Word: pleasanton
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...Rather Be In Jail." Around Pleasanton, Kans. (pop. 1,200), Hall's father was regarded as a fine lawyer but a hard man who once exacted as his fee in a homicide case his acquitted client's whole 600-acre farm. Carl Austin Hall had a mentally deficient older brother who died at five in a mental institution, sent there because "the folks didn't want Carl brought up around him." But as a boy, Carl himself was always in trouble, always trying to cheat someone, always bragging about how he would one day make big money...
...parents dead, Carl Hall went back to Pleasanton to receive a $200,000 inheritance which included a large home and 1,170 acres of fertile Missouri and Kansas farm land. He sold the family property as fast as possible. "Sentiment," said he, "don't mean a damn thing to me." Pleasanton was too small for Carl Hall. "People got their noses up at me," he complained. "They're jealous because I got money. I'll show 'em how money and brains can really get goin...
With that, he went off with the wife of a Pleasanton businessman and took her to Kansas City, where, after her divorce, he married her. He used to come back to Pleasanton in a Cadillac convertible with men whom he fatuously introduced as "my broker" and "my lawyer." During the next four years, he lost money playing the stock market, in liquor-store ventures and in an airplane crop-dusting business. He drank and gambled. His wife left him. He turned to passing bad checks in hospitals, and then to holding up cab drivers. In 1952, he went...
...dusk fell over the little one-street town of Pleasanton (pop. 2,073), 5° plain Texans gathered in the white frame First Baptist Church. Many of the men-ranchers, merchants, peanut farmers, railroad workers-were in shirt sleeves. Their women wore wash dresses. They had come to pray for the success of the San Francisco conference...
From then on the trails of both parties converged and became bloody. A dead nightwatchman surrounded by cartridge shells bore evidence that the second band had passed through Chetopa, Kans. after leaving Pleasanton. When the Wood car was swapped for another next day at Siloam Springs, Ark., a gunfight with peace officers took place. One convict group marched into the Bank of Chelsea (Okla.), ran out with $2,500 in cash under a barrage from officers and townsfolk. One of the convicts, Lewis Bechtel, was captured while eating at a farm house near Dripping Springs, Okla. Another, Frank Sawyer...