ABSTRACT

In the early 1970s, it was said that occasionally the whistle of a Southern Pacific train could still be heard from inside the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem. Rain engineers began to blow their engine's whistle in 1927 while passing the prison to remind the DeAutremont brothers, doing time inside, that their bloody holdup of the Shasta Limited had not been forgotten. Hugh DeAutremont, the youngest brother, was unwilling to simply fall into the routine of prison life, and instead, after being assigned to work in the print shop, became interested in writing. Prison librarian Herman Spector found the same surge in the number of prison publications that Isabella Kellock Coulter had uncovered. Spector wrote that it was between the years of 1930 and 1934 "when the public had other worries than the coddling of prisoners, that with almost harelike frequency forty-five more institutions produced magazines.".