Vic Socotra

08 September 2009

Old Sparky

(The Old DC Jail)

It is gray and wet and, and like that sad winter morning in Cannes when we ran out of weekend and holiday parties and champagne and it was finally, after all, time to get back on the ship and go be sailors once again.

There was something ominous in the silky feel of the water in the pool, and I realized as I paddled that it is almost time to move away from the simple joys of the grilling season and into the more subtle and kitchen-focused time of savory stews and slow-cooked sauces.

I got a bit of a chill at the end of the hour I paddled. It was raining, on and off, and thoroughly gray. Had to do it, though I didn’t feel like it any more than I feel like going to work this morning. Still, it was Labor Day and the last of the week–days the pool is open.

Kuba the Polish life-guard got a bit weepy later, when I climbed out at a minute after eight in the evening, and the regular season of 109 consecutive days the aquatic facility is open officially ended. He is leaving on Saturday for home, and there in the darkness, I had to give him a hug of dripping thanks.

The Board has benevolently authorized payment for the next two weekends of supervised swimming before the tarp comes out and the pool furniture is dragged down to the bowels of the building and the gate is locked for the season. I get the Regular Season honors again for the eighth straight year, first in, last out, and now we move into the Bonus Season.

The only way they can stop the record at this point is to heave a clock radio into the pool while I am still in it and electrocute me.

I was going to look for the Germans later today, since I will be near where I think they are in the District, but that may have to wait for dry weather. I don’t think they will mind.

It is curious to think of it now, since we are so determinedly Progressive in Arlington that you would quite forget we are in Virginia, and that the District of Columbia actually had capital punishment. I was looking for the Germans when I found the number: 118 people executed between 1853 to 1957.

Daniel Woodward was the first, race unknown, for murder, on September 2, 1853.

In all, there were sixty-eight hangings and fifty electrocutions. Philip Jackson, an African American convicted of rape, was the first to be electrocuted at the DC Jail on May 29, 1928.

The argument at the time was that the electric chair was more humane than the traditional hanging, which as I recall was the same as the argument for the Guillotine. They called The Chair here fondly “Old Sparky.”

The procedure was that the person would be attached to the chair-like wooden frame, and various cycles (differing in voltage and duration) of alternating current would be passed through the condemned's body to fatally damage the internal organs, including the brain.

This was at the time of the great current war between George Westinghouse (AC) and Thomas Alva Edison (DC). You would have thought the District would have gone with the latter, just out of brand loyalty, but not so.

The first jolt of AC was designed to cause immediate unconsciousness and the end of brain activity. The second was intended to cause fatal damage to the vital organs.

Coroners clinically noted that death was frequently caused by electrical overstimulation of the heart.

Versions of Old Sparky were most popular in the East. The one here was operational in the old DC Jail, which replaced the Arsenal Penitentiary at Fort McNair, where the Lincoln assassins were hanged. They ripped down most of the prison, leaving only the east end as what became “Quarters 20” and housing for the Generals who live at the Fort.

Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy, the first Army three-star lived in Quarters 20 not long after I went to school across the street. She was single then, and a mover and shaker in town. She once commented a bit wistfully how hard it was to find eligible prospects when you lived alone in the building where conspirators had been tried and then executed.

On post, the story was that ghost of Mary Surratt, the only woman executed in the District’s history haunted the Officer’s Club, and that the shade on the upper story window that overlooked the yard where the gallows had been would sometimes be inexplicably raised and lowered when no one was home.

The DC Jail that replaced the Arsenal was quite impressive in its time, 1872, to be precise. That was long before DC became a city, when it was a creature of the Congress and the President. They ripped it down about fifteen years after the last execution in the District, who happened to be one Robert Carter, a 28-year-old African American, for murder on April 26, 1957.

For most of a century, the DC jail was the focus of crime and punishment for the Federal enclave. There were never really that many executions here, when you consider the size of the place.

Nothing like Texas. Or Kentucky, for that matter. The electrocution record was set at Kentucky State Penitentiary in Eddyville on July 13, 1928, when seven men were executed, one after another.

That stands today, as far as I know. But Old Sparky was going to put the record to the test.

The way that came to be is sort of curious. John George Dash, the Nazi agent who had turned himself in and betrayed his comrades had anticipated that he would plead guilty to a quiet civilian trial and be let go.

On the 28th of June, though, Dash saw a newspaper headline through the slit in the door of his cell door trumpeting the brilliance of the FBI in foiling the Nazi plot.

Thinking the FBI had in turn betrayed him, Dash withdrew his guilty plea and insisted on his day in open court to explain what he had done and why.

That is one of the major reasons FDR was persuaded to opt for the secrecy of the military tribunal. The public had the useful impression that the FBI’s constant vigilance had stopped the Nazi threat, when it was actually a case of pure dumb luck.

The government did not want to broadcast how easily German U-boats had reached American shores undetected.

Anyway, the Commission went into session on the 4th of August, and two days later, Maj. Gen. Frank R. McCoy, USA, President Presiding, banged down the gavel and declared all eight of the Germans sentenced to be electrocuted in Old Sparky within 48 hours.

That would have made a record that would have beaten Kentucky.

As it turned out, they only got six, and I will have to tell you why tomorrow, when we go looking for Herbie Haupt, Heinrich Heinck, Edward Keiling, Herman Neubauer, Richard Quirin and Werner Thiel.

They are around here somewhere. Or rather, #276-281 are.

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