The Press: Acid & Ink

The free home delivery offered by the Jefftown Journal is hardly a bargain. All who read the paper live within the walls of the Missouri State Prison at Jefferson City, where the Journal is printed by its inmate staff. The Journal’s policy is to look for the silver lining; it reports the bleak news of prison life in the brightest voice it can muster, and it encourages prisoners to work toward rehabilitation. But most Journal readers share a common misery that goes untouched by such institutional cheer. Lately they have found a wry spokesman in the Journal’s superb cartoonist, Prisoner 69652, Sammy Reese, murderer of two.

Reese’s cartoons are a mixture of ink and acid. “You live your life sentence, I’ll live mine,” one Reese convict growls at another over mess-hall coffee. Says a guard to a prisoner in solitary on bread and water: “White or rye?” Says an inmate to a guard: “Let’s get one thing straight, McPherson: I live here, you just work here.” Occasionally Reese slips into macabre, sick-style prison humor: “Ain’t I a pain in the neck?” says the hangman to the condemned. But some of his cartoons rise to a choking pitch of bitterness, a stifled scream: “You with the dignity,” a guard shouts at a curiously proud marcher in a gang of grey. “Get back in line.”

Forgotten Interest. Reese was only 19 and only four months married when he killed his first man, a clerk in a liquor store he was trying to rob. Only six months before, he had been released from the reformatory after serving time for two earlier holdups. A month after his first murder, he killed a night clerk while robbing a hotel. After a fierce gun battle with St. Louis police, he was arrested, tried, convicted of both murders and sentenced to death. The prosecutor called him “the most cold-blooded murderer I’ve ever seen.”

Reese won a new trial and was sentenced to two consecutive life terms plus 75 years. During his stay in jail, he rediscovered a forgotten interest in art, and, encouraged by Hoodlum Priest Dismas Clark (TIME, March 3. 1961) and St. Louis Judge David FitzGibbon, studied painting and drawing. Once in prison, he organized art classes. Soon Reese and his students were exhibiting (and winning prizes) in outside art shows. When cramped quarters caused the classes to be stopped, Reese asked for a few months in solitary confinement. In the company of his own thoughts. Reese became a cartoonist.

Grinning Wryly. “It’s a matter of mood with me,” Reese says. “Sometimes I’ll work right through the night in my cell.” When he works all night, Reese sits Buddha-fashion on his cot and draws by the light that shines-in through the bars from the guards’ catwalk. In the language of self-study prisoners soon learn, Reese explains himself: “This is a catharsis for me in a sense. I was a little rough at first, but now I’ve toned down a little.

The cartoons are more subtle, or maybe I’m growing up a little more in my ideas.” As a souvenir from his troubled past, Reese is still unstable, often rips up hundreds of cartoons in an explosion of anger.

But his work has won the attention of his professional hero, Bill Mauldin, whom he met through correspondence when Mauldin was on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “It’s genuine,” Mauldin says of Reese’s work, “good irony. He’s shrugging off prison life, grinning wryly about it. The cartoons aren’t polished or professional, but they’re strong; they tell the story.”

Equally important to Reese is another artistic success: five of his paintings now hang in the chambers of Judge FitzGibbon, who was among the first to find something worth saving in a man condemned to die.