This snapshot shows young Clyde Barrow posing with his girlfriend, Eleanor Bee Williams (later Kilgore) (1908-1996) near Broaddus, Texas at the home of Mona Ardell Kindred Burkett (1897-1984), Eleanor’s first cousin.
Eleanor’s cousin, Mona, and her husband, Monroe L. Burkett (1892-1986), probably lived at White City, southeast of Broaddus, as I have heard the story told several times.
Regardless, Clyde was arrested and charged with a crime for the very first time, as a result of this trip.
Clyde had first met Eleanor in 1925, while she was still a student at the Forest Avenue High School in Dallas.
Clyde fell head-over-heels for Eleanor.
He liked her well enough to get a tattoo with a heart & dagger with the initials “EBW” on his outer arm, for Eleanor B. Williams.
One day in the fall of 1926, after a big argument with Clyde, she left to visit her kinfolks in San Augustine County.
After Clyde sulked for a period of time, he rented a Ford Model T car at Nichol’s Brothers in Dallas for the afternoon, to drive to San Augustine County in an effort to patch things up.
He got Eleanor’s mother, Katherine Karl Harris Williams (1882-1966) to ride with him to Broaddus from Dallas, so that she could visit Katherine’s younger sister, Effie Kindred (1887-1939)
They did make up, and everything was fine…for a while.
He even stayed there for several days, supposedly forgetting that he had a rental car in the driveway, two days past due.
Meanwhile, the Nichols Bros. rental firm had become nervous about their missing Model T.
Clyde had failed to tell Nichols Brothers that he was taking the car out of Dallas County, which would have called for a more expensive rental fee.
After trying unsuccessfully to locate Clyde, they discovered that he had gone to San Augustine County.
They filed an official complaint and soon the San Augustine County Sheriff, Henry Jasper “Judge” Wilkinson (1879-1959), dispatched a couple of deputies to White City to find Clyde and the car.
When the deputy sheriffs showed up at the Burkett farm looking for him, he slipped out the back door and ran through the corn field.
Clyde was seventeen years old at the time.
After commanding the fleeing youth to halt, without success,
they fired upon him.
Clyde hid in the woods until the heat died down, and it was early evening before Clyde felt safe enough to return to the farm house.
The cops were gone…but so was the Model T.
The next day, Sheriff Wilkinson himself showed up and the Burketts hid Clyde in their attic.
Eleanor passed notes up to Clyde as the Sheriff searched the home.
Eventually, he gave up and left.
Eleanor’s mother was not happy.
She insisted that they break off their engagement immediately.
Clyde hitchhiked back to Dallas.
I’m not sure how Eleanor and her mother got back home, but it wasn’t with Clyde.
Clyde Barrow was arrested on December 3, 1926 in Dallas for the theft of the car.
It was his first official crime …but it wouldn’t be his last.
The rental company was glad to get their car back in one piece and charges were eventually dropped against Clyde.
The Nichols Brothers didn’t want the hassle of a trial and they sure didn’t need the negative publicity of sending a love-struck teenager to jail for chasing down his girlfriend and keeping the car too long.
Eleanor’s mother didn’t change her mind, though, and when Clyde showed up at their home, immediately after getting out of jail for stealing the car, she ran him off and told him not to come back.
Soon after, Clyde talked Eleanor, still sixteen, into eloping with him.
Along with another couple, they slipped away for several days, until Eleanor figured out that Clyde probably had no serious intentions of marrying her.
Eleanor returned home alone, to face the wrath of her mother, and pretty soon Clyde was no longer a part of her life.
A few days later, Clyde was arrested again, along with his brother, Buck Barrow, with a truckload of stolen turkeys, just before the Christmas holidays.
Clyde’s downward spiral into crime accelerated from here and ended with a police ambush in Bienville Parish, Louisiana in 1934, but not before robbing at least 15 banks, dozens of rural gas stations and grocery stores, stealing a bunch of cars and killing several business owners and police officers along the way.
Eleanor turned out to be a decent, upstanding member of her community and lived a good, clean life.
By 1930, Eleanor married Charles B. Kilgore, an attorney associate at Roark & Kilgore and lived in Dallas.
She held a job with the Titche-Goettinger Department Store in Dallas and in later years she was employed as a receptionist for the Ford Motor Company in Dallas.
Clyde liked Fords.
In fact, just a month before he and Bonnie died in a hail of gunfire while driving a Ford, he wrote the following letter to Henry Ford:
“Tulsa, Okla
10th April
Mr. Henry Ford
Detroit Mich.
Dear Sir: —
While I still have got breath in my lungs I will tell you what a dandy car you make. I have drove Fords exclusively when I could get away with one. For sustained speed and freedom from trouble the Ford has got ever other car skinned and even if my business hasen’t been strickly legal it don’t hurt anything to tell you what a fine car you got in the V8 —
Yours truly,
Clyde Champion Barrow”
Clyde made several trips through Deep East Texas during his 25-year lifetime.
As a child, he had spent some summers with his Walker relatives at Swift Hill near Martinsville in Nacogdoches County, where his mother was born and raised.
Legend has it that he even made a stop at Ford’s Corner on Farm Road 1, back when it was still Highway #8.
Elbert Ford (1905-1982) and his wife, Vera Noby Conn Ford (1909-2007), ran Ford’s General Store at what is still known as Ford’s Corner at the north end of Farm Road 1.
The story goes that Clyde left a half-eaten sandwich and dropped an unmailed letter to his mother, when he left in a hurry.
The sandwich was kept on display at the store until it became unbearable to see or smell, and the letter was eventually turned over to the San Augustine Sheriff’s Department.
Clyde met Bonnie Parker in 1930 and the rest of the story is in the history books…but before Bonnie, there was Eleanor in White City, Texas.
The tattoo on his arm was there to prove it.
The Burkett and Kindred families, that were Clyde Barrow’s hideout hosts for his first official crime, are buried in the Hebron Cemetery, off of FM 705 between Pineland and Broaddus.