Bonnie and Clyde saga still stings
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That day, as he recalls, he was scheduled to meet the man who owned S.A. Conger's old funeral parlor. They were going to talk about history and specifically one day — May 23, 1934, 70 years ago today — when police brought the bodies of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow to Conger's door.
After years on the run, robbing banks, raiding a prison, and killing a dozen people, Parker and Barrow had been shot dead a few miles away near the town of Gibsland. They were embalmed at Conger's place, and Holmes, a Dallas businessman and history buff, wanted to ask questions about how it all went down.
When he introduced himself to the building owner's secretary that day and told her why he was there, though, she grabbed him by the arm and tossed him right back onto the street.
"I mean slung me out the door," Holmes said. "I had finger marks in my arm where she grabbed me. She wanted me out of there."
Times have changed in Arcadia, and in Gibsland, the last town the two lovers visited alive. Gibsland this weekend is celebrating the 70th anniversary of their deaths with a festival. A prosperous flea market in Arcadia, 8-½ miles down U.S. 80, is named after Bonnie and Clyde, and there are plenty of folks who tell stories about the renegade couple.
When Holmes first visited, folks didn't care to talk much about Bonnie and Clyde, least of all to glorify their names. All the duo got was a stout granite marker on Louisiana 154, erected in the 1960s on the site where they were killed. It promptly was vandalized.
Even the marker was a grudging concession. Locals were tired of giving outsiders directions to the site, especially after the story was immortalized, fictionalized and romanticized in the 1967 movie starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.
"It's not something we're proud of, many of us today," said Billie Gene Poland, 73, a Bienville woman who grew up hearing the stories of Bonnie and Clyde.
The movie upset locals. The attention annoyed them. S.A. Conger's son, Sidney, "exploded" at a reporter in the 1970s, calling the story "a nuisance" and Bonnie and Clyde a couple of "desperado terrorists." In 1984, on the 50th anniversary of the killings, few spoke to reporters about it at all.
"Don't print anything in the newspaper about Arcadia," one anonymous businessman begged the Shreveport Journal.
But there was no suppressing public fascination with the tale of Bonnie and Clyde: how they robbed banks in several states from 1932 to 1934, how they killed wantonly for a while, somehow eluding death themselves — until it all came to an end in an ambush by six lawmen on that nowhere road in Bienville Parish on May 23, 1934.
The older generation died out. Arcadia and Gibsland began dying, too. They were left behind by Interstate 20, a ribbon of promise headed elsewhere a couple of miles to the north. Finally, in recent years, the story of Bonnie and Clyde appeared to take on value.
A few even bickered over which town — Arcadia or Gibsland — had the clearest right to the legacy. Visitors came and, for the first time, money was made.
Today, both places sell simple Bonnie and Clyde souvenirs. But this is not the story of Tombstone, Ariz., or Deadwood, S.D., tiny towns turned tourist meccas. Arcadia, population 3,000, may have rebounded in recent years, but it has missed chances to cash in. The Conger building was torn down a few years ago. And Gibsland, population 1,100, still is a shell of what it used to be.
It has "The Authentic Bonnie & Clyde Festival," which marked its 11th year this weekend, but not much else. Downtown storefronts are boarded up and broken down. One gas station shut down back when unleaded regular cost $1.19 a gallon, and only a few cars pass on U.S. 80.
But with an eye to the future, city officials began installing old-time lamp posts a few years back, and they light up at night like ghosts in a mist, sad beacons exposing Main Street for all it once was and still is not.
Holmes, the Dallas businessman, had pictured something else when he first visited the area and was tossed out of Conger's place.
He saw a strip of shops, tour operators, wax museums, hotels and themed restaurants. Put a couple of signs on the Interstate, he thought, and the towns would take off. There was something to the story of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow.
The young couple met in Dallas, Texas, in January 1930. She was a waitress, well-liked and alluring. He was an outlaw, baby-faced and on the run. They fell for each other, but Barrow was arrested within weeks. Parker waited two years for him to be released. Reunited in February 1932, they formed a gang and began knocking over banks and stores from Texas to Indiana.
The goal wasn't infamy, said Texas historian and author John Neal Phillips, who wrote a book about them in 1996 and edited another due out this fall. It was revenge. Barrow, angry about how he had been treated at Eastham Prison, wanted to take the place down, free prisoners and kill guards.
The robberies would finance the plan. But holdups, not to mention a dozen killings along the way, outraged authorities. So when Barrow had his revenge in January 1934, raiding Eastham Prison at sunrise, freeing five prisoners and killing one guard, he and his gang had become the nation's most wanted criminals.
Texas officials hired Frank Hamer, a former Texas Ranger, to track them down and "shoot everyone in sight." Hamer joined up with three others, who in May 1934 met with the Bienville Parish sheriff and his deputy. Word was that the couple were hiding out in an abandoned house not far from Gibsland. The police waited for them at the forest's edge on the road leading to town, and when the couple's 1934 Ford Deluxe V-8 drove into sight, they pumped more than 160 bullets into it.
The deadly duo never had a chance. Parker was 23, Barrow 25.
One resident, Levohn Cole Neal, 83, described the scene as "a horrible mess." Another, Doyle Gantt, 82, said it was "bloody, gory."
Souvenir hunters moved in. People grabbed what they could, and thousands came to gawk during the weeks after the ambush.
For locals who witnessed the carnage, rehashing what they had seen quickly grew thin, and townspeople eventually made themselves unavailable to tourists wanting to hear about the shootout for the umpteenth time. The turnaround probably dates to September 1990 and the opening of a flea market called Bonnie & Clyde Trade Days in an RV park south of town.
Most customers — and soon there were throngs — came for the wares, not for the name on the sign. But the name didn't hurt, and the owners played it up with streets called Ambush Alley, Barrow Boulevard and Desperado Drive.
Arcadia boomed. Since 1990, the RV park owners estimate, 2 million people have visited. Antiques shops have taken root in vacant storefronts downtown. Fast-food places have popped up at the I-20 exit. Arcadia has a Sonic, a Subway and a McDonald's, and the town of Gibsland has Bonnie-and-Clyde envy.
"Why is this in Arcadia?" Olen Walter Jackson, 93, a Gibsland alderman, remembers thinking at the time. "It happened in Gibsland."
That was where Parker and Barrow made their last stop, picking up some food at Canfield's cafe on Main Street. That was where folks first heard of their deaths. And that, many people decided, also was where the "authentic" celebration should be.
So motivated, they launched their festival in 1993, hired actors to stage shootouts once a year, and opened a small museum on Main Street. It's not much. Department-store mannequins are dressed up to be Bonnie and Clyde. It's open one day a week or by appointment, and it's not all that easy to find.
But in an area where unemployment hovers around 10 percent and the poverty level around 25 percent, it's something.
Background on Parker and Barrow was provided by The Associated Press.