Thursday, March 28, 2024

Bonnie and Clyde Historian to Speak

The Southlake Historical Society presents “An Evening with Robin Jett”, author of “Traveling History with Bonnie and Clyde”. The event is scheduled for Wednesday, Apr. 13, 2011 in the Southlake Town Hall third floor meeting room, 1400 Main, at 7 p.m.

Ms. Jett is a native Texan with Masters degrees in Education from UNT in Denton and History from Texas Woman’s University.  She teaches history at North Texas Central College and maintains a website,www.redriverhistorian.com, that offers information about the history of “where the South meets the West” including Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana.

Jett will share vintage photographs from her book, including sites the outlaw couple visited in Dallas, Tarrant and Denton counties and discuss the history of the Barrow gang and the Dallas area during the Great Depression.

Special guest for the evening will be Mr. Jack Cook, a longtime Southlake resident who saw as a teenager where Bonnie and Clyde gunned down two motorcycle patrolmen in April 1934 on Dove Road just east of Hwy. 114, in present-day Southlake.   A Texas Historical Commission granite marker commemorates the site.

In an oral history he gave the Southlake Historical Society, Mr. Cook describes that Easter Sunday scene:

“We’d left church, and Hubert [Long] wanted to go somewheres up towards Roanoke.  And we passed by Dove Road and there was a car up there.  And the car looked like Mamie Cook’s.  Mamie Cook had two daughters and she used to take them around to meet their boyfriends.  But it was exactly the same car.  Then we decided it wasn’t them.  We tried to get Hubert to go up there and see who they were.  He wouldn’t do it; he just kept on going.

We wasn’t gone 30 minutes and then we came back, there was that big crowd of people there.  Went up there and there was a great big blood spot right there on the road and they’d already come and picked up them [troopers’ bodies].  We’d just missed them a little bit.  And someone said too bad, good thing that Hubert didn’t want to go up there, and I said I was satisfied that they wouldn’t have bothered us because they wasn’t afraid of us.  They would probably had been friendly with us.”

The program is open to the public.  Donations at the door are greatly appreciated by the Southlake Historical Society, a 501 (c)(3) organization. For more information about the program, contact Connie Cooley at cecooley@verizon.net or 817-223-9606.

An image of a family bowling and dining

Photo of a solar eclipse