Marvin Gardens Game Card 1935 Edition

Conventional wisdom says to scoop up New York Avenue, Tennessee Avenue, and St. James Place first because players are more likely to land there than any other place on the board. For the same reason, the Reading and B. & O. Railroads and Illinois Avenue are also good investments. But if you can, buy Connecticut, Vermont, and Oriental Avenue early and build hotels. Initial cost to build is low, but the rents are high. The earlier you do this, the better your chances of bleeding your opponents dry.

Of course you know what people think about conventional wisdom. They just can’t help but tweak it. As a result, there are literally thousands of published strategies for winning at Monopoly. Some of these are based on detailed statistical studies, others on years of experience in tournament play, and still others on murky Zen-type logic that defies close examination.

My own approach, perfected during countless rainy Saturday afternoons during my misspent youth, is the first round scramble…what I affectionately call the go-for-the-jugular opening. I scoop up whatever I can get of the colored tiles, but focus on the utilities and the railroads and the dark blue properties, where the threat of huge rents can shut the game down early. I won’t start auctioning properties to other players until we’ve been around the board at least three times. I find this works best with 2 or 3 players. More than that, and you’re better off with the Hornblower & Weeks opening and the Zuricher defense, as John McPhee recommends in his brilliant 1972 essay “The Search for Marvin Gardens.”

But Monopoly has a shady history that mirrors its cutthroat play strategy, and that most people have never heard. Even as the game teaches us to drive our friends and neighbors into the poor house, we fail to realize that we are ourselves participating in a real life swindle. You see, like all great inventions, Monopoly had an inventor. Depression era folklore tells us that inventor was an unemployed radiator repairman from Germantown, Pennsylvania named Charles Darrow. His original game board was painted onto an oil cloth and the houses and hotels were hand-carved from blocks of wood. In the darkest days of the Great Depression, Darrow built himself a pretend empire, and then made that empire real with the royalties from what is arguably the best selling (licensed) board game of all time.

But that is just folklore.

What seems to have gone unnoticed by all but a handful of legal scholars and pop historians is that Charles Darrow was the point man for an ongoing rip off. You see, he flat out stole the original idea of the game from a woman named Lizzie Magie, who in 1903 set out to give us a concrete lesson in Georgist economic theory.

The Official Version of the Tale

Just like Watergate, just like Chappaquiddick, there is an official version of the history of Monopoly.

And then there’s what actually happened.

You can find the official version, the corporate equivalent of “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it,” on Hasbro’s website. In Hasbro’s version, Darrow was simply struck by inspiration one day. With the help of his son and an artist friend he hand-painted the oil cloth game board and carved his little wooden houses and hotels and then sent the game to Parker Brothers. Parker Brothers turned him down, citing three major errors (folklore says Parker cited “52 design errors,” but that’s not true). Knocked back on his heels, but not dissuaded, Darrow struck out on his own. He made a bunch of hand-painted games and sold them through a Philadelphia department store.

The games flew off the shelves. Unable to keep up with the demand, he was understandably elated when Parker Brothers came to him begging for a chance to correct their earlier error in judgment. Parker Brothers bought the game and in its first year of production it became the best-selling game in America. According to Hasbro, they have sold nearly 200 million copies of the game worldwide.

Yet, something seems off with that version, doesn’t it? While it is certainly possible that an idea as complicated and as fully realized as Monopoly could pop into an out of work radiator repairman’s head fully formed, it is highly unlikely. Look at our age old classics, games like chess and checkers and backgammon that have been in the public domain for as long as we can remember. The conceptual elements of those games took generations of play to iron out. The same is true of our sports, like baseball and football (look how long it took them to invent the forward pass). So why should it be different with Monopoly, which is arguably far more complicated than all the games I just mentioned? Well, for that you need a little background information.

And that background starts with the search for a utopian way of life.

The Prophet and the Single Tax

Back when I was working my way through graduate school I rented an apartment on San Antonio’s northwest side. Nothing fancy. A one bedroom place with a kitchen and a full bath and a view that looked out over a garbage dumpster. This was back in the early 90s and I think I paid about $375 a month, with an option to renew my lease every six months.

Things went well for about a year and a half. The rent creeped up, but I didn’t notice. I was too busy reading and nurturing my righteous indignation at the injustices and corruption inherent in the “system.”

But then, after about two years or so, I stopped and looked around. I realized that the place was falling apart. The apartments across the street had a significant percentage of public housing, which is a great idea as long you don’t have to live next door. We had shootings and car burglaries and fights and loud parties and police foot chases going through the complex at all hours of the night.

It occurred to me that I was paying more and more and getting less and less. But I was stuck. I couldn’t afford my own home, and I felt like it was to my advantage to live close to the school. That meant apartment living. And that meant paying rent to a landlord.

In short, I had no practical way to escape the cycle of escalating rents and diminishing lifestyle.

Of course, I wasn’t the first person to experience this. Back in the 1860s, as the Industrial Revolution was gearing up, a Philadelphia man named Henry George noticed it too. Born in 1839, George traveled widely, making his way to Australia and even to Calcutta, where he saw the degradation of slum life in its rawest form. With his sensitivities to poverty awakened, he returned to America and worked for a time in California as a journalist, where he wrote powerful pieces on the deplorable treatment of Chinese immigrants and the unethical scams used by the railroad monopolies to seize land for their expansion. It shocked him that the industrial might of the young nation could also generate such miserable poverty and corruption.

He eventually honed his experiences into a cohesive economic theory, which he laid out in his 1879 bestseller, PROGRESS AND POVERTY. Henry George posited that monopolists were to blame for the world’s economic woes. They controlled the scale of production and the nation’s real estate, and therefore set the rules for everybody else. They gave us, the working poor, a sharp stick in the eye and we had no choice but to take it because there was no other game in town. Land ownership was the key. Once they owned the land, they entered into a cycle of generating wealth that excluded everybody who did not own land. A responsible government, one that had ALL its citizens’ best interests at heart, had only one real weapon against this cycle: taxation. And if the government collected that tax from the right place, and spent it in the right places, it could ensure its own economic health. This was a good thing, George said, for everybody.

His answer was simple. Tax the landowners. In fact, taxing the landowners was really the only tax you needed for a healthy economy. From this conclusion, he developed his theory of a single tax. The idea was to tax landowners, spent the revenue wisely, and then redistribute whatever was left over back into the community.

Remember, at the time, very few people owned property. Certainly the percentage was nowhere near what it is today. For that reason, the idea proved to be a popular one, and it took hold in two important directions. The first was of course in the economic philosophy of Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency, known for its commitment to busting up monopolies, such as those controlled by Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan.

But Henry George’s single tax answer also excited artists and academics, and in 1900 a sculptor named Frank Stephens and an architect named Will Price bought a large Pennsylvania farm and built the town of Arden. The town’s economic model was that of George’s single tax theory, and it proved successful. Soon a wide variety of socialists and bohemians and Georgists joined the town. And the most important member of the town, at least from the standpoint of this story, was Elizabeth J. Magie.

Lizzie, as she liked to be called, had a creative knack for dreaming up games. Her father was an adherent of George’s single tax theory, and he passed this interest on to Lizzie, who, in 1903, shortly before taking up part time residence in Arden, thought it might be fun to create a board game illustrating how the single tax theory works. The old teach ‘em through the backdoor approach to getting your point across is nothing new. The Bible is full of parables used to deliver a metaphorical message. Geoffrey Chaucer used the sugar coated pill in his Canterbury Tales, giving us stories of much sentence and solas. English Literature, in fact, is lousy with the concept. So Lizzie Magie (who in 1910 married Albert Phillips and became Elizabeth Phillips) was participating in a longstanding tradition of playful teaching when she created The Landlord’s Game, and it met with much enthusiasm in Arden’s intellectually-minded populace. (In fact, the original copy of The Landlord’s Game, given to the town by Elizabeth Magie Phillips herself, still exists.)

