Chapter 1 of Jerry’s Riot: The True Story of Montana’s 1959 Prison Disturbance
charged ahead with uncommon energy, trying to change everything at once. He recruited Ted Rothe, his friend and ally, from Wisconsin State Prison. To make the prison safer, he hired more guards. To know the troublemakers, he started classifying prisoners by crimes and behavior. He even fired the âcon bossesâ who had supervised their peers in the industries and shops. Powell was a whirling dervish. In his quest to bring the prison into modern times, he was upsetting the balance of power inside of it.
Clyde Sollars felt a haunting at the prison. The prison felt dead and ugly. Knowing the men held inside was like ripping open a psychological veil. Behind it were the inmatesâ victims and their personal agonies. Civilization built prisons to hide what they didnât want to see. Sollars and all the other guards discovered that in the midst of convicted men they met hell, exposed and raw and full of pain. Guards coped with two evils: real dangers and apparitions. They sensed in Floyd Powellâs vision a change in wind direction. It felt like a storm building on the mountain. To many Montanans, prison reform was worse than a futile gesture. It was a violation of faith.
If anything, a guardâs life was a fertile field for conversation. On the outside, off shift, guards cracked their foaming Great Falls Selects and smoked their unfiltered Camels and ranted of how it was, how it really was, and lamented Powellâs policies and the joint and the torment of their working lives. At the top of the steps at the barred door into Inside Administration, Sollars pushed a button that sounded a buzzer. Officer James âLittleâ Jones, the second-shift turnkey, appeared at the door. He was as short as his nickname implied, but a muscled, wiry man, and his hair was thick and black. âLast trip for today?â he asked Sollars. He opened the door for Sollars to pass and then swung it shut. Metal crashed against metal. He turned the big key until the lock slid closed with a thunk. Jones made small talk before Sollars entered a little hallway to his right. He had been sorting the mail for fewer than ten minutes before he heard the noise that scared him.
Jones worked two grill doors that day. On the west side of the building, opposite from where Sollars had entered, two grill doors spaced twelve feet apart created a vestibule, where on most days one door would be locked before the other was opened. Those doors admitted convicts from the yard. Usually a second turnkey guard worked between the doors and had to work them with care to avoid being trapped with both sets of keys. Today Jones was working alone. On such days when the afternoon shift was short a man, the outside grill door was left open. Convicts who had business to do came up the steps from the yard on the west side of Inside Administration and walked right up to the second grill door in the vestibule. As a matter of policy, Jones would order them to step back before he unlocked the door. Standing now inside his claustrophobic mailroom, Sollars was thinking again about the noise that bothered him. Like other guards he had become accustomed to listening beyond clanging doors and crude language for true and ominous signals of trouble. This noise had ricocheted around the jungle of concrete rooms like a clap of thunder. Had he heard a board falling flat to the floor, blasting the air away? Or had he heard something else? His suspicion grew. For a few moments only silence came to his ears, and in prison, silence deafens. Here, a dictionary of sounds lay open in Clyde Sollarsâ mind, as it did for every guard, ready for quick reference. In this prison of a thousand eyes, danger usually came first to the ears. Sounds that fill the prison alarm new guards. As months pass those sounds become a pattern of routine. The prison at its safest was a numbing routine and a guard was soon to learn that he should listen close when the routine changes. From somewhere in the maze of rooms came an urgency of shoes on tile. They werenât squeaks of new shoes but the warnings of a struggle. Sollars felt curious and then afraid. He crept into the lobby. Here in this gloomy room, where convicted men had tromped a trail in the linoleum, he saw no carpenters, nor did he see anyone else. Where was Jones, the turnkey guard? And why were both barred doors to the yard standing open? That very second, as Sollars comprehended a guardâs greatest fear, a squat and sweating convict rumbled into the lobby from Deputy Warden Ted Rotheâs office. His big fist clutched a thin ugly knife, red with blood.
Sollars recognized him at once. He didnât know the man well, in fact couldnât recall a conversation with him, but in an instant Sollars sensed the manâs frightful confidence. Like a mad bull, Jerry Myles snorted through a flattened nose that listed to the left.