You can see me in the photo at the left kneeling by a headstone in a forlorn, weed-infested graveyard in a bad part of Dallas, Texas.  The remains below that headstone are none other than those of Clyde Barrow, the male half of the notorious duo who ravaged the the southern states in the late 1920s/ early 1930s, and who were made famous to our generation by the hit movie Bonnie & Clyde, starring Faye Dunaway  and Warren Beatty.  In real life, just as in the movie, Bonnie and Clyde drove into an ambush in rural Louisiana where they met their ends in a hail of bullets on May 23, 1934.

How I came to be in this dreary place on a rainy day started with a story my dad told MD and me on our last trip to visit the folks in Michigan.  I can’t remember now how it came up, but he started telling us about the time he saw the remains of Adam “Eddie” Richetti, the sidekick of Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd in a funeral home in Bolivar, Missouri.  My father grew up on a farm near a little town called Halfway, which is ‘halfway’ between Bolivar and Buffalo.  For the folks in Halfway, Bolivar was the closest ‘big’ town where everyone went to shop.  At that time, Halfway was basically a wide spot in the road.

In June 1933 ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd and Adam Richetti (shown at right) stopped off to get their stolen car fixed at Bitzer Chevrolet where Richetti’s brother, Joe, worked as a mechanic.  As they were cooling their heels there, the Polk County Sheriff who lived in Bolivar, William Killingsworth, wandered in.  My dad didn’t know if he just happened in or if he had heard the gangsters might be there.  I suspect the former since he didn’t come in with guns drawn.  Floyd and Richetti took him captive at gun point, took Joe’s car and lit out for Kansas City.  Along the way they ditched Joe’s car, stole another vehicle, switched their hostages (they had collected another along the way) over, and kept on traveling.  Before they reached Kansas City, they let Killingsworth and the other hostage go by the side of the road, and drove off.  They reached Kansas City, and there was where the story went murky.

At the same time Floyd and Richetti were driving to Kansas City, unknown to them, an escaped fugitive was on his way there as well.  Federal agents had captured Frank Nash, an escapee from a federal prison, in a store in MD’s home town Hot Springs, Arkansas.  The agents drove him from Hot Springs to Fort Smith, Arkansas where he was passed off to other agents who took him aboard a train bound for Kansas City.  Upon arrival there, other agents arrived to transport him to the jail.  As they were getting out of the car, they were fired upon by men who jumped out of a green Plymouth parked nearby.   Nash and several of the lawmen were killed in the gun battle.

These murders took place right outside of Union Station in Kansas City and came to be known as the Kansas City Massacre.  Prior to this event, federal agents were unarmed.  As happens so often after many such tragic events, legislators stampede into making laws that are sometimes not well thought out.  In this case they decided to pass a law authorizing federal agents to carry arms, and, in the process, made J. Edgar Hoover, who then commanded a national police force of armed agents, the most powerful man in the country.

With virtually no evidence on hand, the feds put it out that Floyd and Richetti were behind the Kansas City Massacre.  By the time this announcement came out, the two were shacked up in Buffalo, NY with a couple of molls.  When they got wind that they were the suspects, they grabbed their girls and took off for Oklahoma.  On the way their car broke down in Ohio.  While there, local lawmen captured Richetti, but Floyd escaped only to be gunned down a couple of days later.

Richetti was convicted of aiding and abetting an escape and was sentenced to two years in the federal pen.  But, more seriously, he was also convicted of murder by the State of Missouri for his alleged part in the Kansas City Massacre.  Although there was virtually no evidence linking either Floyd or Richetti to the event, Richetti was sentenced to the gallows.  Instead of hanging, however, he got the dubious honor of becoming the first person to be executed in the new gas chamber at the Missouri State Penitentiary.  After he was gassed, his body was sent to his brother in Bolivar and Richetti was finally laid to rest in a cemetery in Bolivar.  During the viewing at the Boliver funeral home, my dad was one of the many people who lined up to see Richetti.

After my dad told me this story, I did a little online searching to see what I could find about Richetti and Floyd, and during my search, I came across information about other famous gangsters of the time.  I discovered that both Bonnie and Clyde were laid to rest in Dallas, Texas after they were gunned down in Louisiana.  I knew I was going to be in Dallas for our oldest grandchild’s grandparent’s day at school, so I decided to track down the final resting places of the infamous duo.

I discovered Bonnie had been laid to rest in a cemetery quite close to our son’s and DIL’s house.  Bonnie Parker now resides in the Crown Hill Memorial Park, which is at the intersection of a couple of busy Dallas streets.  MD and I set out on a gloomy, rainy day underneath a sullen sky to find her.  With our never-travel-without-it GPS device, it was easy to find the cemetery, but took some time to find Bonnie’s grave.

