Execution Eve. William Buchanan
dedicated to proper prison operations. All they needed was leadership. Within seventy-two hours of his arrival, Warden Buchanan had identified every man in this category.
One was Porter Lady.
Painstakingly efficient in his job as Cellblock Supervisor, articulate and a natty dresser, thirty-six-year-old Porter Lady was regarded by his colleagues as a dandy. For the first week, Lady’s relationship with the new warden was discreetly proper. Then, late one night, Lady came to the prison and asked to speak to the warden in private.
“If I’ve misjudged you,” Lady said to Buchanan that evening, “I’m putting my job on the line. But there’s something I think you should see.”
They went to Cellblock One. In a remote corner of the basement Lady lifted a manhole cover and shined his flashlight down a flight of stone steps. The steps led to a narrow tunnel that opened onto a cavernous room. At the far end of the clammy chamber, Lady shined the light onto two dungeon cells. Buchanan stared incredulously. At the front of one cell a man stood hand-cuffed to the bars with his feet barely touching the floor. Bearded and soiled by his own wastes, he looked more animal than human. The shackled man moaned and closed his eyes to avoid the painful light.
Buchanan seethed. “How long has he been here?”
“Thirty days.”
Thirty days suspended in a dank dungeon totally devoid of light. Let down for fifteen minutes each midnight to relieve himself in a slop bucket, gobble down a single daily meal with his bare hands, then strung up again. Watered twice a day by a convict who held a dipper to his lips.
Lady said, “His infraction was—”
“I don’t give a damn what his infraction was,” Buchanan said, his voice cold with fury. “I want that man taken to the infirmary at once. If you don’t have the keys, cut those damned bars down.” He took a couple of breaths to bring his anger under control. “And Porter . . . thank you.”
One week later, Buchanan received a letter from Governor Chandler listing the names of nine guards and other officials at the institution whom the governor wanted dismissed at once. The first name on the list was Porter Lady. It was followed by the names of Sam Litchfield, Clyde Twisdale, Tom Woodward, and five others that Buchanan had determined to be first-rate men.
Buchanan felt betrayed. He had been promised autonomy. Now the young Governor he had trusted and forfeited a secure federal appointment to serve was defaulting on his word.
That night, alone at his desk, Buchanan penned his resignation as warden. At 3:00 A.M. the next morning, he left Eddyville for a four-hour drive to Frankfort. When Governor Chandler arrived at his office in the Capitol that day, Buchanan was waiting.
The governor studied the list of names over his signature. “Jess, I never saw this letter before in my life.”
The letter, typed on Chandler’s official stationary, was a clever forgery.
“Jess,” the governor said, “I don’t care how many orders you get to fire or hire people, you make the decision as you see fit. If you think a person is necessary for the competent operation of that institution, you keep him—even if the order to fire him comes from me.”
Reassured of Chandler’s integrity, Buchanan departed for Eddyville without ever showing the governor his handwritten resignation.
Subsequent investigation into the bogus letter from Governor Chandler established that a prominent state legislator filched the stationery from the governor’s office, brought it to Eddyville, where a Lyon County executive typed the firing order and forged Chandler’s signature, and carried it back to Frankfort to mail so that it would bear the capital city postmark. Such was the state of prison politics.
The day after returning from Frankfort, Buchanan announced the immediate dismissal of eleven officers and guards from the prison staff. Then he announced that he was establishing a new position at the prison, Chief of Staff, accountable only to the warden and responsible to assure that the warden’s policies were implemented without question. The new Chief of Staff—Porter Lady.
With his promotion, Lady received his first orders.
“To begin with,” Buchanan said, “I want that dungeon sealed off. Fill the damned thing with cement. I never want it usable again.
“Next, I want this institution cleaned up, top to bottom. Put mop and bucket crews on it and keep them on it every day until I tell you I’m satisfied. From now on it will be the guard captains’ responsibility to see that the yards and cells stay clean, and I’m going to inspect them myself every day.
“Next, I’m disbanding the Disciplinary Committee. There’ll be no committees making decisions here while I’m warden.
“Next, I want new cellblock assignments—maximum to minimum. I’ll decide with your help who goes where. I don’t care how much shuffling it takes or who screams; I want young boys and first offenders kept away from the heavyweights.
“Finally, tell the kitchen supervisor that any cockroaches I find in the food from now on, he’s going to eat.”
Lady could hardly suppress his enthusiasm. “Yes sir!”
“And Porter . . . one more thing. Put those damned Moguls on the scrub brushes.”
No coddler of convicts, Warden Buchanan nonetheless demanded that they be treated humanely. In following weeks, he focused on upgrading the inmate diet. On advice from a physician, the first addition to the menu was citric acid. Every second day, lemonade was served with the evening meal. As they could be afforded, fresh fruits and vegetables were added. Then, an unheard of luxury: meat once a week. Slowly, inmate health problems began to wane.
Staff positions were restructured. Rejecting the commonly held view at many state prisons that any man who could turn a key and shoot a gun was qualified to be a prison guard, Buchanan instituted a classification system for employees. Guards who were excellent marksmen but poor in one-to-one situations with inmates were assigned to wall-tower duty. Others who couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn at ten paces but were cool in trying circumstances were assigned to yard and cellblock duty. Every man was used where his talents best served the institution.
It was the beginning of one of the most esteemed prison administrations in American history. Over the next two decades, out-of-state wardens, legislative committees, officials from the American Prison Congress, and a Chief Justice of the United States would visit Eddyville to study Warden Buchanan’s innovative, hands-on methods.
It was all accomplished by a man whose formal education ended with the sixth grade.
Sooner or later, all new wardens are tested. The test for Warden Buchanan and the innovative changes he brought about at Eddyville came on Saturday, August 7, 1937—a day he was absent from the institution.
It had been planned that way.
Just inside the prison yard to the rear of the administration building was a timeworn two-story red brick building as old as the institution. It was the inmate kitchen and dining hall. The upper floor of the old building contained twenty-four rows of long wooden tables with side benches where the inmates ate their meals. The first floor contained the kitchen and bakery, where a score of cooks toiled over eight massive coal-burning ranges preparing three meals each day for 1,230 men. Food from the kitchen was hoisted to the upper-floor dining room on a manually operated dumbwaiter and set on tables where each man’s army-type mess tray was served cafeteria style by cook’s helpers.
On Friday evening, the day before, three men were involved in a clandestine operation in the bakery storeroom in the basement of the kitchen. Laboriously, they hoisted fifty-pound sacks of flour and moved them from one side of the storeroom to the other. After a while one of the younger men stopped. “Damn it, Bob, my back’s killing me. Are you sure you got the right dope about this?”
“Keep working, Earl,”