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.43Even as the Washington Post wrote glowingly of the brave fed-eral men it carried such subheads as “Dillinger Blazed His way toThrone of Underworld with Machine Guns,” “Bandit’s Success inBank Robberies and Jail Breaks Amazing,” and “Outlaw Shot Way outof Many Traps Set by U.S.Agents.” Over and over editorial writerscondemned the dead man’s acts only to return to his popularity.Dillinger had hero worshippers all across the country, the Sheboygan(Wisc.) Press noted, and women everywhere were ready to be hiscompanion.44The guilty pleasure of a criminal being so attractive was a big partof the Dillinger story’s appeal.An article by Joseph K.Shepard inthe Indianapolis Star captured some of this paradox by noting the dead outlaw’s odd combination of fatalism and flippancy.It was hissense of humor, Shepard believed, that got him into trouble.Dillingerdid not take the world seriously enough, but always played the wiseguy, toyed with life itself.Shepard wrote that he gained insight intoDillinger when he met him in the Tucson jail, then talked about himfor two days with Pierpont, Makley, and Clark as they rode the trainback to Ohio to stand trial.Dillinger’s whole philosophy since prisoncentered on living life to the fullest: “Might as well go early in themorning,” he used to say, “stay all day, bring your lunch and enjoythe fireworks at night.” He joked, “The world’s a very dangerousplace; few get out of it alive.” 45Dillinger’s “wise cracks,” his assumption that life was fleetingand nihilistic, did not amuse Shepard, but he had to admit that theoutlaw lived and died by his code.If something as serious as prisonwas absurd—“ ‘A jail is just a nut with a worm in it.The worm canalways get out’ ”—then everything was absurd: “It was meat andgood red wine to him to walk right by a Federal agent and flash histwisted smile when the whole United States was in arms against him.It was the bread of life to him to walk in disguise into night clubs and amusement places, flaunting his presence, in the hottest spots in thecountry.He couldn’t leave the cities and the night life alone.Every‘coup’ of Dillinger’s was just one more joke on the world.” It wasthis jocularity—living life on the edge, thumbing his nose at the law,“You Can’t Get Away with It” | 167laughing all the way—that carried him out of Crown Point singing“The Last Roundup” in March, that brought him to Mooresville for afamily dinner in April, that took him in the end with not one but twowomen to the Biograph.And he did it all knowing “that every timehe stepped into the street the lightning might strike.” Shepard clearly was torn, admiring Dillinger’s swagger and style yet deeply disturbedby his refusal to take life seriously, his insistence on running through his wild year as if deeds had no consequences.An outlaw bloody oftooth and claw was bad enough.For him to morph into a charismaticman, full of life, one who invited us to join him in mocking grim-faced authority, in laughing at the self-important likes of J.EdgarHoover and Homer Cummings, that was truly unsettling.46Robert J.Casey underscored these same themes in his three-partcolumn, “Dillinger, the Country Boy Killer,” published in the ChicagoDaily News during the week after the outlaw’s death.Following a childhood of small-town boredom, Dillinger “settled down to a lifewhich promised to be just as deadly dull as his boyhood had been.”Something in the young man rebelled; he got drunk, mugged FrankMorgan, and spent his twenties behind bars.Folks in Mooresvillewould never let him forget he was an ex-con, so Dillinger embracedhis fate.“I said to myself, ‘Johnny, you’re a criminal now.by the free gift of a judge and jury and the best thing you can do is to study forthe job ahead in your new profession
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