John Stadig was serving six years in the federal prison on McNeil
Island, Washington for counterfeiting United States currency. It was a month
into his sentence, and since he’d so far been a model prisoner he’d earned the
privilege of shoveling gravel in the pit of the north yard. A
one-and-a-half-ton green Fargo dump-truck driven by prison trustee Charlie
Powell, was just backing up to be re-loaded, and until it was in position the
other prisoners had nothing to do, so Stadig was there with the rest of the
cons, just leaning on his shovel in the pacific-northwest drizzle of mid-April.
As the truck lurched to a stop John turned to the convict next to him and
whispered “It’s now or never Mack.” They both dropped their shovels. Mack
Smith, who was in for robbing a post office in Cheyenne, opened the driver’s
side door of the Fargo, grabbed Powell by the arm and yanked him down from the
cab and onto the ground where his body splayed into a cloud of dust. Smith
climbed inside and slid over to the passenger side while Stadig quickly jumped
behind the wheel and closed the door as he shifted it into gear and stepped
hard on the gas. The truck thundered towards the locked gate of tower number
six and smashed through as bullets rained down on the roof of the cab from
above. The vehicle charged the second gate and managed to break through but the
second impact caused it to stall just outside of the fence. This gave the
guards a chance to steady their rifles before the inmates made their desperate
dash from the cab to the nearby forest. Stadig, with his longer legs, was ahead
of Smith, but when he heard one of the guards’ rifle shots followed by Mack’s
high-pitched grunt and the sound of him thumping to the ground behind him, he
knew he hadn’t just tripped. He couldn’t turn around but just had to run
faster, while Mack’s pained voice behind him shouted “Run John! Run!” He began sprinting from side to side to make
himself a harder target. The woods seemed miles away and he felt like he was
running in slow motion, though he’d probably never run so fast in his
twenty-six years. He was surprised to find himself reminded at that moment,
even as bullets were making small dust explosions around his feet, of all the
times he’d run away from school whenever the teacher’s back was turned back in
St. Francis, Maine. He remembered dashing each of those days toward a line of
trees, much like the ones he saw now, but those trees lined the St. John River,
and he was running then to cross over to Canada where he could visit his mother
who lived there. That was freedom in those days, but that was more than a
thousand cigarettes ago and John felt like he could taste his lungs now as they
gasped a barking protest at how far away those bushes still were; his teeth
that ached from sucking air, and his chest that felt like it was being dented
from inside by a hammer, both agreed with that complaint. But as another bullet
zinged and then ricocheted off of a rock behind him, he was surprised to
discover that he’d made it to the trees, and was safe, for the moment.
Now that John had a moment to clear his mind he could ask himself, “What
the hell were you thinking?” The plan had been to race the truck to the ocean,
find a boat, and make it into Puget Sound before the guards knew what hit them.
If they could have reached the open water they would have been harder to find,
since the prison only had five vessels for searching right off the bat. After
dark they could have made their way to some remote and unlit stretch of the
Washington coastline. They’d even agreed that if they couldn’t locate a craft
they would’ve been willing to attempt the swim to the mainland.
But to say the least, things didn’t go smoothly. They not only didn’t
achieve the shore, but now there was no longer any “they” at all. Mack was
either dead or back in custody and John Stadig was alone as he ran deeper into
the woods. It was going to be very difficult to make it from trees to ocean on
foot because he’d have to expose himself to possible gunfire again. The prison
probably had at least fifty armed guards headed for the forest, and suddenly he
knew what it felt like to be one of the deer he and his friends used to hunt
back home in northern Maine and New Brunswick. He’d just have to find a place
to hide and hope they didn’t find him. Maybe after dark he could get to the
beach, though probably not. With the original plan flubbed his chances were
very slim.
He was deep in the grove now but could still hear filtering through the
trees behind him the chaos his escape had caused. The emergency lock-down siren
was screaming continuously, the muffled shouts of guards and the noise from the
engines of vehicles leaving the gate caught his ear as the search began. His ears
picked up the ragged snore of handsaws to the beat of clanging hammers, and he
guessed they were making desperate repairs on the fence he’d smashed.
On the edge of a clearing he found a thick patch of blackberry bushes
and plunged into their midst. As he ducked and crawled to get to their thickest
growth he was wishing they were in season, because one way or the other he was
going to be missing dinner tonight. He saw nothing there to eat and if they did
catch him he’d be in the “hole” without food for quite a while.
Once he’d found a hiding place and settled in, there was nothing to do
but to think about what had led him to this point. Why would a man in his mid-twenties who could have gotten parole
in less than four years try to escape from prison? He should have been able to
put up with fourty months or so of incarceration, but he didn’t think he could.