Based as it was on economic theory, it wasn’t long before the academics living at Arden started using the game in their graduate school courses. The first of Lizzie’s friends to do this was a young professor named Scott Nearing. Nearing appreciated the proto-socialist message in The Landlord’s Game and took it back to the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania and introduced it to his students as a way of demonstrating the evils of rent gouging. In so doing he started two trends that would become significant later on in the Monopoly story: making his own game board and spreading the concept around by word of mouth.

He couldn’t buy the game down at his local Walgreens. He had to make his own board. This he did. And so did his students, who took the game with them as they branched off on their own careers in America’s colleges. It wasn’t long before Nearing’s students became teachers in their own right. They introduced the game to their students and their friends, and soon copies of the game were popping up in cities all over the East Coast and the Midwest. It was only natural that these spin offs would incorporate the names of geographic locales familiar to their designers. After all, everyone had to make their own board, so why not personalize it. It became a cottage industry of sorts.

Eventually a man named Charles Todd got hold of the game. In Todd’s version of the game, the names of the properties had been changed by a group of Quakers to the now familiar Atlantic City street names. This version, suggested by a real estate salesman named Jesse Raiford, included the now famous bastardization of Marven Gardens, which was spelled “Marvin Gardens” on Todd’s board (more on that later). One night, Todd and his wife Olive entertained another couple named Charles and Esther Darrow. Charles Darrow fell in love with the game, and the rest is history, as Hasbro says on their official website.

But hand in hand with the game’s word of mouth popularity was the fine tuning of its rules. Remember: not only did you have to draw your own board, come up with your own play money and tokens, but you had to write up your own rules as well. This allowed for the game to grow organically. Rules that made the game smoother, and hence more fun to play, entered into the mix.

In Lizzie Magie’s original version, you had to become the best landlord at the table. You won by rent gouging, which was, ironically, one of the evils the game set out to topple. That did not sit well in an America where the vast majority of the people felt like their landlords were vile, greedy bastards who lived to take food out of their kids’ mouths. As a result, the game’s early aficionados decided it would be more fun to play by forcing all other opponents into bankruptcy. The Quakers who introduced the Atlantic City property names would also do a little tweaking of the rules, and it wasn’t long before the game was ready to enter in Charles Darrow’s life.

The Landlord’s Game

Go get your copy of Monopoly from the closet.

Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Okay, got it?

Look at the board. See how it’s designed for continuous play? You go around and around the board as many times as it takes to bankrupt your opponents. We’re all used to seeing this now, but in 1903, when Lizzie created The Landlord’s Game, this was unique. Prior to this, most board games utilized a playing field with a defined beginning point and ending point, like you find on Candyland, for example.

Now look at the four corners. In Monopoly, they read “Go,” “In Jail/Just Visiting,” “Free Parking,” and “Go to Jail,” respectively. In The Landlord’s Game, they read “Mother Earth” in place of “Go,” “Absolute Necessity/Jail” in place of “In Jail/Just Visiting,” “Public Park” in place of “Free Parking,” and “No Trespassing/Go to Jail” in place of “Go to Jail.” According to Elizabeth Magie, “Each time a player goes around the board he is supposed to have performed so much labor upon Mother Earth, for which after passing the beginning-point he receives his wages, one hundred dollars, and is checked upon the tally-sheet as having been around once.” Sounds an awful lot like “Pass Go – Collect $200,” doesn’t it?

Wait, there’s more.

The Landlord’s Game also included individual properties, utilities, and railroads. Accessories included property titles (which were distinguishable by denomination, type, and color), play money, dice, tally sheets, mortgages, a bank, and instead of Monopoly’s Chance and Community Chest cards, Luxury and Legacy cards.

The game ended after five circuits of the board. Whoever had the most assets won and, if Lizzie’s friends were anything like mine when I was growing up, was declared Master of the Universe.

I could go on indefinitely, but I think you get the idea. The Landlord’s Game and Monopoly…extremely similar. Almost identical, in fact. Though very few people today have ever played The Landlord’s Game, you could jump right into it. All you’d need is a passing familiarity with Monopoly.

Bilking Lizzie

Someone out there is yelling, “But hold on a minute. From what you’ve said here, Charles Darrow never met Lizzie Phillips. How could he have known he was stealing from her?”

Good point. You might also wonder why, if Lizzie was so smart, she didn’t get a patent on her board game. Surely that would have sealed the deal here, right?

Unfortunately for Lizzie, no.

You see, she did get a patent on The Landlord’s Game. Trained as a stenographer and no slouch in the brains department, Lizzie designed – and patented – a mechanism to auto-return the carriage on a typewriter. She understood the process. It was old hat for her. As a result, in 1903, she applied for, and received, a patent for The Landlord’s Game. Aware of the game’s word of mouth success, and also of many of the modified rules to her original game, Elizabeth Magie Phillips reapplied for – and was granted – a patent in 1924.

During the intervening years, she twice contacted Charles Parker of Parker Brothers and offered her game for publication. Parker was put off by the games complexity and its obvious political connotations (Georgist theories had fallen out of favor by then), and politely told her thanks, but no thanks.

So this is where the plot takes a sinister turn.

The year was 1934. Charles Darrow lifted his game right out of the hands of his friend Charles Todd, called it Monopoly, and tried to sell it to Charles Parker. (And yes, there are a lot of guys named Charles in this story.) Parker turned him down. Darrow decided to go for broke, had 500 copies of his plagiarized board game made up, and managed to get it into a major Philadelphia department store in time for the Christmas rush.

It was a hit. Charles Parker heard about it (again, Monopoly has word of mouth to thank for its success), and went to Philadelphia to make an offer and eat a big heaping helping of humble pie. The offer was made, Darrow accepted, and the rest, as Hasbro says, is history.

Well, not quite. You see, on February 1, 1937, Time Magazine ran an article crediting Charles Darrow as the single-handed genius behind Monopoly. Fans of The Landlord’s Game wrote in to dispute the article. And of course, a few of the homemade versions of the game went to market. One of these was a game called Finance, which was designed and sold by a man named Daniel Layman. Layman, a former frat boy from Indianapolis, had played the game back in college with his friends, and even considered marketing the game as Darrow had done. His choices for a name for the game included Finance, Business, or Monopoly. Finance won out. It was a thoroughly non-political version of The Landlord’s Game, complete with Community Chest cards.

When Parker Brothers got word of Finance, they approached Charles Darrow and said, “Hey, what the hell?”

Darrow sheepishly admitted that, well, maybe, you know, I didn’t actually totally all by myself invent Monopoly. I may have, uh, you know, gotten the idea from some other folks.

Can you say BUSTED?

Charles Parker – and his son-in-law, Robert Barton and the new president of Parker Brothers – was furious. And then he remembered Elizabeth Magie Phillips – who had not once, but twice, tried to sell him The Landlord’s Game – and he thought, Oh my good Lord, I’m in it deep now.

The honorable thing would have been to admit what happened and throw Charles Darrow under the bus of public opinion.

Well, Barton did go to Lizzie, but he negotiated a chicken feed deal with her and absorbed her product. He did the same to the other games, such as Finance, that had claims to Monopoly’s throne. Before long, Monopoly’s less successful older brothers were swept under the rug.

Monopoly, as it were, had a monopoly on the game business.

