Oklahoma News Building, Oklahoma City

October 22nd, 1934.

I was writing about cotton when the teletype killed Pretty Boy Floyd.

A Tuesday afternoon, I had a half-finished piece on the fall harvest in the roller

and a cup of cold coffee at my elbow, and I was trying to make bail counts sound like news when the

wire machine across the room started chattering. Not the usual lazy rhythm. This was fast. Urgent.

A staccato burst that made heads turn before anyone read a word. I walked over.

The paper spooled out in a thin ribbon, and the first two words came through in capitals.

Floyd dead. The rest followed in fragments, killed in a cornfield. East Liverpool, Ohio, federal

agents, shot running. The room came alive. Reporters reaching over each

other for the wire, editors hollering from doorways, somebody already on the telephone to the

city desk. The whole building shifted into that electric pitch you get when a big story breaks

and everybody wants to touch it first. I stood still. I was the only person in that building who had something the rest of them didn't.

Two years earlier, on a November afternoon in a Peacain Grove in eastern Oklahoma,

I had sat across from Charles Arthur Floyd and watched him cock his foot on a car bumper

and talk about his life like a man with nowhere particular to be. He was grinning that day.

He pointed at a thicket and said there ought to be good quail hunting over there. He told me

things he had never told any reporter and never would again, because I was the only one who

ever got to him. I had carried those words in a shorthand notebook hidden inside a manuscript for two years.

Couldn't use them. Couldn't speak them. The world wouldn't allow it while the man was alive

and the government was hunting him. The teletype was still chattering. I walked back to my desk

and pulled the cotton harvest out of the roller. I rolled in a fresh sheet. I didn't write one article. I began writing a series.

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