The Crown Hill Memorial Park is a nicely kept cemetery and is large – at least if you’re looking stone by stone on a chilly rainy day for one in particular.  After about 45 minutes of searching, we found Bonnie’s headstone tucked in behind a hedge.  In the photo below, her stone is about halfway down the left side of the long hedge in the Sunset Garden section of the graveyard.

Bonnie’s mother was most surely responsible for the wording on Bonnie’s headstone and is buried next to Bonnie.  In fact, it was Bonnie’s mother’s stone I found first because it stands up a little more than Bonnie’s and wasn’t covered with dirt.

When I finally did find Bonnie’s marker, I had to sweep the dirt off of it in order to take the photo.  As dirty as it was, it’s a wonder I was able to find it.  As you can see from the inscription on the headstone, to her mother, Bonnie wasn’t the vicious outlaw she was in reality, but was Mamma’s little girl.  Which, I suppose, is as it should be.

I wonder how many of the people Bonnie terrorized, robbed and maybe even killed would share the sentiments her mother put on her stone?

After visiting Bonnie’s grave, we fired up the GPS and headed for Clyde’s final resting place.  Our trip took us to a pretty dicey part of Dallas.  I don’t know what it was like in Clyde’s day (probably not much different, I would imagine), but today his cemetery is in a neighborhood of falling down homes and jacked up house trailers all in various states of disrepair.  The area is being encroached on all sides by various industrial operations.

The Western Heights Cemetery, Clyde’s place of interment, is as rundown as the area in which it exists.  It was the perfect cemetery to roam through on a gray, chilly day.  As you can see from the photo below, the graveyard is overgrown with knee high weeds and looks like the perfect setting for some kind of Halloween horror movie.  We had to pull the car off of a busy street onto a muddy, rutted road with a chain across the entry way.  It was a new chain, which begs the question: what happened to the old one?

Although the Western Heights Cemetery is much smaller than the Crown Hill Memorial Park, it took longer to find the grave we were searching for because of the overgrowth of weeds.  We finally found it near the edge of the graveyard overlooking the busy street we had come from.

As you can see from the headstone Clyde is buried next to his brother Marvin, aka ‘Buck,’ who was gunned down by lawmen about a year before Clyde.

Due to the overcast day, it was difficult – even with a flash – to get good contrast on the photo of the headstone (which, like Bonnie’s, was also covered with dirt and had to be swept clean).  The sentiment – Gone but not forgotten – isn’t nearly as from the heart as is the one on Bonnie’s stone.

The Western Hills Cemetery must be the final resting place of the entire Barrow clan because there were at least a half dozen Barrow stones all in the same area.

What had never occurred to me until I found these graves and subtracted dates is how young these two people were. Bonnie wasn’t quite 24 and Clyde had just turned 25.  Because of the movie and their legend and larger-than-life status, it’s hard to believe that basically they were just kids.  Mean kids, no doubt, but still, just kids.  I guess much like with people who get involved with gangs today, those who chose gangsterism as a career in the early part of the 20th century didn’t need to worry about saving for their pensions either.

Ten or twelve years ago we wrote in Protein Power about the data contained in the vast amount of ancient Egyptian mummies. We pointed out that several thousand years ago when the future mummies roamed the earth their diet was a nutritionist’s nirvana. At least a nirvana for all the so-called nutritional experts of today who are recommending a diet filled with whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables, and little meat, especially red meat. Follow such a diet, we’re told, and we will enjoy abundant health.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work that way for the Egyptians. They followed such a diet simply because that’s all there was. There was no sugar – it wouldn’t be produced for another thousand or more years. The only sweet was honey, which was consumed in limited amounts. The primary staple was a coarse bread made of stone-ground, whole wheat. Animals were used as beasts of burden and were valued much more for the work they could do than for the meat they could provide. The banks of the Nile provided fertile soil for growing all kinds of fruits and vegetables, all of which were a part the low-fat, high-carbohydrate Egyptian diet. And there were no artificial sweeteners, artificial coloring, artificial flavors, preservatives, or any of the other substances that are part of all the manufactured foods we eat today.

Were the nutritionists of today right about their ideas of the ideal diet, the ancient Egyptians should have had abundant health. But they didn’t. In fact, they suffered pretty miserable health. Many had heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity – all the same disorders that we experience today in the ‘civilized’ Western world. Diseases that Paleolithic man, our really ancient ancestors, appeared to escape.

The press has been filled with reports of the recent discovery – thanks to DNA analysis – of the mummy of Queen Hatshepsut, who ruled Egypt for around 15 years 3500 years ago.