Not So Peaceful Seas

By the 1950s Parker Brothers figured all its Monopoly woes were in the past – a thoroughly buried past. Monopoly games had been used by the US Military as a means to smuggle in maps and real money to POWs in German war camps, giving the game some incredibly good press with returning soldiers and their families. The game was as much a part of our culture as Mom and apple pie. Several generations of Americans had grown up on the game, and for them, it was never anything more than good clean fun. They weren’t bothered by any sort of political subtext, socialist or Georgist or whatever. It was just Monopoly. Everybody loves Monopoly, right?

But things have a way of coming full circle, and for Monopoly – and Parker Brothers – that meant trouble.

In the late 1960s, yet another economics professor – this time Ralph Anspach of the University of California – started feeling uncomfortable with the economic lessons Monopoly was teaching its players. His concerns, ironically enough, led him to many of the same conclusions Elizabeth Magie Phillips had reached many years before.

And just like Lizzie, he sought to teach his concerns with a game.

He called it Anti-Monopoly, and after dumping a bunch of his own money – and that of several private investors – into the project, he struck pay dirt. The game took off, and though he didn’t set the world on fire with his sales, he did okay.

Okay enough for the folks at General Mills (Parker Brothers’ parent company) to come knocking with a trademark infringement suit.

Anspach knew his back was against the wall. His choices were to fight the giant or lose everything, and so he went to court. Some good research turned up the well documented, albeit well-buried, history of Monopoly, and the things Anspach learned about the game’s history led him to the realization that his best chance for victory lay in challenging the Monopoly trademark.

When Anspach took his case to court, he put as many of the early figures in the game’s history as he could on the stand. The story came out…in all its shady undertones. Especially damning was Charles Todd’s testimony, as he had never fully recovered from the sting of being used so shamelessly by Charles Darrow.

The matter went up and down the appeals process twice before the parties finally settled out of court. Neither party could claim a complete and utter victory, but the full story did come out. To paraphrase Louis Brandeis, Monopoly’s shady past was dragged into the sunlight of courtroom examination, and its wounds were disinfected.

For me, the symmetry is perfect. Economics professors spread the original Landlord’s Game, making Monopoly possible. And then, seventy years later, an economics professor forced Monopoly to recognize its debt to The Landlord’s Game. You have to go to Hollywood – usually – to get that kind of story.

Marvin Gardens: An Afterward

Some towns begin as a matter of necessity. They grow from outposts on the frontier, or watering holes along the trail, or convenient stops along the rail line, into places where people get married and have babies and live out their lives.

But some towns get started as expressions of pure will, and Atlantic City was one of those places. It was born in the mind of a modern day Ulysses named Richard Osborne, who was already famous for putting Chicago on the map and peppering the Mississippi River with well-engineered towns. In the summer of 1852 Osborne approached a group of investors and revealed his plan to build a city on the sandy dunes of the Jersey shore. His partner, Jonathan Pitney, had already engineered the character of the town by naming its streets after the states in the Union and the oceans and seas of the world. Osborne’s investors bought into the idea, and the Atlantic seaboard’s favorite playground was borne.

Unfortunately, Atlantic City was tied in to a declining technology. You see, the big reason Osborne was successful with his pitch was because he had the knowledge and the connections to bring the railroads to Atlantic City. It worked with Chicago, and it worked here. But when air travel and the automobile came along, all that changed. The wealthy tourists of the east suddenly had the option to take their vacations in more distant, and exotic, locations.

And this they did.

Atlantic City fell on hard times, so that by 1972, when John McPhee wrote his article, “In Search of Marvin Gardens,” Atlantic City looked more like Jeremiah’s vision of the apocalypse than a glorious playground for the rich. The fortunes of Atlantic City, it seemed, had run a metaphorical parallel to those of Elizabeth Magie Phillips’ original Landlord’s Game.

In 1976, the citizens of New Jersey voted in legalized gambling, and when the hotels of Atlantic City’s past converted themselves to casinos, a new Atlantic City was born. These days, tourism has returned. Once again you can find opulent luxury and walk the Boardwalk of old. Unfortunately, the streets just outside the casinos still resemble something out of the apocalypse, underscoring the problem of disparate wealth and poverty that Elizabeth Magie Phillips set out to right with her Landlord’s Game. Lizzie, it seems, was the real prophet.

But once again I hear somebody in the back yelling, “What about Marvin Gardens? You promised us, remember?”

Yes, I remember.

Okay, go back to your Monopoly board. Look at the property names there. Every single one is matched by a real street, a real railroad, a real utility, on the Rand McNally map of Atlantic City.

All but Marvin Gardens.

It’s not there, and not just because of a typo that Charles Darrow made famous when he plagiarized his original board. You see, Marvin Gardens, or, more properly Marven Gardens, is actually a suburb of Atlantic City that derives its name from two neighboring towns, Margate and Ventnor.

While the rest of Atlantic City was collapsing into apocalyptic poverty, Marven Gardens did quite well. John McPhee describes it as something of a middle class paradise, “set on curvilinear private streets under yews and cedars, poplars and willows,” the houses themselves built of “stucco, brick, and wood, with slate roofs, tile roofs, multi-mullioned porches, Giraldic towers, and Spanish grilles.” It has traditionally maintained its own police force, its own streets, its own standards of the good life.

And therein is the rub. You see, the area is something of an abstraction from the rest of the city…just as Marvin Gardens is to the game board. It seems somehow fitting that it should remain the most visible, and yet the most intangible, proof of Charles Darrow’s theft.

Sources

Monopoly is a passion for a great many people, and so is its history. The story is hugely vast, comprising more than a century of history, legal wrangling, and biography. I have given only the most cursory account of it here. To do the full scope of the story justice would take a book length manuscript…and fortunately, more than a few people have done so.

I encourage you to look to these sources, and others, for more information.

Anspach, Ralph. Monopolygate, 2nd Ed. Xlibris Corporation. 2007.

McPhee, John. “The Search for Marvin Gardens.” First published in The New Yorker, 1972. Reprinted in Pieces of the Frame, 1975.

Orbanes, Philip E. Monopoly: The World’s Most Famous Game & How it Got that Way. De Capo Press. 2006.

Thirteen years ago, when I was going through the application process to become a San Antonio police officer, I had to make frequent trips to police headquarters. I remember waiting in the lobby with nothing else to do but read the wall-sized memorial to all the San Antonio police officers killed in the line of duty. Sometimes I had to wait an hour or more, and that gave me a lot of time to study the faces in the black and white photos and marvel at their old fashioned badges and read the brief descriptions of how they died.

The plaques go back to 1857. For the first two officers, there are no pictures, no badges. The incidents their plaques describe actually predate the city charter that established the San Antonio Police Department. (The SAPD didn’t take its current political shape until the 1870s.) But as you go forward through the display, the badge styles start to take their present shape and the hairstyles and the clothes start to look more modern. You get a sense of history developing right in front of your eyes.

It was that sense of history staring me in the face that hooked me. There were stories on that wall just begging to be told. Sam Street, for example, was shot while investigating a routine suspicious person call. Tragic, though not uncommon in police work. But he held the rank of Chief of Detectives at the time, making him the highest ranking member of the Department to die in the line of duty. Officer Peter Scrivano’s badge is bent under at the bottom left corner. Later, I discovered it was damaged in the shootout that took his life. Detective Henry Perrow was shot and killed in a dead end alley by a member of John Dillinger’s Gang. Officer Patricia Calderon, the only female officer ever killed in the line of duty, drowned while chasing a suspect through a flooded creek. A law enhancing the penalties for running from the police now bears her name. There were so many stories there, and so much tragedy.

