Donna Fielder

I’ve been reading the stories and watching television shows that have proliferated this month in honor of the anniversary. Tomorrow, I’m taking a Bonnie and Clyde tour around Dallas and the spots made famous by their attentions.

One thing that probably won’t be on the tour: They died owing D.R. “Red” Boyd a dime — the price of a newspaper.

He was a habitué of Ruby’s Diner, and I met him there nearly 20 years ago. He’s gone now, but I went back and found the story as he told it to me.

Red was born in 1920. He lived on the east side of Lewisville Lake, and when he was 13 he started a newspaper route around the lake.

Bonnie and Clyde were notorious in the early 1930s, roaming the Southwest robbing small banks, restaurants, grocery stores and gas stations before being ambushed by Frank Hamer and a bunch of other officers in Louisiana.

It wasn’t like they didn’t deserve killing, mind you. They’d shot down a lot of people, some of them police.

A month before they died, Red was walking his newspaper route near the Lake View Marina.

“I was walking and carrying my newspapers in a paper sack,” he told me back then. “I kept hearing something like ‘rtrtrtrtrtrtrtrt,’ ” Red said. “I turned and started up to where the Duck Inn is now.”

He came upon a brown Ford with a woman standing beside it and a man nearby.

“She was holding a machine gun. He was over at a ditch. He had set up two buckets with a board across them and was putting cans on the board. Then she raised that machine gun and mowed them down. Then he set them back up again,” Red said.

“Every time she’d knock those cans off she’d look over at me and smile and I’d smile back at her. I didn’t know who they were. Then the man walked over and said, ‘Let’s see your paper, Sonny.’ I handed him one. He unfolded it and laid it across the hood of the car. And there their picture was, in front of that same car, her holding the machine gun. It said ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ underneath.”

The kid who had bumbled into the outlaws’ target practice just stood there.

“He went back and commenced to putting up tin cans again. And she mowed them down again. And she’d smile at me every time. She was a pretty woman — long sandy looking hair down on her shoulders. Then Clyde looked over and me and said ‘Sonny, don’t you think you’d better be a’goin’?’ And I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ Just as polite as I could.”

So he turned his back on the woman with the machine gun.

“She started shooting again – rtrtrtrtrtrtrt! And every time I heard it the hide would go up on my neck. And I thought ‘He didn’t ever pay me for that paper.’ But I thought I was smart for not asking for it.”

The next month Bonnie and Clyde died in a shot-up brown Ford. And two years later, Red went to the Centennial in Dallas, where the Ford was on display.

“It was full of bullet holes,” he said. “But it was the same car I seen.”

In 1967, Warren Beatty was in Denton promoting the movie, Bonnie and Clyde, which was shown first here because it was filmed mostly around the county. Red met Beatty coming out of the Campus Theatre. They walked down the street to a restaurant, and he told the movie star his story.

“He patted his foot,” Red said. “And he said, ‘I would have given anything to have put that in the movie.’”

I lost track of Red after that. If he’s alive, he’s 89. And if he’s alive he’s still telling that story. And every time he repeats the part about the rtrtrtrtrtrtrtrtrtt of the machine gun, I know the hair stands up on the back of his neck again.

DONNA FIELDER can be reached at 940-566-6885. Her e-mail address is dfielder@dentonrc.com.