Willing Captives of Alcatraz Lore

SAN FRANCISCO —  Kate Kennelly recalls the morning she looked at herself in the mirror, confronted the stress-induced age lines, and finally admitted that she hated her job.

As a product liability attorney, the 33-year-old had come to despise the tedious 18-hour days, what she called the “conflict and drudgery of the legal profession.”

So she shed the shackles of lawyerdom and went to prison instead: Alcatraz, in its heyday the most notorious penitentiary on American soil.

Five evenings a week, Kennelly boards a ferry for the choppy ride to the now-closed prison that has finally made her happy. Along with a staff of seven, she is a tour guide who tells true tales of the men who paid their debt to society by enduring years on the 12-acre hunk of rock in the middle of San Francisco Bay, within tantalizing view of the city a mile and a half away.

But unlike the park rangers herding the 4,200 curious visitors who flock to Alcatraz by day, Kennelly and her crew go to work as the sun sets. Their “Alcatraz After Dark” program treats several hundred sightseers to a more intimate view of prison life, previously known only by the streetwise men who were sentenced there.

“As soon as I heard about this job, I said, ‘This is it. This is the thing I’ve been looking for,’ ” Kennelly said. “Every day, I’m able to explore history. Now I can say I love my work.”

These employees of the nonprofit Golden Gate National Parks Assn. have one of the Bay Area’s most colorful jobs. Despite the relatively low pay--about $12 per hour--there is a long waiting list of people who want to land a spot on the staff.

Kennelly’s team treats the old prison as the University of Alcatraz. More than mere tour guides, they refer to themselves as “interpreters.” In reality, they’re tireless scholars who immerse themselves in research libraries on and off the island to enliven their talks and not just recite long-forgotten factoids.

Following their passions, they lead 30 offbeat seminars that break through the stereotype of bar-filing TV gangsters to explore real inmate personalities and the difficult life they led as punishment for their crimes.

Wearing black berets and forest-green shirts, the interpreters offer tours of the prison hospital, chapel and kitchen, where two of the prison’s four escape attempts were hatched “because that’s where all the tools were.”

They chronicle the foiled breakouts and religions practiced behind bars. They explore the lives of the families--the wives and children of soldiers and guards--who lived outside the prison walls, as well as some of the lesser-known inmates, including a German aristocrat and a Zulu prince.

One of Kennelly’s seminars involves the peculiar emotional stress of serving time on Alcatraz--where on some nights men lying in their cells could hear the chatter of life on the mainland, including the maddening siren call of female laughter. In another talk, she discusses the lives of the prison guards in a segment she titles “Hours of Boredom, Seconds of Terror.”

Handling two boats of 300 visitors each most nights, the Alcatraz After Dark program--which began its fourth year this week--garners $500,000 a year. Rather than be added to the national park’s general fund, the proceeds stay right on Alcatraz, where they are used for much-needed renovations.

An Army outpost from 1934 to 1963, Alcatraz operated as a maximum-security federal prison that housed the likes of Al “Scarface” Capone, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, Alvin “Creepy” Karpis and Robert Stroud, the “Birdman of Alcatraz.”

Now part of the national park system, Alcatraz has lost little of its allure, thanks largely to Hollywood convict yarns, most recently the 1995 film “The Rock,” with Sean Connery and Nicholas Cage.

The interpreters try to get to know Alcatraz intimately. For John Moran, a former Oakland schoolteacher who took a summer job there and never returned to school, that meant exploring its creepiest corners.

He shut himself in a solitary cell, enduring the blackness and sensory deprivation prisoners faced for days at a time.

On a recent night, he locked a dozen visitors in a solitary cell for a taste of total darkness, Alcatraz-style. After just 30 seconds, the tiny room buzzed with tension.

“He comin’ back?” someone asked.

Tours Include Some Drama

When he finally opened the door, Moran said, “How would you like to spend a week in here? It sure takes the fight out of you.”

Then, in a well-timed bit of theatrics, he slammed the door again to the shrieks of those inside.

Once, Moran even spent a night alone in Robert Stroud’s cell.

“I actually had a decent night’s sleep,” he said. “It was a little cold, but there were no ghosts, no creatures, no bumps in the night.”

Still, Alcatraz after dark can be a foreboding place. In the lengthening shadows, interpreters often lead the way with lighted lanterns--with skittish tourists holding onto their shirt sleeves.

Interpreter Sonja Williams once had a woman who claimed to be psychic on her tour of the supposedly haunted prison hospital. Once inside, the woman--who reportedly had multiple personalities--began speaking German in a child’s voice, later saying the place was frequented by spirits.

Moran prefers exploring the lives of “small-fry” inmates, such as former journalist Elliott Michner, sentenced to eight years on a counterfeiting conviction.

“People can see a bit of Elliott in themselves,” he said. “He was at a bad place at a bad time, enduring the Depression.”

Not long ago, Moran made his own contribution to Alcatraz’s chilling store of knowledge. While investigating the prison gardens, he found an odd piece of graffiti: “Tippy 475 7/7/45.”

A check determined the author was William Tippitt, prisoner No. 475, who lost his mind at Alcatraz and died in an insane asylum.

With stories like that, it’s no wonder that Moran and the others are proud to reveal the nature of their jobs--even to strangers.

“As a lawyer, I hated that question, ‘What do you do?’ because I could see people recoil when I told them,” Kennelly said.

Now she’s the life of the cocktail party.

But for any interpreter, the best part of the job is running into men who once lived there. Once, Williams overheard an elderly man talking to a group and asked him, “Did you ever do time here?”

Yes, said ex-inmate Darwin Coon, explaining that he had returned to “check out the old neighborhood.”

Coon gave her a tour of the prison and showed her the kitchen where he made beer on the sly. He even took her to his old cell.

As she sat beside the gentle old man who had returned to the scene of his exile, Williams felt a sensation some of her fellow guides also have shared.

“I think he was a little homesick for the place,” she said.