But with all that rich material to fascinate me I kept coming back to the very first plaque with an officer’s picture attached. It belonged to Patrolman William Madison Lacey, aged 38. According to the plaque, William Lacey entered service on November 28, 1900. He was killed the very next day in a labor dispute by the man he was assigned to protect. He was survived by a pregnant wife and four children.

That’s all. There’s nothing more written there.

But I was floored.

One day on the job!

Can you imagine?

It seemed so wildly improbable. So unfair. But most of all, to a young man who joined the police department primarily as a way to fuel his reckless addiction to adrenaline, it was a sobering reality check.

Still, I went on with the application process. I got in, figuring that I would ask around and find out exactly what happened to William M. Lacey on that fateful Thanksgiving Day nearly a hundred years earlier.

How hard could it be, right?

Of course, life got in the way. I was working West Patrol “B” Shift, 2 to 10:30 pm, with Tuesdays and Wednesdays off. I was on a steep learning curve, seeing something new every night; and before long, the names of men I knew personally started showing up on that wall down at police headquarters. I forgot all about William Madison Lacey.

And then, in 2006, I was promoted to the rank of Detective-Investigator. I was assigned to the Homicide Division. I was in police headquarters every day now, and once again William M. Lacey entered my world. Only this time I had access to everything ever written by the San Antonio Police Department. I figured it would be a simple matter of going to the archives and reading the file.

Cold case solved, right?

Not so fast. As it turns out, the archives only go back as far as the mid 1970s. Before that, there’s nothing but a few scattered personnel records maintained by Internal Affairs and Accounting.

Want something before 1922?

Well, in that case, you’re completely out of luck. The City of San Antonio was wiped out in a flood on September 10, 1921. At 1:30 am that Saturday morning a 12 foot wave swept through downtown and obliterated all City records. Nothing but memory remained.

And by the summer of 2006, when I started asking questions in earnest, all memory of that fateful Thanksgiving morning back in November of 1900 was gone.

Or at least, so I thought.

Snapshot: San Antonio, Circa 1900

In the final year of the 19th Century, San Antonio was a city in transition. With more than 53,000 citizens, it was the largest city in Texas. Though the city was nowhere near its current size, it was growing fast. New roads were being built. New subdivisions required the city to annex land as far out as the present day Loop 410, the highway that services San Antonio’s airport and the meat of its business district. The wild frontier days of lawlessness were on the way out, replaced by barbed wire and the railroads and even health code regulations restricting the sale of chili to specially designated plazas during evening hours. The automobile had been in town for less than two years, and already there was a “traffic problem” forcing city officials to declare a speed limit of 6 miles per hour through downtown.

And the police department was changing, too. Starting in 1873, City Marshal John Dobbin began modernizing the gang of cowboys previously responsible for maintaining law and order in San Antonio. They got uniforms. They were required to wear coats and badges and to keep their service revolvers hidden from plain sight. San Antonio got its first female officer, Elizabeth Dunn. We also got our first black police officer and the first “pill box” substations. Mounted patrols were slowly being replaced by motorcycles and automobiles. And the entire department, which numbered fewer than fifty officers and still couldn’t make up its mind whether to call itself the City Marshal’s Office or the San Antonio Police Department, could assemble on the steps of the brand new City Hall building for a group photo.

This was the world I had to enter if I ever hoped to find out what really happened to Patrolman William M. Lacey. It was a journey that would take me through the archives of three public libraries in two counties; deep into the photo holdings of the Institute of Texan Cultures; into the moldy banker’s boxes housing court records in the Bexar County Archives; into private homes to read diaries and look at photos; and finally, into an abandoned, rain-swept corner of the San Antonio Municipal Cemetery where the trail seems to have taken a perplexing turn.

But the key to it all was a labor dispute.

The Telephone Strike

Dr. Donald Everett, one of my favorite history professors while I was an undergraduate student at Trinity University, once told me that nothing in history takes place in a vacuum. We look back across the centuries and hear that Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, or that William visited England in 1066, or that the Visigoths had themselves a little Roman holiday in 410 A.D. But the important fact to remember is that those events didn’t just happen out of the blue. They were part of a pattern of events, a confluence of political and sociological and personal relationships, all blending together to become a significant date on a test we had to take once.

So I looked for the larger context in William Lacey’s story, and what I found was a telephone company strike. Problems between the Electrical Union and the Southwest Telegraph and Telephone Company had been brewing throughout the summer of 1900, and those problems reached a head in October, when the telephone company’s lineman insisted on a pay increase to $3 a day and 8 hour shifts. At the same time, the operators, who were all female, were asking for a wage increase of $5 per week. These rates, according to a statement made by the Electrical Union’s president, Martin Wright, were in keeping with the state standard set by the Electrical Worker’s Union. The phone company balked. The Union president threatened a strike. Negotiations failed, and on November 3, 1900, the Union employees carried through on their threats and walked off the job.

Almost immediately the phone company brought in scabs, non-union workers willing to work while the union folks were protesting in the street outside. One of these scabs was a lightly built, hot-tempered young electrician named Charles R. Smith, who less than a month later would shoot William Lacey at point blank range.

Smith seems to have rubbed just about everybody the wrong way, relishing his position as scab and rarely missing an opportunity to start a yelling match with union employees congregating on Travis St in front of the phone company. But by the end of November, the fighting seems to have become more of a private feud between Smith and O.D. Blanton, a union lineman, and C.K. Phillips, a union electrician. Arguments between the men were a daily occurrence, and on several occasions seem to have ended with rocks and tools thrown across Travis St. Smith, who lacked the physical size to stand toe to toe with either Blanton or Phillips, took to carrying a pistol.

Indeed, things got so bad that the telephone company manager, F.B. Clyde, had to petition City Marshal Druse for protection.

And this is where William Lacey enters the picture.

A Policeman’s Story

William M. Lacey had four children and a pregnant wife at home. They’d been married for just seven years. He was a good looking man with wavy brown hair, a high, intelligent forehead, and a strong solid jaw. In the last picture he ever posed for, his brow hoods a pair of sleepy, confident eyes. This was a man who knew what he was about, and in November, 1900, that meant supplementing his carpenter’s profession with a side job as a police officer. Lacey’s application to join the department was approved unanimously by city council, and on Thanksgiving Day, November 29, 1900, William M. Lacey reported for his first day on the job as a San Antonio police officer.

City Marshal Druse assigned Lacey to a detail that included two other officers, L.C. Espinoza and Mike Molyneau. Their job was to take charge of the strike situation. They walked the four blocks from City Hall to the telephone company’s offices at the corner of Travis and St. Mary’s St, and they had been watching an irritable crowd of union strikers for about twenty-five minutes when Charles Smith stepped out of the telephone office. Phillips, Blanton, and Martin Wright were in the crowd and recognized Smith right away. Insults were yelled back and forth. Smith, who seems to have never heard that discretion is the better part of valor, poured salt in the wound by asking the strikers how they enjoyed being out of a job.

In a deposition he gave before Judge Joe Umscheid, Officer Espinoza recalled watching the scene with a growing sense of unease. From his post he could see the faces of the union leaders turning red with anger. He could see Smith smiling back at them, smug as could be, taunting them. Then Espinoza’s gaze shifted to the brand new officer, William Lacey. Lacey’s face was taut with suppressed tension, his eyes darting nervously across the angry crowd. The muscles in his cheek twitched each time a nasty comment was yelled above the general din. His arms were crossed over his chest, his brand new uniform coat stiff with laundry starch.

