Arizona Nostalgia

A bit of Arizona nostalgia today. This Google Earth shot is of Dr. Tom's Place, a compound where I rented a small room for five years while attending the University of AZ in Tucson. It's directly across the street from the Dillinger House, where members of John Dillinger's gang were captured after a brief fight in 1934. Dillinger was the inspiration for Humphrey Bogart, as the gangster Duke Mantee, in the 1936 movie "The Petrified Forest", which also starred Leslie Howard and Bette Davis.

This article gives more information (although they do get the address wrong):

The Dillinger gang, hiding from its recent East Chicago, Ind., bank robbery, might have enjoyed Tucson weather longer if a grease fire hadn't started in the basement of the Hotel Congress. Flames roared up the elevator shaft, engulfing the third floor. Hotel occupants quickly evacuated, but gang members delayed trying to collect their bags. With the hall blocked by fire and smoke, the gang members retreated to a window, where the Tucson Fire Department rescued them with an aerial ladder. As soon as he was rescued, gang member Charles Makley tipped firemen William Benedict and Kenneth Pender $12 to climb back up and retrieve his bags. That baggage would be the downfall of the Dillinger gang.

...After the 1934 blaze, firemen Benedict and Pender were thumbing through a copy of True Detective magazine and noticed two of the magazine's "wanted men" seemed to be the same as the ones eager to have their luggage rescued. Suspecting they had big-time criminals there, the police set up stakeouts. The work paid off. Makley was captured at Grabe Electric Co., where he was looking for a radio that monitored police calls. The local lady with him was released and cautioned to "pick her friends more carefully."

Next to be drawn into the police net were Russell "Art" Clark and his girlfriend, Opal Long, arrested at a rented house at 327 N. Second Ave. Clark and Long put up a fight until a knock on the head convinced Clark to cooperate.