He hated the man in the long black coffin.
He hated him. And he loved him.
Ralph Lowery stood at his father’s open grave and struggled to hold back his tears.
It wasn’t Ralph’s fault that Frank Lowery had rejected him. It wasn’t Ralph’s fault that his dad had just stood by and watched his son drift into a life of crime.
Now Frank was dead, and Ralph, 26, had nobody left to blame.
He stood alone in the graveyard south of Seattle. The guards who had brought Ralph from his prison cell in Walla Walla had insisted that other mourners keep their distance.
More than four decades have passed since Ralph buried his father, but he still battles tears when he talks about the confusion, remorse and shame he felt. It marked him forever, “kind of like a tattoo,” Ralph said.
Frank died at a time when Ralph may as well have been in a grave himself.
Ralph spent Christmas 1957 in solitary confinement, his punishment for attempting to escape the state penitentiary by tunneling under the wall a month before. He marked the holiday with a Salvation Army care package containing some hard candy, cigarettes, an orange and an apple.
The prison kept Ralph in solitary for six months. The parole board later tacked an additional two years onto his minimum eight-year sentence. Ralph could have cared less, and that became part of his permanent record:
“Subject very frankly stated that he would never be brought back to the institution once on escape, as he would ‘shoot it out with the cops.’ Subject very frankly stated that he had very little to gain from life, and shows somewhat of an attitude of aggressive belligerence, and it is doubtful whether a great deal more time will show improvement in this case.”
Ralph’s solitary cell was about 8 feet long and 4 feet wide. A steel cot was welded to one wall and covered by a thin mattress. There was a toilet, a sink and a single light in the ceiling, burning behind a thick lens of unbreakable glass.
Despite being physically removed from others, Ralph wasn’t cut off from the convict way. He took his lead from his former cellmate, Bob Rennick, who at 36 had already spent more than half his life locked up in state and federal prisons serving time for theft and robbery.
Rennick treated Ralph like a brother. He said the younger man needed to try to create a new life, one entirely behind prison walls.
Girlfriends and family? Don’t write them. Don’t call. Don’t encourage visits. There’s no point in keeping contact with people you will only miss. Brush your teeth. Wash your face and hands. Exercise daily, and never stop looking for a chance to escape.
“The people I ran with, this was their philosophy. It was easy for me to go along with, because I had no one,” Ralph recalled.
The secret to staying sane in prison, Ralph learned, was, “You’ve got to pretend you are in the world of the living.”
Ralph turned his back on the outside. In the year after his escape attempt, he received and sent only about 15 letters. He had no visitors. He exercised religiously in his cell, keeping as fit as possible in a space where one could only take a couple of steps in any direction. When he was released from solitary, he had spent so much time swatting around a handball that his fist had swelled up like a baseball catcher’s mitt.
Even before they were out of solitary, Ralph and the other inmates involved in the November 1957 tunnel escape attempt were hatching another plan. They communicated by unorthodox means.
One was using the “toilet telephone.”
The prisoners would empty the water from the commode in their cells and talk to each other through the pipes. For added security, they’d speak in a special prison patois Ralph knew as Yeggany. A cipher system mixed with gibberish, it may have got its name from turn-of-the-century slang for burglars, who were sometimes known as yeggmen or yeggs.
Ralph built his upper-body strength by swinging on gymnastic bars in the prison yard, and his endurance by jogging the penitentiary’s running track for hours under the hot Eastern Washington sun.
The guards jokingly asked if he was training for another escape. Ralph just smiled.
Rennick told Ralph he had plans. One of the first things he promised to do was to help the younger man get his smile repaired. Rennick saw to it that that Ralph’s crooked and battered upper teeth were extracted. The older con fashioned a partial denture. When Ralph looked in the mirror, he no longer saw the protruding incisors and canine teeth that had earned him the childhood nickname “dog face.”
“It really changed my appearance,” he said. “It was the first time in my life I could smile at people.”