Espinoza had been in the thick of the action during the City Hall protests two years before, when Mayor “King Bryan” Callaghan Jr., who for many years ran San Antonio like his own private fiefdom, tried to fire the entire police department, and he knew what was going through the new officer’s mind. He knew the thick blue uniform coat was basting the new officer in a layer of heat and sweat. He knew how isolated Lacey was feeling, like a lion tamer when the animals decide they no longer have any interest in taking instruction. Lacey was swallowing constantly, his Adam’s apple working up and down like a piston, and hardly ever blinking. He was getting his first taste of a rough situation, but for all his obvious nervousness, was doing surprisingly well. Lacey was scared, but sticking to his post. He wasn’t moving over to stand next to the other two officers on his post, like a meeker man might, and in Espinoza’s assessment, that was the sign of a good cop. If things got really bad, he thought he’d probably be able to count on William Lacey to watch his back.

And the way things were going, it looked like that was about to happen.

Somebody in the crowd threw a rock, narrowly missing Smith. The smirk slipped off his face as Smith realized the situation was getting out of hand. His voice took on a whining, frightened note.

Phillips, a thick-armed electrician whose huge build allowed him to push his way to the front of the crowd, stuck a threatening finger in Smith’s face. “You are nothing but a big baby,” Phillips said, “and you ought to be at home with your mother.”

Granted it was a weak insult by today’s standards, but evidently it had the desired affect on the crowd. With the strike entering its forth week, nearly everyone was stewing for a fight, and as the union workers advanced on Smith, the scab promptly sprinted for a nearby telephone pole and scrambled up it.

The crowd had Smith on the run. Soon there was a whole chorus of jeers driving Smith upward, and the more he panted and whined the louder and more ominous the taunts became.

Smith, meanwhile, his hands covered in sweat, clung to the pole, the veins in his neck standing out like cords beneath his skin as he kicked at the hands clutching for his boots.

Officers Lacey and Espinoza moved in to restore order, but were unable to push their way through the crowd before Phillips managed to get a hold on Smith’s pant legs and pulled him down into the frenzied crowd. Phillips had a wrench with him, and when Smith tried to fight back, Phillips swung the wrench, opening a deep cut across the top of Smith’s scalp.

Smith’s hair and face were wet with blood and he was barely conscious. He staggered through the crowd and into Robinson’s Livery Stable. With Phillips, Blanton, and Martin Wright in the lead the crowd pursued. They punched and kicked Smith, driving him deeper into Robinson’s Livery.

William Lacey never stopped fighting his way through the crowd, and he reached the front of the fray just as Smith was knocked to his knees by a hard punch to the face. Lacey reached down to pull Smith to his feet, but Smith had already produced a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver from inside his shirt.

Smith claimed he didn’t know it was Officer William Lacey pulling him to his feet. He believed Phillips, Blanton and Wright were closing in for the kill. When Smith opened fire, William Lacey was standing less than an arm’s length from him. Lacey took the shot on his left side, the bullet lodging next to his heart. Smith then fired two more shots. He hit Blanton in the back, next to his spine, and nicked Wright in the arm.

A panic went through the crowd and people ran for the exits.

Blanton landed in a heap in a corner of the livery.

But Lacey kept his feet. He staggered back from Smith, his hands hanging limply at his side. His face had an elastic, slack-jawed expression as he stared about the room. He never cried out. He saw a chair up against a wall and managed to drop down into it.

Meanwhile, Officer Espinoza was still trying to fight his way inside Robinson’s Livery when he heard three shots fired in rapid succession. The crowd was pouring out all around him, but Espinoza elbowed his way into the inner chamber. He saw a man on either side of Blanton, carrying the mortally wounded man out of the scene. Along the far wall, he saw Smith, the gun still in his hand; but despite the blood in his hair and on his face, he seemed cool and calm.

Then Espinoza saw William Lacey, seated against another wall, blood seeping through his thick gray field coat. Espinoza told Smith he was under arrest and Smith nodded. He handed Espinoza the pistol and surrendered without resistance.

And as a hush fell over the few remaining people inside the livery, William Lacey sat dying. A few onlookers came to his side and tried speaking to him, but Lacey could make no reply. He died fifteen minutes later, just as a doctor was entering the building.

On the way to the jail, Officer Espinoza asked Charles Smith what had happened. Smith told him he had no idea he had just killed a policeman. He swore that Lacey was never his intended target. But when Espinoza asked Smith who his intended target was, the man fell silent. He would make no further comment.

And so Espinoza took Charles Smith and C.K. Phillips before Justice Joe Umscheid and gave an affidavit accusing Smith of murder and Phillips of felony assault.

The Funeral
Officer Lacey’s body was placed in a casket at a nearby funeral home and then taken to his Kentucky Ave home on San Antonio’s west side. The body was brought into the parlor and immediately surrounded by his wife and four children. Throughout the rest of the day several hundred people came by to pay their respects.

Lacey was buried in Cemetery #4 at San Antonio’s Municipal Cemetery. Among his pall bearers were Charles Van Riper, who went to become chief of the San Antonio Police Department, and San Antonio Mayor Marshall Hicks.

The service was a huge affair attended by several hundred people, and many of San Antonio’s most prominent politicians and clergy were among the guests.

The Southwest Telephone and Telegraph Company gave Lacey’s widow a check for $1000 and a public apology for the actions of its employees, and the matter slipped into obscurity for the next 87 years.

William M. Lacey: An Afterward

As I was researching William Lacey’s story, one of the little footnotes that bothered me was the location of Lacey’s burial plot. Back in 1900, the San Antonio Municipal Cemetery was a well-maintained graveyard, an honored place to put the dead to rest. The surrounding neighborhoods were dotted with huge three story Queen Anne-style mansions and wide open horse pastures. It would have been a lovely, serene location–at least back then.

But these days, the Municipal Cemetery is surrounded by some of San Antonio’s roughest streets. From the corner of the facility known as Cemetery #4, where the newspapers said Lacey was laid to rest, you can watch drug dealers and prostitutes walking the streets. You can see the homeless sleeping on bus benches. You can hear TVs blaring from clapboard houses hovering on the verge of collapse. Police cars sprint up and down the streets all day long, their lights and sirens lit up like pinball machines going full tilt. At night, the area echoes with gun fire. To me, it seemed a curious place for a policeman’s grave, and I was struck by a desire to go see him.

Cemetery #4 is one of the oldest parts of the graveyard and there hasn’t been much activity there for four or five decades. I showed up at the cemetery a few weeks ago, the morning after an all-night rainstorm. It was a humid, overcast morning, and the ground was spongy from the rains. I had no idea where William Lacey’s tombstone was located, but that corner of the cemetery wasn’t very big, and so I started wandering, going up and down the rows while trying to read the nearly obliterated engravings on the tombstones. I spent most of the morning looking, but couldn’t find the grave site.

As it turned out, I wasn’t the only one having trouble. Twenty years before I began my search, a recently retired tobacco company manager named William Botto was searching his family tree. He found many of the same documents I found during my search, and started asking questions. He went to the cemetery, and couldn’t find his grandfather’s grave among the crumbling markers. He went to the cemetery management. They had no record of burials before the 1920s. He went to the City. He went to the County. Finally, he went to the San Antonio Police Department and said, “Where’s William Lacey’s grave?”

The Department said, “Who’s William Lacey?”

And that was how the Department got reacquainted with one of its own. William Botto shared what he knew about his grandfather, and 87 years after his death, Patrolman William Madison Lacey was finally added to the San Antonio Police Officer’s Memorial Wall in police headquarters.

But the exact location of Lacey’s grave is still unknown. Botto never found it. The police officers who worked to get Botto’s grandfather up on the wall have since died or are otherwise unavailable. And Botto himself is also unavailable–which means the case has gone cold again.

At least for now.