He thought about how his brother Emerson or his half-brother Jonsie could have
probably handled a sentence like his on their heads. They’d worked every day in
the machine shop, fixing cars from morning till night since they were
teenagers. They were used to routine, but John had always seen their life as a
caged one, so for him penitentiary time was something worse. For John Stadig,
the big house was hell and he was sure he couldn’t make it even two years, let
alone four.
John could now hear the roar of boats as they slapped the choppy waters
around the island in search of him. Listening to those vessels reminded him of
the river-craft he’d motorized a few years back in Maine. He’d done it on his
own time in his cousin’s shop, hoisted the engines out of old cars, adapted
them with propellers and installed them in rowboats for the purpose of pushing
rafts of lumber to shore against the strong currents of the St. John River.
Even at that very moment as he crouched in the bushes on the west coast, those
two boats might still be ramming logs back east.
From a very early age John Stadig had shown a raw talent for working
with machinery and electronics of every kind. He felt that he’d learned more as
a boy from tinkering in Raymond’s shop after school than he’d ever learned in
his eight years of yawning at the blackboard. He also had a genius for
invention, which he’d first discovered when he noticed that Model “T” Fords
couldn’t go frontward up a steep hill because the incline put the gas tank
below the engine. That’s why in the old days people would have to back the cars
up, turn them around at the top of the hill and then go down. John came up with
a simple pump and hose system that corrected the problem. Not that it mattered
though to anyone who owned anything but an old Model “T”, because by the time
he’d come up with a solution, the Model “A” was in circulation and the design
flaw had been corrected.
He’d arrived at plenty of other inventions and improvements for tire
pumps, radios, generators and wind turbines, but once he’d reached his twenties
he thought he was really onto something when he started getting the inspiration
for a better airplane engine. His dream was to enroll at the Tri State College
of Engineering in Indiana to learn how to draft his ideas, but money was a
problem. The Great Depression was in full swing and he could never get work as
a mechanic for long enough to save the tuition. In 1931 he spent several months
traveling to Montreal, New York and finally Wichita, trying to get a bite on
his designs from various airplane builders. But it was not a time for financing
new ideas, it was more a time to hold on for dear life and ride out the storm.
It seemed the only thing that paid in the 1930s was crime, but John
Stadig couldn’t bring himself to threaten someone with a gun in order to rob a
bank. He’d discovered though, a few years before, that besides his mechanical
and electronic skills he also had a talent for chemistry and photography.
During these hard times counterfeiting didn’t even seem like a crime. The
government and the banks had thrown millions of people into poverty and
desperation. Those who’d been rich were throwing themselves out of skyscrapers,
while folk who’d been poor but independent were now starving and lining up for
hand-outs. But according to lawmakers it wasn’t the bankers who were the
criminals, but the poor people who tried to make ends meet by bucking the
system just a little. Yes, John had copied a few bank notes, but he wasn’t
trying to get rich. He’d just wanted to help his mother with the mortgage and
pay for his education.
While John was reflecting on his past, Finch Archer, the warden of McNeil
Island was thinking about where John Stadig was at that moment. He was fairly
certain his men had him surrounded. Every available guard, with rifles, machine
guns and pistols at the ready, had been sent to beat through the heavy brush in
search of the convict. Given Stadig’s history of escaping custody, the powers
that be would say he shouldn’t have been allowed near a truck. If he managed to
avoid capture it would have been embarrassing for both Archer and his prison,
so as an extra incentive a reward of fifty dollars was offered to whoever found
him first. That same prize was dangled by radio to the police on the mainland.
This was big money in hard times for a cop or a guard.
Stadig managed to shiver in hiding through the cold, damp night while
flashlights darted all around him. He held his breath when boots crunched down
on twigs close to his hiding place. His stomach was empty throughout the next
day, and his body was stiff from curling himself up as tight and small and
still as he could. As the second afternoon came to a close he was starting to
hope that he’d be captured again just so he could move and eat, even if only in
a dark cell with a piece of stale bread once a day. That crust was beginning to
seem more and more delicious the longer he lay there listening to his stomach on the rough ground.
About thirty hours after his escape, at around 7:45 in the evening, a
guard found John Stadig crouching in the bushes on the north-east corner of the
island. He sighed with relief, surrendered, and was immediately led to a dark
cell for the next sixteen days as punishment. During that time he ate mostly
bread and water, though Christian charity compelled the prison to give him a
full meal on each of his two Sundays in the hole.
Two years were added to his sentence.
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