Alcatraz residents

Former Alcatraz residents recall its wild parties, dark secrets

By Jillian D'Onfro

Jolene Babyak remembers her time living on Alcatraz in the mid-1900s as “really fun.” That may sound discordant to anyone familiar with the island’s history as a holding cell for notorious criminals like Al Capone and Alvin “Creepy” Karpis or with the prison’s bloody confrontations and against-all-odds escapes, but for her, it was home. 

“It was a really wonderful place to grow up and to live,” Babyak wistfully recalled to SFGATE during a tour of the island this fall. 

“The Rock” had a tough reputation for its prisoners, but the reality was far different for the dozens of civilian residents, like Babyak, who lived there for three years. For her, Alcatraz holds happy memories, including themed parties, “watermelon feeds” and her first kiss. 

As Alcatraz marks its 50th anniversary as a widely popular public tourist destination this year, SFGATE connected with both Babyak and Bill Baker, one of the last surviving former inmates, to reflect on their time there.

Both speak vividly about the island — and both have written books about their experiences — but their contrasting perspectives weave a stark picture of the island’s surprising customs, staggering disparities and dark secrets. 

Being a child on Alcatraz meant a stream of activities, many organized by parents to steer kids away from trouble, Babyak said. The adults on the island set up movie screenings every week, helped the teenagers throw dances, and hosted potlucks for everyone once a month.

Residents eagerly anticipated and adored the regular themed parties, especially the annual “Western” bash, which included elaborate costumes and mini-plays. “Everybody dressed up and we did skits,” Babyak said. “It wasn’t Hollywood, but it was very entertaining.”

A handful of guards would even gussy themselves up as “ballroom girls” with dramatic makeup and flared skirts, dancing the can-can in sync. “Liquor wasn’t allowed, but I’m pretty sure some of them carried flasks in their garters,” Babyak wrote in one of her books about growing up on the island. 

Alcatraz celebrated Halloween with games and prizes and hosted a summer party on the pier dubbed the “watermelon feed,” where everyone gorged themselves on fruit and the kids ran relays and three-legged races in the fog. The women would regularly throw gatherings to entertain each other, including the annual “lampshade” event, in which everyone had to make their own hats out of, you guessed it, lampshades. 

After the island’s “Beatnik” costume party in 1962, Babyak received her first kiss, she recalled with a laugh. That was during her second stint on the island. Between when Alcatraz received its first federal inmates in 1934 and lost its last ones in 1963, Babyak lived there twice while her father worked for the prison, first from 1954 to 1955 when she was a young child, and again in 1962 when she was 15. 

“I liked living here. It was fun,” she said. “It was unique, you know?” Their peers at school in San Francisco — the children would commute by ferry to go to class — would pepper them with questions and attention. 

The only “cardinal rule” on the island was to avoid interacting with prisoners, she recalled: “We were totally disconnected.”

Araya Doheny/Getty Images for Alcatraz City Cruises

The kids’ presence would find its way to imprint upon the inmates anyway. “When we got to go to the yard, we could hear the children screaming and playing, you know,” Baker said. “And that was really sort of a stab in the heart.” 

He landed in Alcatraz at 23 years old in 1957 and served three years. He had originally been jailed for car theft, but had a penchant for escaping that ultimately escalated his punishment to The Rock. Like Baker, most of the inmates at Alcatraz weren’t murderers or rapists, but men originally imprisoned for crimes like robbery or mail fraud who got in trouble while locked up elsewhere. Folks largely didn’t wind up in Alcatraz for their crimes but for their behavior.  

Looking back, the sheer, inescapable monotony of daily life lingers as one of Baker’s most enduring impressions of his sentence. 

“You were locked in your cell most of the time,” he said. “It was all about boredom and how you dealt with it. In the long run, the boredom, the repetition, the routine could wear you out.” 

The highlights of his days were betting on ball games, joking with friends, or playing bridge. “Happiness comes in small packages in prison. but it comes,” he wrote in his memoir. “It has to get through the gray filter of awareness that you’re locked up. But it gets through, somehow.” 

Like the guards hiding their flasks in their garters, Baker and his fellow inmates would smuggle fruit into a trash can in the bathroom of the shop where they worked sewing gloves. After a few days, as the fruit fermented, they’d take turns sneaking in to enjoy a drink. 

Instead of rehabilitation, Baker’s time on Alcatraz taught him trade secrets that would make him a better criminal. He learned from another prisoner how to make counterfeit payroll checks, which eventually became his source of funds once he left the island — and ultimately became the source of his reimprisonment elsewhere.

“We were crooks and many of us were striving to get better at being crooks while in prison,” he said. “That’s what we talked about, that’s what we dreamed about in our cells.”

For Babyak, one of Alcatraz’s darkest secrets was how it dealt with mental health. As an adult, she’s spent years researching former prisoners’ backgrounds and reading records related to Alcatraz’s care and treatment methods.

Araya Doheny/Getty Images for Alcatraz City Cruises

“Being schizophrenic on Alcatraz did not improve their situation, you know, their mental health,” she said. She describes her research, which she is considering turning into a book about mental health on Alcatraz, as “an eye-opener.” 

For his part, Baker remembers that the worst cases would be candidates for transfer off Alcatraz, but that prison authorities would otherwise turn to heavy medication.

“They didn’t deal with mental health — they said go see the preachers,” he laughed ruefully. “Of course, they did give away some pills. They gave a lot of Thorazine to the ones who were really, obviously sick.” 

He and Babyak’s time on Alcatraz never overlapped, just as their experiences there hardly do either. Babyak holds that some of the civilians had the happiest times of their lives living there, because of the sense of community and togetherness. Unsurprisingly, Baker’s happiest memory of Alcatraz was the day that he left. 

“If the boat out of there had sunk,” he said, “I could have just got out and walked on water all the way to shore. No problem.”