Pretty boy Floyd Biography p-1

Boy Floyd Charles are their Pretty Boy Floyd a criminal portrayed by police and media as America's number one bank robbing kidnapping murdering gangster yet Charlie wasn't exactly what others painted him out to be a bank robber indeed but his style and crimes were quite the opposite of his reputation he modeled himself after the old-style American Desperados of the Wild West the Daltons the youngers Jesse James he was the last of that read the last of the great American bank robbers Charles Floyd was hated by the police yet loved by the people he became a romanticized hero the Robin Hood of his day taking from the rich and giving to the poor while much of his heroism has been greatly exaggerated there was an element of truth I'm the son of Charles Arthur Floyd and I guess I'm the only person I've ever heard of went to school under an assumed name and I knew that he robbed banks and things but he was a good father to me and he treated my mother well and we had a lot of fun together my uncle was not a screwball he took the money he didn't shoot anybody in the bank like Bonnie and Clyde take $20 and leave somebody dead even though he robbed banks he had morals and he had screws if you can say that about my problem Charles Arthur Floyd became the epitome of the social bandit a voice of the disenfranchised in the downtrodden but to the Justice Department he was just another gun slinging gangster Charlie Floyd was no gangster he was a country boy turned bandit but instead of a cow pony and a colt 45 he chose a Thompson submachine gun a sedan to liberate money from those banks during the Great Depression I'll make no excuses for Charlie Floyd he was a criminal pure and simple he did bad things but he didn't do as many bad things as everybody thinks actually I guess what he was with a country boy who just didn't want to pick cop born in the mountains of northwestern Georgia Charlie was the forth of Walter and Mamie Floyd seven children hard-working honest god-fearing farmers who shortly after Charlie's birth made a big move to eastern Oklahoma in search of a better life they moved in to a little town of Aikens Oklahoma that old town used to be called sweet town because they made a lot of good molasses there and that cotton gins and there was some prosperity and hope and that's really where Charlie Floyd came of age four years cotton had led the farming industry throughout Oklahoma though it brought food to the table it also brought bleeding fingers with everlasting calluses from picking it hard work that young Charlie soon realized wasn't for him Charlie Floyd was in many ways typical of the farm boys and hills and eastern Oklahoma Charley worked hard ever since he was a boy 12 hours in the fields was common sometimes for longer hours during the harvest season growing bored and restless with the monotony of picking cotton Charlie at age 10 committed his first documented crime stealing cookies from a local store those little cookies were kind of just the beginning certainly made me an older Floyd tried their best to keep these kids on the straight and narrow path Walter did it in his own way usually with his hand or a belt and Mamie did it with her her loving ways and a little bit of the Bible but a little bit of the Bible wasn't enough for young Charlie there was a lot of the devil in him and his friends Charlie as a youngster growing up was jovial a prankster and honoree of course most boys are when everyone out but everybody seemed to think about a bit of no time or place was ever too sacred for Charlie and his pals to pull their pranks everybody was Baptist Yellow Dog Democrats down there but they took those boys to the brush Arbor revivals where they got big ample doses of the Old Testament and the fear of the Lord and they sang hymns till they lost their voices and they were there all night long under those brush harbors it was typical most times for women attending these meetings to take their infants wrap them in quilts and bed them down as evening approached the straw the back of their family farm wagons well Charlie and his boys slipped out of this revival meeting very stealthily and quietly move those babies from one wagon to the next to the next till all the babies thoroughly switched those wee hours when those families were going home and those mama started messing with those sleeping babies we would have heard a sort of a simultaneous scream come out of those parts as all these people figured out that they had the wrong child and it took far into the next day for people to get those babies switched back he that was the kind of devilment Floyd and his friends would pull down there but Charlie didn't stop the practical jokes it wasn't long before he crossed the line between boyhood pranks and criminal activity the first real serious crime if you don't count switching babies and stealing cookies serious friend Charlie Floyd committed when he was about 17 18 years old it was in May of 1922 down in Akins down in his hometown some others allegedly broke into a little country post office and they made off with Kenny's not just a few pennies but $350 worth of pennies that they had in there I guess for odd change it's his first felony federal territory most office federal authorities were pulled down from Muskogee to investigate well at this point Charlie probably thought the heat was on and they dumped the coins into a well on his grandfather's farm federal authorities came around figuring Charlie must be involved in a subway in some manner spotter said no no my boy was home asleep at time well his father may have made a mistake covering for his son cuz this was the beginning a small way of his criminal career but even at the time no one could have guessed this handsome young man would one day have a price on his head by Charlie's late teens he had had enough of this back-breaking labor and decided to take advantage of Oklahoma's dry state status moonshining was very big in those hills eastern Oklahoma and Charlie soon was a bootleg whiskey their local moonshiners making a little pocket change here and there there were a lot of moonshiners going on during those days liquor was prohibited in Oklahoma so you had to take it upon yourself to create your libation to cook your own whiskey out of the woods everybody had a bootlegger the banker had a bootlegger sometimes the preacher had a bootlegger Charlie Floyd certainly knew how to make moonshine and do how to drink good moonship charlie was clearly heading down a crooked path when he momentarily became side tracked his diversion was Ruby Hargraves a tall thin pretty young woman who found this square-jawed handsome well-built young man equally attractive it wasn't wrong before they were both deeply in love they had a great passion and you'd see him together down there in those country places on those paths through the berry bushes and out by the graveyard and they did some heavy duty courting and out of that passion came a son and worse they married and had a very simple straightforward marriage a few hours after I was born my father came to the bed and got me and took me to a mirror and he held me upside his of Hameed on he said look he's gonna be a fighter we're gonna name him Jack Dempsey Jack Dempsey was the heavyweight champion of the world I'm Anderson no we're not we're gonna name even Charles Dempsey if we're gonna name him anything these happy days for the Floyd's quickly became overshadowed by poor economic times farmers were the

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Keywords: crime, Bio

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Length: 10min 0sec (600 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 01 2012