Word: caryll
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...Said the warden: "I am at the cell with the condemned man." Ordered Governor Brown: "Well, you can send him back upstairs. I am granting him a 60-day reprieve." In his "holding cell," only 15 paces and ten hours from death in the gas chamber, hawk-nosed Convict Caryl Whittier Chessman, 38, self-admitted hardened criminal, got the news from the warden, asked incredulously: "You're not kidding...
...death on two of those crimes, both of them kidnaping for robbery, with bodily harm. In itself, the man, his crime and his punishment would scarcely cause a ripple of interest beyond the California state line. Yet, in the days preceding the reprieve, concern for the fate of Caryl Chessman had swept itself into a passionate whirlwind that whipped around the globe, gathered up pleas for clemency and dumped them in an overwhelming cascade on Pat Brown's shoulders...
...Strangely enough, the man who created all the noise was neither lawyer, nor governor, nor humanitarian, but the criminal himself. Self-styled descendant of famed Poet John Greenleaf Whittier, Caryl Chessman was the son of an unstable Hollywood movie-studio worker...
...California's San Quentin, Convict-Author Caryl (Cell 2455, Death Row) Chessman, 38, and a score of other condemned men gathered in their recreation room to watch the Rose Bowl football game (see SPORT) on television. Next thing guards knew, Kidnaper-Rapist Chessman and several other cons were pummeling one of their number who, even on death row, is a pariah to his fellow prisoners. By the time the brawl was stopped, the TV set lay smashed on the floor. Chessman, who has a date with the gas chamber in mid-February (his eighth such appointment...
...audiences unquestionably laugh at Bruce, much of the time he merely shouts angrily and tastelessly at the way of the world (on religious leaders: "They have missed the boat. 'Thou shall no kill.' they say, and then one of them walks comfortingly to the death chamber with Caryl Chessman.''). Some of the material springs from his own checkered life (the son of divorced parents, he ran away from home at twelve). His political routines recall Of Thee I Sing with some venom added, as when Ike says to Sherman Adams: "All right, Sherm, you can level...