Epilogue

     An aunt once warned me "Be careful what you look for! You might not like what you find." Such was the case for my paternal grandfather. Family lore held only that he was booted from the family by Granny Beatty for his drinking. It was up to the grandchildren to unearth the rest of his story - the successful early bus company and garage, the bootlegging during Prohibition and beyond, the flight to Kentucky, the extradition from New Jersey, and the imprisonment back in Kentucky.  

     Orville Leslie Beatty remained a prisoner at the Kentucky State Reformatory without parole for the duration of his five-year sentence for grand larceny and illegal distribution of alcohol. Upon release in 1942, he was able to secure a job as a conductor for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, living estranged from the family in Wheeling, West Virginia until his death at the age of sixty-eight in 1948. 

      Governor Happy Chandler's experiment in humane rehabilitation at the new Kentucky State Reformatory apparently worked for my grandfather, but the prisoner allowances for interaction and free movement were soon rescinded. A series of escapes and dormitory fights in the early 1940s brought the return to locked cells and restricted movement. By then, Chandler had moved on from politics to become the second commissioner of professional baseball, succeeding Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis in 1945. 

     It was a delightful surprise of the writing process to discover a prison romance, but nothing in family history corroborates this particular fiction. While the attempted escape of black inmates through the women's building during the flood of 1937 is accurately portrayed, a crossover to the white side and subsequent escape of a prisoner named Robert Waters is entirely fictional, though a later stowaway attempt in a compartment created by stacks of license plates did occur. 

     Historical fiction is tricky writing, risking family alienation and non-family boredom. It's my hope that this attempt at minimizing both is as entertaining for the reader as it was insightful for the writer. In penning it, I came to know more of the man who had become a ghost in the family through his own actions, offering him a small measure of forgiveness and redemption.