture of houses robust cell. There are.