Buck Barrow - Early Life

Early Life

Ivan Barrow was born in Jones Prairie, Marion County, Texas, the third child of Henry and Cumie Barrow. An aunt, watching the little boy "running around acting like a horse," gave him the nickname "Buck." He stopped going to school around age 8 or 9, enjoying fishing and hunting far better.

In the early 1920s the older Barrow children left the family farm one by one, to marry and start careers in the city of Dallas. At 18 or 19 Buck too went to Dallas, ostensibly to work for his brother repairing cars, but he quickly became part of the West Dallas petty-criminal underworld. His sister Marie, barely school age when she and her parents moved to the West Dallas campground, remembered watching him put spurs on roosters for cockfighting, and his pit bull, which tore off the back of her dress. He married twice and divorced twice during this time, and had three children by those marriages. Just before Christmas 1926 Buck, 23, and Clyde, 17, were arrested with a truckful of stolen turkeys they intended to sell for the holidays. Buck took the rap for himself and his brother and went to jail for a week, but the turkey adventure was an ironic joke, as by now Buck was making ends meet by stealing automobiles in cities all over Texas and selling them for a comfortable $100 or so to fences out of state.

On November 11, 1929, Barrow met Blanche Caldwell in an unincorporated part of Dallas County called West Dallas. They fell in love almost immediately.

On November 29, 1929, several days after meeting Blanche, Buck Barrow was shot and captured following a burglary in Denton, Texas. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to four years in the Texas State Prison System. On March 8, 1930, however, Barrow escaped from the Ferguson Prison Farm near Midway, Texas. He simply walked out of the prison, stole a guard's car, and drove to his parents' place in West Dallas where Blanche was living.

In interviews with author/historian John Neal Phillips, Blanche was frank about the fact that she not only knew of Buck's escape, but that she hid with him and actually staged robberies with him. The notion that Blanche did not know until later that Buck was an escaped convict was fabricated by the Barrow family and Blanche herself as a means of convincing Missouri State authorities to reduce her prison sentence following her capture in July 1933.

On July 3, 1931, Blanche and Buck were married in Oklahoma. Blanche was not interested in pursuing a criminal career. She and other members of the Barrow family convinced Buck to turn himself in to Texas prison authorities and complete his sentence. Two days after Christmas 1931 his mother and his wife drove him to the gate of Huntsville penitentiary, where he told surprised prison officials that he had escaped almost two years before and needed to resume his sentence. They welcomed him in.

During his two years at Huntsville Buck sent repentant letters home, written for him by fellow prisoners. Before he had served two years of his six-year sentence he was abruptly pardoned, partly as part of Texas governor Ma Ferguson's plan to decrease prison crowding and partly due to the lobbying efforts of his wife and his mother.

Upon his release, March 22, 1933, Buck Barrow, in the company of Blanche, joined his younger brother Clyde, Bonnie Parker, and W. D. Jones in Joplin, Missouri where he participated in several armed robberies.