Blanche Barrow’s Harrowing Youth. The Bonnie & Clyde Gang Member Outlived… | by Lyle Deixler | May, 2022 | History of Yesterday

2022-05-14 20:22:12 By : Ms. Lisa Shao

T he picture is as freaky as it is haunting: a petite woman, in stylish, knee-high boots and wearing dark sunglasses, has a terrified look on her face as two law enforcement officers hold her by her arms. The body of her shot up husband, Marvin Ivan “Buck” Barrow, lay on the ground a few feet away from her. Five days earlier, in a shootout with police near Platte City, Missouri, Buck somehow survived a bullet to his forehead. It was a gruesome injury that exposed part of his brain.

During that same shootout the woman in the picture, his wife Blanche Barrow, only 22 years old, was partially blinded by flying glass as the lawmen fired upon their getaway car.

On the day the above picture was taken Buck was shot four times in his back. Blanche, due to her impaired vision, thought the photographer’s camera was a gun and that she and her husband were going to be executed at any moment.¹

She was born Bennie Iva Caldwell on January 1, 1911, in Garvin, Oklahoma. Her father, Matthew, at the time of her birth was 40 and her mother, Lillian, was only 16. When Blanche was still a child her parents divorced.

She was raised mainly by her father and had a close relationship with him. But according to John Neal Phillips, a writer and the editor of Blanche’s memoirs, My Life with Bonnie & Clyde, when she was 17 her mother forced her to marry a much older man named John Calloway.

Blanche told close friends that her mother, who was “well acquainted” with Calloway, thought he had some money and possibly received some by offering her daughter to him.

In the Editor’s Introduction to her memoirs Phillips writes that the only thing Blanche got from the marriage was “abuse, both physical and emotional. Although seeing the arrangement initially as a means to freedom and independence, she quickly found it to be otherwise. Among other things, the experience left her unable to bear children.”

After one year Blanche ran away to West Dallas. It was there, in November of 1929, she met Buck (he got his nickname when an aunt watched the rambunctious boy “running around acting like a horse,” called him “Buck”).²

Blanche only ran with the Barrow gang for four months, but it was a violent time where she survived several shootouts, got shot at least once, suffered a serious eye injury (the flying glass that cost her the eye) and was present when two law enforcement officers were killed.

She knew about Buck’s criminal past when she married him but was madly in love with Clyde’s older brother. In her memoirs (published in 2004, sixteen years after her death in 1988) Phillips noted that:

“In some ways one can see that Blanche was a victim, blinded to reality by her deep, intense love for Buck. Of Blanche’s abiding loyalty to her husband, a loyalty that would lead to her involvement in robbery, murder and a life on the run during the spring and summer of 1933, W.D. Jones, a friend and accomplice, would later observe, “I never knew love could be so strong.”

Several years after her wild run with the Barrows, Blanche sat down for an audio interview in 1984 with her cousin, Irene. Blanche recalled a shootout with police at the gang’s hideout in Joplin, Missouri, on April 13, 1933:

Blanche: “They brought the car into the garage and just had to shoot their way out. Everybody got shot. I was upstairs. I set my dog (Snowball) on the table so he wouldn’t get shot. I told him to get in the car and he (Snowball) was supposed to get in the car. And Clyde wanted me to help him push the car out. And all that mess in that picture (the movie Bonnie and Clyde) about me running, that was a lot of make-up deal (made up). I did go out and looked for my dog, but I couldn’t find him and I got back in the car.”

Irene: “How many did get killed that time?”

Blanche: “I believe it was two policemen.”

Irene: “And boy you were in trouble when you killed a policeman.”

Irene: “How many of y’all got hurt at that time?”

Blanche: “Well, all of us got shot somewhere, but not severely.”

Irene: “What did you do, just doctor yourself the best you could without going to the doctor?”

Blanche: “Yeah, took a razor blade and cut the bullet out.”¹

And while the 1967 movie Bonnie and Clyde glamorizes the pair as young rebels in love and on the run, according to Blanche’s memoir they lived anything but a glamorous life.

They certainly were on the run, from the law, and were in constant fear of being discovered by the authorities. Whenever they got injured or shot they had to tend to their own wounds (e.g., Blanche’s comment about the razor blade — yikes!) and camped out and stayed wherever they could in an attempt to keep one step ahead of the law.