For me, the truth about what really happened to William Madison Lacey won’t be known until I can find his grave. Until then, I won’t be able to say I’ve satisfied my curiosity. And until then, I’ll go on looking.

Benita Veliz has everything a young girl on the rise could want, starting with a killer resume. She was only 16 when she was named the valedictorian of her class at San Antonio’s Jefferson High School. She then earned a full scholarship to St. Mary’s University, one of South Texas’ most prestigious schools, where she double majored in biology and sociology. In college, she was involved in student government. She sang in the school choir. She volunteered at a local children’s hospital. She fostered dreams of going to law school and entering politics. And she did all of that while working full time as a waitress in a Mexican restaurant.

Kind of sounds like the Generation Y answer to Sonia Sotomayor, doesn’t she?

Well, hold up a sec. There’s a problem.

You see, Benita Veliz is an illegal immigrant, and according to the law, she has no business being in this country.

Kind of puts a damper on things, doesn’t it?

Well, the situation isn’t her fault. She came to the U.S. at the age of 8. Her parents arrived on a tourist visa and they simply never left. Since then, Benita Veliz has had to come to terms with the hard facts of her illegal status. She can’t qualify for a Social Security card. She can’t get a driver’s license. And, like millions of other illegal immigrants, she has had to live with the constant fear of deportation.

All of those hard facts surfaced after Benita Veliz ran a stop sign in Helotes, a small town northwest of San Antonio, on January 21, 2009. She was stopped by a patrol officer. The officer, acting exactly as he is required to do, contacted immigration authorities. Her illegal status was verified and she was jailed overnight.

And this is where the dream of living in the U.S. ends for many illegal immigrants. Arrest. Jail. A bus ride back across the border.

Which means that Benita Veliz is not alone.

Nearly 65,000 second generation illegal immigrants graduate from U.S. high schools every year. Many of these graduates speak Spanish as a second language. For them, as for Benita Veliz, the idea of going back to Mexico is as terrifying as exile to the Moon. They know no one in Mexico. They don’t know the culture, the laws…in short, they don’t know how to survive.

Deportation is practically a death sentence.

It certainly represents the end of their lives as they know them.

But there is hope looming on the horizon for at least a few of those second generation illegal immigrants in the form of the DREAM Act. Simply put, the DREAM Act is a congressional bill that makes it possible for folks like Benita Veliz to earn her citizenship by serving in the military or by going to college. In a rare example of common sense, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle got together and acknowledged that there are quite a few young people living in this country illegally through no fault of their own. There ought to be some way, they reasoned, to assimilate those young people who have been in the country more than ten years and have demonstrated the desire to excel.

Makes sense, right?

Most people seem to think so. The DREAM Act has gotten very little serious opposition. And with a sympathetic president in the White House, the DREAM Act has an excellent chance of becoming a law.

Unfortunately, it may come too late to help Benita Veliz. The DREAM Act was introduced in mid-March of this year, barely two months after Ms. Veliz’s arrest. Recently a federal immigration judge granted her a three month continuance, which means she can remain here, pulling for the DREAM Act.

Of course, even if the DREAM Act passes in time, it may not help Benita Veliz. You see, none of her family can legally petition for her to stay, because they too are illegal immigrants. The situation seems dire, and even her own lawyers are doubtful about the outcome.

But here’s the rub. Benita Veliz is really only one victim in a much larger tragedy. Stated in the simplest language possible, our immigration system is broken. It needs fixing, and it needs fixing now.

So what’s standing in the way?

Well, it’s a muddled mess of bureaucratic red tape, for one thing. For another, illegal immigrants lack a grassroots support system to give them a unified front. If there was an advocate, somebody to rally behind, somebody to give the cause a unified voice, that person might be able to open doors for meaningful immigration reform. The first step would be to simply the process of living and working in America. Worker visas are a great start. So too is the DREAM Act. The second, and more difficult step, would be to overcome the inculcated sense of fear illegal immigrants have of American authority, such as the police and immigration agents. The latter can only be achieved through some sort of advocate–whether that is an individual or a group I don’t think it matters.

But there is a larger problem than confusing policies and a lack of representation: namely, from a financial standpoint, we have little incentive to change the immigration laws. People need a damn good reason to bring about a fundamental restructuring of their laws. They’re not going to step away from the comfortably warm glow of complacency out of the goodness of their hearts. Right now, about the only thing an illegal immigrant can look forward to in exchange for going through all the red tape of becoming a citizen is the privilege of paying taxes–and let’s face it, that ain’t much of an incentive. (People like Benita Veliz–who does pay taxes, by the way, thanks to an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number–are rare.)

Furthermore, those of us here in the country legally enjoy a financial benefit from hiring illegal immigrants. Those illegals are basically a thinly disguised slave labor caste, working at back-breaking and mind-numbing jobs for pennies on the dollar. We don’t like to talk about it, but even those of us who are deeply offended by injustice are still happy to have our roofs repaired in the middle of summer and our septic tanks flushed and our favorite restaurant’s dishes washed as cheaply as possible.

Right now, there is no serious incentive to fix our broken system because we have not addressed the fundamental issue of money. Bipartisan efforts such as the DREAM Act are great, but they still fail to give people a financial incentive to change the status quo. And until we do that, until people have a real benefit in becoming U.S. citizens, until we start punishing companies for exploiting America’s modern slave population, our immigration problems will continue.

Those of you who visit often know I don’t usually post poems here, but I thought I’d make an exception this time. This is my latest poem, “Downhill Push,” offered up for your reading pleasure. Hope you enjoy!

He has fourteen warrants for his arrest,
But the cops won’t touch him.
Hepatitis, they say,
And all those open sores.
And I’ve got kids at home, you know?
Why risk that just to book some homeless guy
For panhandling?
He’ll be out again before the ink is dry.

Which you understand,
In a way.
But all the understanding in the world
Does no good at the stop light you realize now
You should have tried to beat,
Because it’s too late to roll up the window
Without feeling like a heel.
You went to college.
You went to church,
As a kid.
And you’re thinking of going back,
Someday,
With your own kids.
The poor will be with you always
And all that jazz.
You know the drill, the camel,
The eye of the needle.
The rich man.
God loves charity.
But right now charity smells like piss and bad funk
With a dirty palm stuck through your open window
And a pin prick star cluster against a night sky bruise patch inside his elbow
From the heroin.
You realize it’s a nice metaphor—
Camels and needles and rich men—
Just not here, in the real world.

It wasn’t like this, sixteen years ago,
When you were hired.
A cash stipend for covered parking down the block
Isn’t much when you have to thread this needle
Of bearded bums and winos
Pissing on the sidewalk
Just to get to work.
They’re everywhere.
Downtown looks like the apocalypse.
The homeless the living dead.
And that one over there, up in the grass by the bushes,
Past the two pretty secretaries
In knee-length dresses and white tennis shoes,
Might actually be dead.
You wonder if anyone else has noticed.

They used to run to the door when you came home,
When they were little, yelling
Mommy Mommy Mommy.
There were hugs.
Now you wonder if they even know you’re here
The TV’s so loud.
A shaft of afternoon light fills the entryway
You are golden in the dust motes.
Then you see the laundry, smell the stale, lived in years.
You feel so tired walking in the door.
Your husband comes from the kitchen,
Nods hello.
Did you mow the lawn in those clothes, you ask.
You don’t know your lip is curled in disgust
But it’s plain on your face.
And now, on his, the tired empty passionless anger.
Seriously, he says,
You want to start this now?
On the floor the boys roll their eyes. Their hair
Looks like birds live there.
They have heard all this before. You stop to consider
Their clothes, and this house, and that man over there who’s really let himself go;
You are sliding downhill, into soulsick exhaustion,
Unable to stop the drop.
Things used to be so easy, things
Used to rise on their own.