According to the New York Times, Hatshepsut’s mummy is that of an obese, diabetic 50 year old woman with bad teeth. All the conditions that nutritionists today would have us believe would be prevented by Hatshepsut’s diet. It certainly didn’t work for her. And she is not a special case – most Egyptian mummies show the same disorders, especially the bad teeth. The skeletal remains of Paleolithic man, who consumed a meat-based diet, showed strong, perfect teeth. Bad teeth are the hallmark of carbohydrate consumption.

Here is an X-ray of Hatshepsut’s mouth. You can see cavities, lost teeth, and evidence of severe tooth abscesses, which had to have been miserably painful.

Hatshepsut’s statue pictured to the right shows her in her idealized form. I’m sure most of the Egyptian graphics and statuary of the time represented people in a thin, healthy state instead of the shape they were really in. Based on the mummy data many ancient Egyptians were obese, which is clearly not represented in their contemporary artistic renditions. If one were to look through on issue of Cosmopolitan or GQ or virtually any magazine to day and look at the people in all the ads, one would think no one is obese now. Which clearly isn’t the case. I suspect that the ancient Egyptians intuitively figured that thin and trim people were more attractive than obese ones and created their pictures accordingly.

One other interesting aspect of Hatshepsut’s mummy is that it appears that she died from metastatic cancer. Cancer has been tough to find in mummified and skeletal remains, leading most researchers to assume that the rates of cancer today are driven by environmental contaminants that weren’t present in ancient times.

The moral of this tale of ancient poor health is that a whopping load of carbs – even non-refined carbs – didn’t do Hatshepsut a whole lot of good, and they don’t do us much good either irrespective of the bleatings to the contrary by today’s nutritionists, who are woefully unaware of the history of the high-carb diet.

The above comes from the October 1927 issue of Popular Science, (Click here for larger, readable view) and proves to be remarkable prescient in terms of food.

The article overestimates the population growth, predicting for New York City proper

a population of 13,948,000. In the area described as “Greater New York” there will be 17,797,000 people; and in the suburban area the total population, according to figures based on the law of growth described in the June Popular Science Monthly, will be 28,705,000.

If I had to guess, I would figure that they would underestimate the population growth, but they didn’t. The latest data show that New York now has a population of a little over 8 million with the surrounding Greater New York (including the burbs) housing about 20 million people.

The article predicts, as all non-aviation experienced futurists do, the notion that everyone will have flying cars and that the buildings will all have landing pads on the roofs. It ain’t going to happen unless some heretofore unknown means of keeping airplanes aloft is invented, and that is highly unlikely. The idea of our all having flying cars is a fun one, but one clearly not based on the laws of gravity. Nor on the realization of just how complex aviation is.

What I found most interesting about this old article was the prediction made about what people would be eating in New York City in the year 2000. Other than the idea that milk would be piped in through some kind of a dairy aqueduct, the prognosticating was pretty much on the mark.

…Professor Edgar M. East, of Harvard University, points out that foods will probably be much less varied fifty or seventy-five years from now than today. There will be a wider use of cereals [my italics], but not so many kinds of cereals. The same will probably be true of vegetables. Fruits will have tended to “standardize,” with a few varieties like apples and oranges, or possibly coconuts or some other tropical product, far outstripping all the rest.

The use of meats, fish and other sea foods will probably have diminished greatly. Seventy-five years ago, in the period before the Civil War, New York menus, Professor East points out, listed a variety of game that would make an epicure’s mouth water today—some fifty varieties. Food is most varied when a country is new; as the population increases, certain staples of diet come to be more and more widely used. The New Yorkers of 2,000 A.D. will probably eat quantities of a prepared food made from some such cereal as Egyptian corn [my italics], that can be grown cheaply and brought in large quantities from lands now only partially productive in the South. Or perhaps it may still be wheat.

They certainly hit the nail on the head with the grain consumption estimates. And they were right in spades on the corn.

They were also correct in their claim that meat consumption would change in that there would be many fewer choices. What can one get in New York (or any major city) these days? A steak, pork chops, lamb chops, duck, turkey, salmon, Chilean sea bass, lobster, shrimp, oysters and, occasionally, wild game that’s usually farm raised.

I’m currently reading a wonderful book about the doomed Franklin Polar expedition of 1845, Ice Blink. The author has a copy of one of the provisioning lists for the ships. I’ve divided it in half so the items can be read. Look at what was commonly available in London in 1845:

And

Quite the difference, I would say.

You would think that as cities became larger there would be more variety, not less. But, it’s pretty obvious that the predictors in 1927 were a lot smarter about all this than I am.