Joplin considers memorializing Bonnie and Clyde
In April of 1933, the legendary outlaws Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker spent 12 nights in a snug two-bedroom apartment over a garage behind 3347 Oak Ridge Drive in Joplin, Mo., leaving — in the usual hail of gunfire — after shooting two law enforcement officers to death.
For years, the garage apartment has been one of the more popular tourist attractions in Joplin, up there with the “Spook Light, Missouri’s most famous ghostly manifestation,” and the Everett T. Ritchie Tri-State Mineral Museum. In recent years, the Rev. Phil McClendon, who now owns the apartment, has been renting “The Joplin Hideout” to visitors ($80 a night, double occupancy, no smoking, no pets, bullets not included).
But our counterparts at The Joplin Globe warned last week that the property could be imperiled. “We would hate to look 20 years into the future and find that the home used as a hideout by the notorious gangsters Bonnie and Clyde had been replaced by a strip mall,” The Globe editorialized.
The Globe’s solution: The garage apartment should be nominated as a state historic site and then placed on the National Register of Historic Places. This would make it much more difficult for some future owner to raze or move the building.
Loath though we are to quarrel with another editorial page, we wonder about the wisdom of memorializing two people who specialized in killing cops. Strip away the romance and the Warren Beatty-Faye Dunaway movie, and Clyde Barrow was a stone killer and Bonnie Parker was his accomplice. Would Illinois declare John Wayne Gacy’s home a historic site? Should Kirkwood move to protect Michael Devlin’s apartment?
If we were Joplin, we’d work on that “Spook Light” deal instead.
I don’t see any reason that the state should get involved saving the “home” of Bonnie and Clyde. As a stretch, I can only see that as a result of the depression and prohibition, the lawlessness produced several levels of lawless persons including Bonnie and Clyde during The Great Depression. After all, the Barrow Gang acted all over the region not just in Joplin or Missouri. I certainly don’t mind it being help in private hands, such as the Jesse James hideout as Meramec Caverns. But to say that the garage apartment is some how special due to Bonnie and Clyde takes a stretch of the imagination.
Joplin is a good city and they have plenty to be proud of without the government praising the action of a lawless gang during hard time but making this a state historic site. But I can see the other side as well where they are significant historical figures and Missouri was part of the area they operated in. So I guess depending on your view of what the state should preserve there could be a argument for that too.
With that said, a creation of a Depression Era museum wouldn’t be a bad idea since it could included the good and the bad of the time and Bonnie and Clyde could be included in that as a small part of the reality of the day.