{"id":6045,"date":"2019-11-24T09:00:20","date_gmt":"2019-11-24T14:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/?p=6045"},"modified":"2019-11-12T12:09:30","modified_gmt":"2019-11-12T17:09:30","slug":"some-interesting-bits-of-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/some-interesting-bits-of-history\/","title":{"rendered":"SOME INTERESTING BITS OF HISTORY"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A longtime student of Depression-era bad guys and the lawmen who chased them, I came late to the 2007 book \u201cThe Complete Public Enemy Almanac<\/a>\u201d by William Helmer and Rick Mattix.\u00a0 The latter I\u2019m unfamiliar with, but Helmer is perhaps the leading authority on the topic. Never got to meet the man, though I talked to him once on the phone. Helmer created the whimsical John Dillinger Died For You Society<\/a>, was the only man to ever get a pro-gun article into Playboy <\/em>magazine, and wrote the excellent historical text on the Thompson submachine gun, \u201cThe Gun That Made the Twenties Roar<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few takeaways:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Helmer and\nMattix wrote, \u201cHoldups became so common during the Great Depression that few\n\u2018respectable\u2019 people ventured out after dark without some kind of weapon.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had known\nthat the notorious Baby Face Nelson was saved from death during a bank robbery\nwhen a .22 slug fired by an armed citizen stopped on the back plate of his\nbulletproof vest. I had not been aware, however, that Nelson was wearing armor\non the day of his death as well.  According\nto Helmer and Mattix, \u201c\u2026when \u2018Baby Face\u2019 Nelson went down in battle in November\n1934, his legs were full of buckshot, but his vest had stopped all but one of\nthe .45-caliber machine-gun slugs fired at him by FBI agents. (The one that\nmissed the vest mortally wounded him in the lower stomach.) The next January,\nthe bureau laid siege to a Chicago apartment building occupied by Russell\nGibson of the Barker-Karpis Gang, and he died when his vest was penetrated by a\nmetal-jacketed rifle bullet.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The authors\nattribute to John Dillinger the quote, \u201cNever trust a woman or an automatic\npistol.\u201d  Funny thing about that. On the\nnight of his death, Dillinger was accompanied by Anna Sage, who had set him up\nfor Melvin Purvis of the FBI, and he died with a Colt .380 automatic pistol in\nhis hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0\u201cThe Complete Public Enemy Almanac<\/a>\u201d turned out to be a great read. Recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A longtime student of Depression-era bad guys and the lawmen who chased them, I came late to the 2007 book \u201cThe Complete Public Enemy Almanac\u201d by William Helmer and Rick Mattix.\u00a0 The latter I\u2019m unfamiliar with, but Helmer is perhaps the leading authority on the topic. Never got to meet the man, though I talked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":6046,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-6045","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6045"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6045\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6048,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6045\/revisions\/6048"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}