![]() He dropped out of school at 16 and soon took to a life of petty thievery, car theft, and armed robbery. Clyde was musically inclined-playing both guitar and saxophone -but was also in and out of trouble. When his family farm succumbed to drought, they family moved to Dallas. Bonnie was 19 years old and working as a waitress when a mutual friend introduced her to Clyde Barrow in January of 1930.Ĭlyde Barrow was born in 1909 in Telico, Texas. However, she never divorced him and was still wearing her ring the day she died. He landed in jail in 1929 for robbery, and Bonnie reportedly never saw him again. Thornton was physically abusive and a criminal. Bonnie began seeing classmate Roy Thornton, tattooed his name on her thigh, and married him several days before her 16th birthday. She was academically bright, but troubled. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow Before They Metīonnie Parker was born in 1910 in Rowena, Texas, but grew up in Cement City, a poor Dallas suburb. While portrayed as a daring, romantically involved pair, beneath that publicized image, the two were determined, cold-blooded opportunists who brought chaos and misfortune to all who crossed their paths. Law enforcement ultimately won, but criminals left highly publicized trails of robberies, escapes, shootouts, and murdersĬlyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker-referred to as Barrow and Parker in the day-quickly joined the ranks of dangerous criminals the FBI deemed “public enemy number one.” Law enforcement became larger than life as Eliot Ness and his team of Untouchables pursued Al Capone. John Dillinger escaped from jail twice, once armed with a gun he’d carved from a bar of soap.Ma Barker was a matriarch who directed her sons’ notorious enterprises.Pretty Boy Floyd robbed banks, but took time to destroy the mortgage loan notes.Robbery was such a prevalent problem that in 1927, the Texas Bankers’ Association issued a standing $5,000 bounty exclusively on dead bank robbers.Ī number of violent criminals like Machine Gun Kelly and Baby Face Nelson had become famous, some even heroic. It also overlapped with the later years of Prohibition, and the violence that often accompanied its enforcement. The economic crash left most Americans struggling. The depression hit rural towns the worst. The Great Depression began with the stock market crash of 1929 and continued throughout most of the 1930s. It marked an ugly end to a two-year crime spree that fed the imagination of a public hungry for sensation. The message: Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were dead. That plaque represents the Bonnie and Clyde gas station’s claim to fame-the phone call that former Texas Ranger Frank Hamer made to the man who’d hired him, Texas prison superintendent Colonel Lee Simmons. A plaque pinpoints where a pay phone used to hang. ![]() A small store area and garage stand silent in the background. A concrete porte-cochère (which is a grand doorway to a building or courtyard) features three old gas pumps with long-gone prices. In downtown Gibsland, Louisiana, on 1st Street-right near City Hall-sits a small abandoned gas station. ![]()
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