Chapter 1 of Jerry’s Riot: The True Story of Montana’s 1959 Prison Disturbance
Chapter 1 of Jerry’s Riot: the True Story of Montana’s 1959 Prison Disturbance
Chapter 1 of Jerryâs Riot: The True Story of Montanaâs 1959 Prison Disturbance
A GHOSTâS WHISPER
A board falling flat to the floor is thunder to the heart. And so it was that when prison guard Clyde Sollars heard a hard clap, he stiffened in fear. For a few seconds he listened, breathless. Sollars looked at his wristwatch, an anniversary gift from his wife. The hands showed almost four oâclock. He reached into the canvas bag he had carried into the prison from the main office across the street. Inside the tiny mailroom that was nothing more than a cubbyhole with shelves, wedged at the end of a short hallway, he sorted the dayâs last letters. That noise, sharp and urgent, echoed in his head. The convict carpenters working with hammers and saws near the deputy wardenâs office must have dropped a board. The day suddenly felt used and cold, like frost on a flower. Feeling a chill that he couldnât understand, he worked faster.
An hour earlier, Sollars waited outside the prisonâs rock walls, across the street, while his wife Helen censored the last letters. She was the new matron in the Womenâs Unit, a small stockade behind the main prison. They told her that if she worked with the mail superintendent for a few weeks she would know the prison better. Every morning she and another matron marched eleven of the thirteen female prisoners from their quarters to their jobs in prison offices outside the walls. Clyde felt lucky to see her during working hours. He was one of two mail and transportation officers, alternating with another guard on road trips to return parole violators to Deer Lodge. The most recent assignment had been to North Dakota. The other guard asked for it, hoping to visit relatives along the way.
On this Thursday, April 16, 1959, Clyde Sollars might have been driving hundreds of miles to the east, free as a bird on the perpetual plains of eastern Montana. Instead he stacked mail into a bag, looked at his watch, and decided that before he ended his shift he would walk one more time into Montana State Prison. âSee you at home, Mom,â he had said to his wife. That was what he called Helen sometimes. They had two daughters, grown and gone, and it felt good to speak to his wife as if the children were still at home.
He had come to the prison in 1957. Like many of the guards before him, who found their way to Deer Lodge from the sawmills and the mines and the timber crews, he arrived at the prison with dirt on his heels. After leaving the Army after World War II he went to work in the grain elevators in Charlo, Ronan, Polson, Pablo and Paradise, all towns in northwestern Montana. Sollars was an ordinary blue-collar worker, as unadorned as the other guards who filed in and out of those imposing sandstone and granite walls. He was about to find out how plain men take on new worth in a crisis.
He swung the canvas sack onto his shoulder and walked forty paces across Main Street and into the lengthening shadows of two mighty cell houses. The fortresses stood four stories high. Castle-ike turrets clawed at the pale sky from each of the eight corners. One cell house had been built before the turn of the century, the other, during Teddy Rooseveltâs presidency. They made an awe-inspiring sight to travelers who drove into town on Highway 10, a two-lane ribbon of asphalt, and stopped and pointed their Brownies to snap pictures. The forbidding prison, by some accounts one of the worst in the country, made for interesting vacation snapshots next to the more pastoral elements of Montana, like steaming geyser spray from Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park.
Like most prison guards, Sollars saw little romance in the rugged architecture of the cell houses. He thought them ugly and wretched because he knew of the misery that they hid. He felt them staring at him with their troubled swollen eyes. The prison had eyes everywhere. The hundreds of prisoners watched and remembered all they saw, as did the guards if they knew what was good for them. The seven wall towers watched what was inside, and everything inside stared back. Eyes watched from everywhere. It was said that the prisonâs ears heard all, even a ghostâs whisper.
Wind swept the scent of spring snow off the mountains that loomed like a painted backdrop behind the prison. The scent stung his nose but felt fresh and clean. Only when Sollars arrived at the looming stone entrance did he shiver. Instinctively he zipped his blue uniform jacket. He tilted the bill on his police-style cap to shut out the sun, which already was fading behind the prison. Then he looked up. On the wall outside the tower, known as Tower 7 or the main gate, a guard stood with a loop of clothesline rope. He uncoiled it and let it drop twenty feet or so to