In the early morning, before sunrise,
Ambien dreams fade slowly,
Leave you with the slow intractable resistance of a hangover.
The car rolls backwards to the street.
In the mirror, a face–so worn–not the one you remember,
Wonders if the mind doesn’t actually create reality
By pushing what’s inside out.

ArmadilloCon 2009 has come and gone…and what a time it was! The folks at ArmadilloCon have really figured out how to do it right. The hotel was great (love those DoubleTree chocolate chip cookies!), the guests were fantastic, and the panels were top notch. Plus, I got the added thrill of introducing my wife to her first convention and I think ArmadilloCon sold her on how much fun they are.

Here were some of the highlights:

The Meet the Pros party opening night. I got to hang out with John Picacio, Sanford Allen, Lee Thomas, Gabrielle Faust, Matt Cardin, Scott Cupp, Chris Roberson, Mario Acevedo, Jeanne Stein, A. Lee Martinez, and a host of others. We got a surprise visit from Michael Moorcock, who presented the Jack Trevor Prize to Howard Waldrop. Good times and good booze all around!

Later I went to hear Matt Cardin read his short story “The Devil and One Lump” and was blown away. I’m now a fan.

I closed out opening night with a panel called “What Happened to the Monsters?” Jeanne Stein did a great job moderating this one. And, as usual, Lee Thomas and Matt Cardin brought some intellectual heavy lumber to this one. The conversation ranged from Aztec snake demons to zombies and we had some great audience participation.

Saturday morning started with Lee Thomas reading his short story “I Am Your Violence.” If you’ve never had the pleasure of reading a Lee Thomas short story you need to stop reading this and get busy. The guy is absolutely brilliant! Go out and get a copy of Unspeakable Horrors or Inferno or, better yet, his upcoming collection Out of the Closet, Under the Bed.

After lunch I sat on a panel called “Zombies!” moderated by A. Lee Martinez. Lee Thomas was on that one as well. A. Lee Martinez and Lee Thomas basically had me bookended on the critical side, leaving me in the middle to defend my beloved walking dead. Luckily, I had some timely help from the audience in the form of Rhiannon Frater. This was probably the highlight of the convention events for me. A. Lee Martinez and Lee Thomas brought up some really great points and kept me on my toes. I think the audience enjoyed this one as well. For the rest of the convention people kept telling me how much they enjoyed it.

Later that night I made the rounds to all the parties up on the sixth floor. I got to hang out with Mario Acevedo and John Picacio and Sanford Allen. I have no idea what time I finally turned in, but I think the sun was coming up.

The next morning I got some breakfast and then headed over to hear Jeanne Stein read from her latest book. Damn, that woman can write. Great plotting, great characters, great all the way around.

After that, it was my turn to read. I did a selection from Quarantined and had a pretty good crowd. I don’t think I put anybody to sleep.

A. Lee Martinez got up to read next. He gave us a selection from his new book Monster, which caused me to laugh away my hangover. I know a lot of funny people, but A. Lee Martinez just takes the cake. I can’t recommend him enough.

I finished off the convention with a long stay in the dealer’s room, where I signed a bunch of books and bought even more. I picked up a copy of Terry Bisson’s Planet of Mystery, Joe Hill’s Gunpowder, and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Situation. But the real find was a hardback first edition of Joe R. Lansdale’s God of the Razor. And I even got him to sign it! Very cool!

Thanks ArmadilloCon for showing me a great time!

August 14, 2009

For immediate Release

Contact:

Lee Thomas
info@whc2011.org
Nate Southard
registration@whc2011.org

JOE HILL ADDED AS AUTHOR GUEST OF HONOR FOR WORLD HORROR CONVENTION 2011

Austin – August 14: The World Horror Convention 2011 is proud to announce the addition of Award Winning and Bestselling author Joe Hill to the lineup of special author guests. The international conference of horror’s premier talents and their fans will take place in Austin, Texas from April 28th through May 1st, 2011.

“Our goal with this convention is to highlight the brightest new stars of dark fiction, the writers and artists who are helping the genre grow,” said convention chair Nate Southard. “Joe Hill’s name is at the top of that list.”

Hill burst onto the literary scene with his first book, the limited edition collection 20th Century Ghosts, which showcased fourteen of his short stories and won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection, in addition to the British Fantasy Award for Best Collection and Best Short Story for “Best New Horror.” William Morrow/HarperCollins published Hill’s first novel, Heart-Shaped Box, in 2007. The novel went on to reach number 8 on the New York Times bestseller list and garnered high critical praise. Hill is also the author of Locke & Key, a successful graphic novel series published by IDW Publishing. His next novel, Horns, is due February 2010 from William Morrow.

Hill joins award-winning authors Sarah Langan, Joe R. Lansdale, and Brian Keene on the WHC 2011 guest list. Additional Guests of Honor will be announced in the months to come. A website featuring convention and hotel information, registration, and more is live at www.whc2011.org.

The World Horror Convention is an annual gathering of professionals in the horror industry: publishers, authors, artists, musicians, filmmakers, dealers and, of course, horror fans. WHC serves as both an industry insider’s networking event and a chance for fans of the genre to get together, meet some of the creative talents in the field, and generally spend a weekend celebrating All Things Scary.

Visit our guests at:
Joe Hill: www.joehillfiction.com
Sarah Langan: www.sarahlangan.com
Joe R. Lansdale: www.joerlansdale.com
Brian Keene: www.briankeene.com

For more information please contact Nate Southard at registration@whc2011.org or Lee Thomas at info@whc2011.org.

Itinerary for ArmadilloCon 31

I’m gearing up for this year’s ArmadilloCon 31 in Austin. Opening ceremonies kick of on Friday, August 14, 2009 at 4:00 pm and the fun will continue till we close the place down on Sunday, August 16, 2009. Guests this year include A. Lee Martinez, Joe R. Lansdale, John Picacio, Scott Cupp, Mario Acevedo, Rick Klaw, Steven Wedel, Lee Thomas, Bill Crider, Chris Roberson, Gabrielle Faust, Elizabeth Moon, and many others.

Here’s what I’ll be doing:

Friday, August 14, 2009

4:00 pm – Welcome to ArmadilloCon 31 in the deWitt Room.

7:00 pm – Opening Ceremonies in the Phoenix Central Room.

10:00 pm – A panel called “What Happened to the Monsters?” in the Phoenix Central Room with Lee Thomas, D.L. Smith, J. Stein, and Steve Wedel. Steve Wedel will be moderating and one of our guiding questions will be “Is it harder to create horror now that most of the traditional monsters are used by everyone?”

Saturday, August 15, 2009

12:00 pm – A panel called “Back to the Moon” in the De Zavala Room with J. Gibbons, A. Jackson, K. Murphy, B. Mahoney, and W. Ledbetter. J. Gibbons will be moderating and one of our guiding questions will be “Can We Stay There?”

2:00 pm – A panel called “Zombies!” in the De Witt Room with A. Lee Martinez, Lee Thomas, P. Wells, Mario Acevedo, and M. Williams. A. Lee Martinez will be moderating and one of our guiding questions will be “The Harlequin Romance of Horror?” I have no idea what that question means, but I guarantee you we are going to take this panel to town.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

10:30 am – I will be reading selections from my latest novel, Quarantined, in the Robertson Room. I’ll also be doing a question and answer session after the reading on incorporating police procedural information into your fiction.

12:00 pm – I will be signing autographs and posing for photos in the Dealer’s Room.