Blanche also hated her portrayal, played by Estelle Parsons, in the movie. She claimed the film made her look like “a screaming horse’s ass.” Ironically, Parsons won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for that role.

In late July of 1933 the Barrow gang, after a string of robberies and shootouts, was on the run yet again. Clyde chose the Red Crown Tavern and Tourist Cabins, outside of Platte City, Missouri, as a hideout and place to rest.

The cabins were located between two intersecting highways. Clyde thought the roads would provide an escape route if law enforcement showed up. They rented two, single-story brick cabins that had a garage between both cabins.

Platte County Sheriff Holt Coffey found out about the gang’s whereabouts and led a 13-member posse in an attempt to apprehend the fugitives.

The lawmen approached the cabins and ordered everyone to get out. Blanche told them to wait a minute while they got dressed. Clyde then opened fire with his deadly, Browning automatic rifle. Sheriff Coffey was struck in the neck but survived.

As they scrambled to their car, Buck also opened fire with his Browning. Captain William Baxter shot Buck in his forehead. Buck was then dragged into the backseat of the car as the posse unloaded on the vehicle.

Flying glass went into Blanche’s eyes, partially blinding her. The gang escaped and two other lawmen, besides Sheriff Coffey, were also wounded but survived.³

Five days later the Barrow gang was camping and hiding out at Dexfield Park, a wooded, recreation area near, Dexter, Iowa. Buck was in bad shape and drifting in and out of consciousness.

The gang members poured peroxide in the hole in Buck’s forehead to keep the wound clean and gave him aspirin for the pain (the peroxide worked and doctors later marvelled at its effectiveness).

Shortly before dawn on July 24 law enforcement once again closed in. Another shootout ensued and Bonnie, Clyde and W.D. Jones were all shot but managed to escape.

Buck was shot four times and Blanche stayed with him as the pair were taken into custody. As the officers pulled her away from her wounded husband Blanche cried out, “Stop, don’t shoot! He’s already dying!”⁴ Five days after their arrest Buck died at a hospital.

In a 2013 interview with the Des Moines Register Margaret Reed, daughter of Deputy Sheriff L.E. Forbes, recalled her father, who was one of the officers holding Blanche’s arm as she was arrested, said Blanche was “a holy terror. She was mean and nasty,” and just wanted to be with her mortally wounded husband.⁵

As she and Buck were being tended to at the hospital Blanche, dressed in only a sheet and hospital gown, asked to use the bathroom. In a futile attempt, she tried to escape.

Blanche was sent back to Missouri and charged with assault with intent to kill for the Platte City shootout. She was sentenced to ten years at the Missouri State Penitentiary but after serving six years was released on good behavior.

While she was in prison Bonnie and Clyde were killed in an ambush by law enforcement officers in Bienville Parish, Louisiana on May 23, 1934.

Upon her release Blanche went to her hometown of Garvin, Oklahoma, to see her father, Matthew. She then moved to Dallas to look for work and found a job in the cafe of the Interurban, a mass transit train and trolley system.

Besides the job she found a new man, Eddie Frasure, a master carpenter who was also a talented musician and singer. On April 19, 1940, the two got married in Rockwall, a suburb of Dallas.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Eddie joined the Navy Seabees and was stationed in the Pacific as a construction engineer. While he was away Blanche changed jobs, first working as a dispatcher for the Yellow Cab Company and then went back to a restaurant called Talbot’s Cafe.

When Eddie returned home he was hired as the supervisor of a Dallas-based engineering firm. Blanche stopped working but with Eddie’s job requiring a lot of travel she went with him and found herself on the road again.

This time was different — gun-toting law enforcement officers were not trying to track her down. She did though need to get permission from her parole officers to travel and was amused by their efforts to keep tabs on her.

In 1951 the couple settled in Pleasant Grove, then a rural part of Dallas, and Blanche’s life on the road was over. They joined a local church and Blanche started teaching Sunday school.

At one point, she allowed a stranger and her asthmatic son to stay with her so the young boy could try to improve his health in the dry, warm Texas climate.

Blanche and Eddie also adopted a 12-year old boy named Ricky. He came from a broken home and they tried to give him a better life. She also reconnected with old friends and relatives and kept in touch through letters, phone calls and family reunions.

A heavy smoker, Blanche died of lung cancer on December 24, 1988, at the age of 77.

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