LUDOLPH

Posted by Cathy Gowdy on Monday, May 11, 2009 at 18:25:37 :

Marin Journal
Thursday, July 30, 1914
Page 8

Paroled Prisoner Dead at San Quentin
Written by Charles Brown Jr. for the Marin Journal

On Tuesday morning when the first rays of the sun climbed over the Contra Costa hills and looked in through a window of the prison hospital at San Quentin, they saw a man on his deathbed. The covers were thrown away from his chest and he tossed with fever, raising a pair of hairy hands to his face again and again. Once he turned on his side and motioned to the person who stood at the window. The attendant went over to the white iron bedstead and sat on one edge of it. Both men began to converse in low terms, so low that the sun rays couldn’t hear what was being said. Suddenly the man in the bed raised himself, clutched with both hands at his throat and fell back upon the pillow. The other person rose and drew the covers over the white face of the man to whom he had spoken but a minute ago, then left the room. The face upon the pillow did not move any more and the sun rays climbed higher and higher.

August Ludolph was the man who died that morning at San Quentin prison – died a paroled prisoner. He died in that place because no one wanted him to die any where else. On the outside of those walls he had asked for medical treatment, but he hadn’t any money with which to buy drugs. There wasn’t any place where he could go in his illness but to prison; for no one had ever cared for him when he was well. He was just a paroled prisoner, an ex-convict.

He gave up his struggle in the outer world the other morning and went back to prison, back to the place where he had spent most all of his life. At the ferry in San Francisco some one gave him just enough to pay his way across the bay. When he arrived in the shadow of those walls at San Quentin and entered the Warden’s office he told his sad story to that official. He was taken to the prison hospital immediately.

“I have come back home to die,” he told the attendants, “I have come because I am not wanted any where else.”

After he had been put to bed that morning he grew much worse and whispered strange stories of what had happened to him since he left those walls a few weeks before. Most of the stories were unpleasant and made one think of a world that was made up of billions and billions of people who went around without any hearts.

Day in and day out he had tramped streets looking for something to do. He wanted work and any kind. The prison pallor was still on his face, but strength flowed in his veins, a strength that he was only too willing to put into his work if given him. But always he was told the same thing. And by that time he began to realize that an ex-convict hasn’t any business to ask for work as it will not be given him. No one wants him around at all. He isn’t good for anything but to steal and murder, the good people say. An all the while it is they who are the thieves, the murderers – they who are at that very moment murdering the heart and soul of this man who wants to climb up out of the dirt and be good after years and years of wickedness. That is the way August Ludolph found it after his years of incarceration in San Quentin prison.

There were odd jobs, some of them very big, that he could have done, could have “turned.” The gang wanted him to work with them as they were having an easy time of it with the police. He wasn’t too old, they said, and even if he was he could help the in some kind of a trick. For instance there was the banker’s house upon the avenue. He might apply for inside work there and take a week or two to study the place. Then some night while the family were away or asleep upstairs he might open the door to the gang. They would pay him well for it, they said. But he didn’t want this kind of work. He wanted to be good, to be honest; for he had sworn it when he left those walls.

And then when he couldn’t find honest work he turned beggar sooner than steal and show the prison directors that all the trust they had imposed in him had been all for nothing. He wished that they hadn’t paroled him for his good conduct. It was better to be back there than suffering all this humiliation. Men and women hurried by him in the streets – always springing aside as though he were some animal ready to claw them in two that he might taste of their life blood. And when he held out his hands appealingly they had nothing for him save an angry look or threat.

Once some one did give him something. It was at evening after he had stood all day without receiving a single penny. A little child gave him a flower, a great red geranium. She thought that he looked awfully tired and unhappy with his hat pulled down over his eyes and his thin coat buttoned tightly about him to keep out the cold. It made him happy for all the rest of the long night.

One night he slept between two lumber piles on the waterfront in San Francisco. He had tramped all day in the streets and hunger and fatigue had overtaken him. Through all the long night and a heavy rainfall he lay – too tired to get up. When morning came he still lay there, drenched, hungry, sick.

The people in the streets haven’t even any pity for a sick man. It didn’t take him long to find this out. So he staggered into a saloon and against the bar. The saloon keeper sympathized with him; for he had once been adrift in the streets and knew what hunger, fatigue and sickness were. He gave him something to eat and money to get medicine with.

But as his illness increased he couldn’t go back to the saloon keeper; for he didn’t want to be a drag on him. So the other morning he gave up the struggle and went down to the ferry. There he found one man who would give him enough to pay his way back to prison.

August Ludolph was buried Wednesday morning in the little prison cemetery over against the brown hill. It was a simple funeral, the kind that is given to every prisoner who died there. A prayer was read by the prison chaplain, then the body was lowered into eternal peace. There were no flowers from sorrowing relatives and friends; neither any music save the plaintive chanting of the sea birds circling above the bay shore. And when the grave was filled a strip of board bearing his number was raised above it. That was all of his funeral. But it was better than anything these thousands rushing by in the city streets had given him.