I have evidence of my father’s criminal past. I wonder if I carry Criminal Genes?
James Clayton Myers, 1952
He was a good looking rogue, I’ll say that for him.
Most of that is a lie, though. He liked fishing, and would play hooky to go down to the Green River and fish for steelhead, or hike up into the mountains for trout, but he didn’t own a gun (never liked them at all), so the only way he could have attempted murder is by whipping the game wardens with a fishing pole.
I think his inmate number is fake, too. He lived at 106 E. Willis St., so that’s where the first part of the number comes from.
I also think he was closer to 5’8″, if that.
Color photos from the 50s are pretty rare. And it seems to be in really good condition. That’s cool.
One of my instructors used to like to tell stories about his ancestors. He told us about a great uncle who was kicked out of Ireland for stealing sheep, then came to the USA where he had a successful career as an arsonist.
spidernapping. is that a crime?
The game wardens don’t care.
Um… WHAT?
I realize you are joking tongue in cheek but, um, what is this?
That just seems to much a witty mock-up made by another family member as a well done joke. I don’t know if an official wanted poster would be handwritten like that, but a nice personal flourish.
Poaching seems like something a small, rural town would deal with; and authorities in a small town might hand-make a poster like that.
Also, if someone caught him poaching, they’d be catching him armed. So if he did anything close to pointing his gun at whoever caught him, that might be interpreted as “attempted murder.” (And the guy would probably have run away so he wouldn’t have seen whether your dad was aiming to shoot him.)
I guess that’s the type of joke that I can see one doing but if I came across it and jokingly showed it to friends and follows I’d feel it’d need a little explanation. Or maybe I’m just being dense. For whatever reason I was confused. I probably shouldn’t have been but I was…..
(thinks back to own childhood* …. Oh, yeahhhh. There were times we did that as jokes. There was even a “Big Book of Rainy Day Activities for Hyper-Active Tots” that would have that as game suggestion. There’s even some scrap papers in my Grandmothers childhood scrapbook about her sister being arrested for make papers. And my and my sisters used to write newspaper articles about our dog trying to frame our rabbit for theft……. It’s just that they weren’t such a common activity that they’d be recognized. … or I just had a morning late middle-age brain fart. Sorry.)
Yeah, but attempted murder? A bit hyper active to the point of fascist. I mean, sure it could happen but in telling it as an anecdote 70 years later, a bit of explanation is in order.
But as a joke. Yeah, I get it. … now.
Argh.
It looks to me like some of his buddies mocked that up, starting with a high school picture (like the wallet-size kind you then buy in a batch and trade with your friends – I assume it wasn’t just my school that did that?). You can see the white borders of the picture, on which they’ve drawn the height marks, then propped up beside the wanted details. I don’t know why the dividing line and the “1” in the inmate number and are black while the rest is red – did they decide it wasn’t visible enough, or the pen stopped working?
(Oops, hit post instead of preview) I suspect this was their joking commentary on the seriousness of his expression, their way of saying his class pic looks like a mugshot.
Wanted for poaching? Was someone ‘egging’ him on? Was he wearing criminal genes when he committed all those heinous crimes? Oh, no, please don’t send me to the punitentiary!
O.K. one more and then I promise to quit. Five foot eight inches, then that couldn’t be a tall tale!
Uncle Eddie knows