Clyde Barrow Writes a Letter to Henry Ford
My business hasn’t been strictly legal. –Clyde Barrow
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Clyde Barrow was a two-bit thug—until he became a murderer. The victim was another two-bit thug: Ed Crowder. Both were serving sentences in Texas’ Eastham Prison Farm in 1930. The motive for murder was revenge. Crowder had repeatedly sexually assaulted Clyde, who stoved his assailant’s head in with a metal pipe. Remarkably, Clyde was never charged with Crowder’s murder. A fellow inmate, Aubrey Scalley, took the rap. He was a lifer so what harm would more years do? Besides, why hang such a harsh sentence on a nice young man?
Eastham was a brutal place and Clyde would do just about anything to escape, even convincing another inmate to “accidentally” cut off two of his toes so he would be sent to the infirmary. Clyde wasn’t the sharpest knife in the sheath. A week later, thanks to the persistence of his mother, Clyde was paroled, in February 1932. He, of course, resumed his criminal ways. But this time, Clyde and his gang of goons became deadly, killing at least twelve, including police officers. They robbed grocery stores, gas stations, and banks—and cars, especially Ford V-8s.
At the time, the Ford V-8 was the fastest car on the road. Driving one gave the Barrow Gang a distinct advantage over the police. Clyde was so taken with the car he posted a letter of praise to Henry Ford while on the lam in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Tulsa, Okla
10th April [1934]
Mr. Henry Ford
Detroit Mich
Dear Sir:—
While I still have got breath in my lungs I will tell you what a dandy car you make. I have drove Fords exclusively when I could get away with one. For sustained speed and freedom from trouble the Ford has got ever other car skinned and even if my business hasn’t been strictly legal it don’t hurt anything to tell you what a fine car you got in the V8.
Yours truly
Clyde Champion Barrow
Six weeks later, on May 23, 1934, on a dirt road in Gibsland, Louisiana, Clyde and his lover and partner in crime Bonnie Parker were gunned down in a stolen 1934 V-8 Ford Deluxe sedan. The gunmen, lawmen all, included two former Texas Rangers, the Bienville Perish sheriff and his deputy, and a Dallas policeman who knew the criminal couple from their Dallas days. They put 167 bullets into that V-8, and into the bodies of Bonnie and Clyde. Forty years later, at the Texas State Fair, as I put it in my review of Kevin Costner’s The Highwaymen, I got to “gawk at the rolling tomb of Bonnie and Clyde.”
According to the Henry Ford Museum of Innovation, the Ford Motor Company received Barrow’s letter on April 13, 1934. The museum states, “Handwriting analysts have questioned the letter's authenticity, but it is the sort of thing the publicity-seeking Barrow might have written.”
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