There are still tickets available. Go by the website

http://www.armadillocon.org/membership.htm

or come by the hotel:

Doubletree Hotel Austin
6505 IH 35 North
Austin, TX 78752-4346
(512) 454-3737

Hope to see you all there!

Like most people I’ve been watching the news out of Aslip, Illinois’ Burr Oak Cemetery and I am appalled. Crime is by definition offensive to the community, but the burial plot resale scam and desecration of human remains we’ve seen in Burr Oak is truly humanity at its lowest. The scope of the crime is staggering, and to call it reprehensible is a gross understatement.

With more than 300 graves compromised, and families coming from all over the country to inquire about their relatives, it seemed difficult to bring the crime down to size, and I couldn’t see a way to wrap my mind around the enormity of it until the original glass-topped coffin of fourteen year old Emmett Till was found in a rusted shed in an isolated corner of the cemetery.

Now most of us know the story of Emmett Till. In August, 1955, Emmett “Bobo” Till was in Money, Mississippi with his mother to visit relatives. On Wednesday, August 24, young Emmett and a small group of his cousins found themselves in front of Roy and Carolyn Bryant’s country store. At the time, Carolyn Bryant, a petite, 21 year old Irish girl, was at the store alone. There are multiple accounts of what happened next. The Bryants and their supporters claim that Emmett was bragging about having sex with white women up in Chicago and his disbelieving Delta cousins put him up to soliciting Carolyn Bryant. There are claims that his come on to her was lewd and offensive, and may have involved a wolf whistle and even grabbing her by the wrist. Emmett Till’s family, friends and supporters claim that Emmett had a speech impediment that made many of his words sound like he was whistling. They deny he spoke offensively to Carolyn Bryant and that, if anything, what happened was a misunderstanding between a southern lady and a northern big city young man; a cultural miscommunication rather than a lewd come on.

Speaking objectively, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle of those two versions. But regardless of what really happened that evening at the store, there is no doubt about what happened next. In the wee hours of the following Sunday morning, Roy Bryant, 24, and his 36 year old half brother J.W. Milam went to the house where Emmett Till was staying, pulled him out of bed, drove him to a barn, beat him savagely, then shot him in the head and tossed him into the Tallahatchie River, anchored by a 74 pound cotton gin fan secured around his neck with barbed wire. Emmett Till’s mangled body was found three days later by a pair of fisherman. When the news spread to the rest of the country it was apparent that Emmett Till’s punishment far outweighed whatever offense he may have originally committed.

The identity of the murderers was hardly a secret, and there was a trial that proved to be as much of a circus as the O.J. Simpson trial would be forty years later. Bryant and Milam were acquitted of the murder charge by an all-white jury and strutted down the courthouse steps, smiling and shaking hands with well-wishers. A few months later, in an interview published in the January 24, 1956 edition of Look magazine, Bryant and Milam confessed to the murder and gave their own grizzly, blow by blow version of the crime.

Meanwhile, Emmett Till’s mother, Mrs. Mamie Bradley, was left with her grief and the brutalized body of her son to bury. She chose a glass-topped coffin so that the whole world could see the horror that had been played out against her child. “Let the funeral wait,” Mrs. Bradley was quoted as saying in the Cleveland Call and Post on September 10, 1955, “so that more people may see my boy.” Accordingly, the body was put on display in Chicago, where nearly fifty thousand people lined up for a look. Jet Magazine’s photo spread of the funeral, and specifically of the horribly disfigured body, generated some of the most intensely powerful scenes of the civil rights movement.

Emmett Till’s case caught the eye of the nation from the very start. His trial was a major media event. Thousands of reporters covered the case from every angle and nearly every major media outlet ran a story on it. Later, there would be books and documentaries. Bebe Moore Campbell and Lewis Nordan wrote deeply moving novels on the case. Dave McEnery and Bob Dylan wrote ballads about the murder. Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks and Audre Lorde wrote poems about it. Toni Morrison did a wonderful play about the case called Dreaming Emmett. All the coverage led to changes in legislation and quickened the pace of the civil rights movement. Rosa Parks, for example, said one reason she refused to give up her seat was that couldn’t get the images of Emmett Till’s mangled body out of her mind.

So, is it appropriate to say that the brutality Emmett Till suffered led to a better world? His murder wasn’t the only keystone event in the civil rights movement, but it was a significant one nonetheless. And we are definitely a morally richer, and saner, nation for having gone through the civil rights movement. There is no question about that. But I keep coming back to the words of Gerald Chatham, the District Attorney who presided over the case against Bryant and Milam, when he said, “The first words offered in testimony here were dripping with the blood of Emmett Till.”

You see, I can’t get over the idea that Emmett Till’s life has been taken from him–not by Bryant and Milam, but by everyone around him. He’s been appropriated for a cause–a good and true cause, yes, but still a cause–and turned into a symbol. The truth, really, is that his legacy has been a horror show.

Five years ago, a documentary raised enough questions about the case to justify reopening it and exhuming the body for a proper autopsy. Out came the glass-topped coffin, which ended up in Burr Oak Cemetery, where it was supposed to eventually serve as a center piece in a civil rights museum. Emmett was reburied in a standard coffin.

Fortunately, his remains don’t seem to have been disturbed by the Burr Oak grave robbers, but that doesn’t mean he’s been left alone. First, his misery was made a focal point for change in the Mississippi of the 1950s. Then his memory was appropriated by the civil rights movement. Next he was literally dug up and used as a prop in a criminal investigation that, while arguably necessary and conducted in good faith, in the end resulted in nothing more than a dog and pony show. And now, when it seemed that at long last Emmett Till might be able to rest in peace, he’s been made the object of a disgusting bait and switch scam. In all likelihood he will probably become the public face of the Burr Oak Cemetery tragedy.

What makes me so uncomfortable about this is that behind all the great causes and hideous crimes, we are still talking about a fourteen year old child who has been denied his own identity by constantly being remade into a symbol. I am torn. I see how an outraged generation took his death and made a better world. I see how lawmakers used his murder as a way to put good laws in the books. But I also see a child whose life was cut short by insane cruelty. I see a family torn apart. I can’t help but think his mother would gladly give up all the progress our society has made in his name just to have her son back. I sincerely wish for him to rest in peace even while I reap the benefits of a world that was forced into change by his death. So maybe we should be torn. Maybe that is the only appropriate response to the legacy of Emmett Till. I just wish it was otherwise.

I just received this from the International Thriller Writers Association. Congratulations to all the nominees and winners. Winning a THRILLER AWARD is a huge honor.

AND THE WINNERS ARE…

On the evening of July 11th, 2009, the International Thriller Writers celebrated and announced the winners for its literary awards at a gala celebration in New York City.

ThrillerMaster Award: David Morrell
In recognition of his vast body of work and influence in the field of literature

Silver Bullet Award: Brad Meltzer
For contributions to the advancement of literacy

Silver Bullet Corporate Award: Doller General Literacy Foundation
For Longstanding support of literacy and education

The 2009 THRILLER Awards:

Best Thriller Of The Year:
THE BODIES LEFT BEHIND by Jeffery Deaver (Simon & Schuster)

Best First Novel:
CHILD 44 by Tom Rob Smith (Grand Central Publishing)

Best Short Story:
THE EDGE OF SEVENTEEN by Alexandra Sokoloff (in The Darker Mask)

Congratulations to the winners and all the nominees.

A new Harry Shannon short story is always a treat, and his latest, “The Night Nurse,” which you can read here, is no exception. There’s a brief interview included with the story that gives some pretty good insight on how and why “The Night Nurse” was written.

“The Night Nurse” has got a great twist at the end that really lands the story. I was so impressed with it that I recommended it for a Bram Stoker Award. I hope you like it, too.