Word: alcatraz
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Spanish christened it Isla de los Alcatraces, Isle of Pelicans. But to generations of moviegoers and newspaper readers, the island in San Francisco Bay has been better known as the Rock, the ultimate roost for a tougher kind of fowl -the jailbird. Alcatraz was decommissioned as a prison in 1970 and is now part of the Golden Gate Recreation Area. Since it was opened to the public by the National Park Service last October, the U.S. equivalent of Devil's Island has become San Francisco's biggest tourist attraction...
...each for the round-trip boat ride and one-hour guided tour of the pen. Though there are 13 scheduled tours a day, come gale, fog or high water, tickets for weekends and holidays are sold out a month in advance. Tourists include some of the Indians who occupied Alcatraz in 1970, penologists, historians, police officers, prison wardens, troops of schoolchildren and an occasional former inmate (one ex-con insisted on getting married there, so that his wife would understand what he had been through...
...ordeal that he and other inmates endured is not underplayed. A staff of 13 young, well-briefed Park Service rangers go deep into Rock lore: the men who came there, how they were treated and mistreated, how they lived, died and plotted escape. "Men were never sent directly to Alcatraz," Ranger Jane Rowley points out. "They always came as transfers and were considered the hardcore troublemakers, the incorrigibles...
...into the cell, and I'll close the door, and you pretend you have to stay in there alone, 24 hours a day." After five minutes, the kids emerge, solemn-faced and committed to lives of virtue. Next, Sara points down ten stone steps to the "dungeon of Alcatraz." That was where the prison authorities would try to break a man, she explains, "when he was still able to say, 'I am me.' His hands were manacled to the walls, there was a lot of putrid water on the floor and lots of rats." The tour includes...
...actor out of curiosity," he said during a Kojak shooting break last week in Hollywood, "and at first my career was fascinating because the parts were varied." Savalas won an Academy nomination for playing a convict colleague of Burt Lancaster's in the 1962 movie Birdman of Alcatraz. The studios then typecast him in a long series of heavy roles, notably the swinish pervert in The Dirty Dozen (1967). When Hollywood sagged as a film center in the '60s, Savalas moved his wife Lynn and their three daughters to Europe, where he worked unenthusiastically as a villain...