Prison records describe Ralph and Rennick making a largely docile return to the routines of prison life. Ralph insists they never abandoned their escape plans. Instead of digging under the wall, this time they were going over it.
The scheme was simple but ingenious. They’d make a ladder from plumbing fixtures. For months, they had pilfer sections of threaded pipe and T-joints. Once they had enough of the correct pieces, they’d screw everything together, climb up, and disappear.
The ladder could only be called that in an academic sense. It was really only half a ladder, with a hook on top, like a shepherd’s crook. There was a single rail made up of threaded pipe, with other pipe sections jutting out at right angles like ladder rungs sawed in the middle. The hook on one end would suspend the contraption from the wall while the men scrambled up.
Rennick, Ralph and four others were the main conspirators. About a dozen other cons assisted by smuggling ladder parts, arranging fistfights and other diversions near prison pat-down points. The would-be escapees practiced with broom handles the moves they would need to smoothly raise the wall-scaling device.
Ralph isn’t clear when his second escape attempt occurred, only that it ended with gunfire from the tower guards.
Records documenting the attempt apparently don’t exist, but B.J. Rhay, warden at the penitentiary from 1957 to 1977, remembers the incident. Now 82 and still living in Walla Walla, he recalls Ralph being hit by bullet fragments and dangling from a fence.
The young convict was placed on a stretcher.
“You are never going to get out of this prison!” the warden shouted over him.
Ralph went back into solitary. Rennick eventually was transferred to the federal prison on McNeil Island. Ralph believed that was punishment, but parole records show Rennick owed more time on a federal sentence for robbing a bank’s payroll.
Time passed. Ralph hung out with other hardened convicts. Some were American Indians, skilled at leather tooling. They showed him how to turn the skins of dead animals into bookmarks, wallets and key fobs embossed with pictures of running horses or flowers.
Leather tooling was a good prison skill. Visitors would sometimes buy the inmates’ work as souvenirs. A little extra cash made for a more comfortable convict. Ralph discovered he could lose himself in the work.
Then one day in 1961, Rhay summoned Ralph to his office. Ralph thought he was going to be shipped off to some far-away prison, a strategy to thwart another escape.
“Lowery, your father is dead,” Rhay told him.
Ralph was stunned.
“That was the was first time I had cried in a long time,” he said.
His father’s death broke Ralph’s link to the brick house in Ballard where he and Frank had once lived, at least going through the motions of being family. Ralph’s dad ultimately had rejected him and never fully explained why. Now he wasn’t even around for Ralph to hate.
As the young inmate wept, Rhay quietly asked if he wanted to attend his father’s funeral in Seattle. Was the warden serious? He’d really let him go? Yes, Rhay said, but only if Ralph promised not to attempt to escape. Ralph gave his word.
He was taken across the state to the church where his sister, uncle and cousins had gathered. Ralph hadn’t seen most of those people in years, but it wasn’t a reunion.
The guards cleared a row in the front of the church for Frank Lowery’s convict son. Ralph’s sister rose to give him a hug but was told to keep clear.
Ralph remembers how all eyes turned in the church as he was led to his seat, dressed in slacks and a button-down shirt, but cuffed and shackled like a wild beast.
“The only thing you could hear was that chain rattling,” Ralph said.
It was one of the most shameful moments of Ralph’s life. He was a criminal. He lived in a cage. He passed messages through toilets. He was an embarrassment to his kin -inside prison or out, in life and in death.
“I didn’t feel I was worth anything,” Ralph said.
Frank’s coffin was lowered into the ground. Ralph was led back to his cell in Walla Walla. All alone, he saw himself clearly for the first time.
His life was slipping away. That was happening because he kept screwing up and committing crimes. Blaming it on his dad may have felt good, but it was a lie.
“Nobody held a gun to my head,” Ralph said. “I did those things.”
Ralph knew he had to change, to climb out of the hole he had dug for himself. He just didn’t know how.
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