The strangest of reunions

I'VE SPOKEN WITH enough inmates to know that jail is a humiliating, dangerous and depressing experience, punctuated by crushing stretches of boredom, loneliness and yearning.

Prison staffers don't speak highly of the corrections experience, either. But at least they get to escape when the shift is over.

So what could entice former inmates and jail employees to gather for a reunion at a place where hard time happened on both sides of the bars? Especially when the place is Eastern State Penitentiary, whose foreboding gates shut for good in 1971?

"If you lose your history, you lose yourself," says John Toth, 67, who was sentenced to Eastern State for a bank robbery he pulled off as a 21-year-old. The Fairmount prison's youngest inmate at the time, he was nicknamed "The Kid."

"I don't take pride in having been a prisoner, but it's part of my history. We have to preserve our history - good, bad and indifferent. Without it, we have no grounding. We lose our purpose and direction."

And without first-person voices like his in public discussion about the country's penal system, our decisions relating to law and order, crime and punishment, rehabilitation and redemption will lose purpose and direction, too.

Today, Toth plans to be among 19 former inmates and staffers once employed at the prison who'll share memories of what they experienced and witnessed at Eastern State, America's first penitentiary.

At 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m., they will host question-and-answer discussions; in between, they'll mingle with visitors at the 186-year-old fortress, which was declared a historic site in 1965 and is one of Philly's most popular tourist sites.

The alumni put real names, faces and experiences to a place that, for many, is known mostly as the site of "Terror Behind the Walls," the annual Halloween zombie-fest. And their memories are more riveting than anything a zombie might grunt.

Toth is a retired paralegal living a quiet widower's life in South Philly. But he gets worked up when he recalls, in gory detail, the suicide of fellow inmate Norman Maisenhelder in 1968.

Maisenhelder was employed in the prison clinic and beloved by inmates and staff alike. He'd killed his wife for abusing their daughter, and repeatedly petitioned the parole board for compassionate release. When his latest request was denied, he got his hands on a long kitchen knife and stabbed himself to death in plain view of Toth and others, after a two-hour standoff with staff.

"I saw the knife go in his stomach and come out his back," says Toth. "I was in shock for a week. He was a fine man, but the parole board played with him - they'd promise him parole, then deny him. Do that enough times, you make a man desperate."

Toth has happier memories of the inmate nicknamed "NoNo" who was the ace pitcher for the prison baseball team. One weekend, the guy pitched two no-hitters against a visiting major league farm team. With each at bat, the pitcher would wag a finger at the hitter, taunt, "No, no!" - and then strike him out.

"He could've pitched for the major leagues," says Toth. "He was like a lot of guys I met who had had committed a serious wrong against the law but who had serious talent, too - musicians, artists, singers, athletes. Prison claimed them before their talent could direct them."

Working at Eastern State could change lives as drastically as imprisonment did. Former guard Robert "Snake" Williams, 73, began his corrections career at the prison after President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. The act finally allowed blacks like Williams access to civil-service jobs.

"Myself and about 15 others were the first African-Americans to come into the system as guards at state prisons," he says. "But we were paid less than white guards and treated badly. They didn't want us there, and prisoners wouldn't take orders from us."

When chaos would erupt on a prison block, supervisors sent in the black guards first, as a buffer for the white guards coming in behind them, Williams says.

The treatment worsened at Graterford Prison in Montgomery County, where Williams was transferred when Eastern State closed in 1971.

"Nepotism was rampant," he says. "Everyone was related. The Klan was big in that area. Some of the guards were members."

It didn't matter to them that Williams was a Marine Corps vet with solid experience in military corrections. His skin color trumped his accomplishments.

"I want people to know the sacrifices we made," Williams says of himself and his black co-workers. And he wants to explain how their determination to educate themselves (he earned a degree from Penn State) and excel eventually propelled them into supervisory positions.

"Prisons are so different today," says Williams' former co-worker, guard Linwood Johnson, 74. "Compared to what inmates had back then"- like a lone television shared by an entire prison - "today's prisons seem like country clubs."

What has not changed is the revolving door that prisons provide for some offenders. Johnson chuckles when he recalls the inmate who returned to Eastern State hours after his release.

"He'd gone to his girlfriend's house, but she didn't tell him she'd moved while he was away," Johnson says. "He needed cash, so he snatched a woman's purse. Turns out she was a judge. He was back with us that evening."

Eastern State's alumni provide a living bridge to its historic past, says Eastern State program director Sean Kelley. It's a connection Kelley is always trying to provide - a tough job, given how the audience for the country's historic sites are "aging out" of attending.

"We're constantly looking for ways to attract new visitors," he says. "Terror Behind the Walls," for example, the prison's major source of funding (it raises millions), has nothing to do with incarceration, but it finances new programming while bringing younger people to a site they may not otherwise visit.

"It drives a ton of traffic to the prison for our regular programming," he says, which is related to issues of corrections, justice and the historic role Eastern State continues to play in both.

"We feel so lucky that these guys" - the reuniting inmates and staffers - "come back every year," he says, although the aging group gets smaller with every reunion. "The prisoners, especially, are able to describe what it was like to have every memory during a certain period of their lives take place in one single place. They have a relationship to this building that none of us can imagine."

But once a year, thanks to the reunions, we can try.

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