⭐ Feature: The Coast is Clear and The Great Escape from Alcatraz
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As accurately depicted in the 1979 classic Escape from Alcatraz, escaping the rock was damn near impossible. That didn't stop 14 different escape attempts during the duration of the prison's existence, involving 36 prisoners. Considering that the lifetime number of inmates was 1,545 men, a pretty small sample size in the scheme of things.

The efforts to escape Alcatraz had to be bold, since leaving the island was extremely treacherous if not on a boat. Joe Bowers tried to climb over a fence but was shot and died from his injuries. The following year, Theodore Cole and Ralph Rose escaped and attempted to swim to San Francisco, only to get caught in a storm and drift away at sea, and their bodies were never found. ♪

Hi, everybody. My name is Shawna, and this is the American English Podcast. My goal here is to teach you the English spoken in the United States. Through common expressions, pronunciation tips, and interesting cultural snippets or stories, I hope to keep this fun, useful, and interesting. Let's do it. Hi, everyone. This is episode 107.

And as you can see from the title, we'll be working on another expression, the coast is clear. As usual, you'll hear a joke, you'll get to practice your pronunciation, and learn a fun fact about the United States.

Today, that fun fact is all about Alcatraz, an island or prison, I should say, former prison, off the coast of San Francisco, which housed some of the United States' most infamous criminals from 1934 until 1963.

One former resident you may know of is Al Capone, the American gangster, mobster, you can say, also known by the nicknames Public Enemy No. 1 and, of course, Scarface.

Alcatraz is a fascinating place for its complex history and twisted stories, and today you're going to hear one of them, the story of how three men managed to escape what was considered the most secure prison at the time. This story baffles historians even today, and the U.S. government still has no idea what happened to the three men.

In fact, it is the longest manhunt in U.S. history.

I can't wait to talk about it. It's very exciting. So be sure to stay tuned for the second part of this episode. The audio you heard in this introduction was taken from a video titled, What It Was Like to Be an Inmate at Alcatraz. That was by the Weird History Channel on YouTube. The link to that will be provided in the transcript.

which you can access by purchasing Season 3 on AmericanEnglishPodcast.com. Without any further ado, we'll start with a joke. Are you ready? A police officer walks up to a pothead and says, How high are you? And the pothead responds, No, officer. It's high. How are you? Do you get it?

A pothead is the name we give to a person who smokes a lot of weed, so a lot of marijuana or cannabis. Now, when you're high, it means that you're under the influence of a drug. In this joke, the police officer wanted to know how messed up the pothead was, how high he was, how much he had smoked.

The pothead's response gives us the impression that he had smoked a lot. The officer approached the pothead and said, how high are you? And the pothead responded, no, officer, it's high. How are you? So we see here that the pothead was correcting the police officer, thinking that he'd asked the question incorrectly.

Let's move on to the expression for the day, which is the coast is clear. We'll start with the definitions of each word first. The coast. The coast is part of land. It's the part of land that's near the sea. The land's edge. My family and I don't live on the coast. We live inland.

So when you're not on that border, that edge near the beach and the ocean, you live inland. Is is the third person singular conjugation of the verb to be. She is a nice girl. He is a nice guy. Of course, we can say she's or he's if we use the contraction. And clear means transparent or unclouded.

Clear can also mean empty or void of something else. The water I like to drink is clear. If the coast is clear, literally, there is no fog, haze, or clouds in sight. If it's a clear day, I can see things off the coast. For example, islands out in the water are

Maybe sailboats, ships, maybe dolphins, whales, and sea life?

The expression, however, the figurative meaning of the coast is clear is used to say that you can do something without being seen. To say the coast is clear is similar to saying there's nobody around, nobody is here, you won't get caught doing whatever you're planning on doing, you can complete the action without being seen,

The origin of the expression dates back to the 1500s. Back then, it was used by the military and naval officers to let people know that there were no ships in sight. The coast is clear.

Let's go through some examples of how we would use the expression, the coast is clear, in everyday situations. Example number one, a mama bird is guarding her nest with her life. When her baby birds are hungry, she decides she needs to leave the nest in order to find food.

There's a problem, though. There's a cat that lives nearby, and she's deathly afraid that the cat will steal or kill her babies. Before looking for food, she looks all around for the cat, and when the coast is clear, she flies down and searches for worms.

She decides to search for worms when the coast is clear, when there's nobody in sight, when she won't be seen, and the cat won't attack, because it's the best time to search for worms. Example number two. Imagine a girlfriend that has been cheating on her boyfriend for months.

One day, while her lover is visiting her, she hears her boyfriend come into the house and is so afraid that she's going to get caught. Now is the time for her lover to escape without being seen, so she tells him, the coast is clear. In other words, go now, it's safe, you won't be seen, you won't get caught, the coast is clear.

Example number three. Imagine a group of delinquent teenagers in a grocery store. Delinquent means likely to commit a crime. This group decides that they're going to shoplift. They're going to take something from the store without permission. One of the kids is on the lookout, and when the cashier and store manager are out of sight, he tells the others, the coast is clear.

In other words, now is the moment to steal if you're going to steal. No one will catch you. It is safe to make a move. The coast is clear. It's important to know that this expression is commonly used in situations where people are doing something they shouldn't be doing. As you can see here, someone stealing from a grocery store might use it. They don't want someone to see them doing that. Cheating, the lover doesn't want the boyfriend to see.

In any sort of situation like that, it would be very common to use. Although, as we saw also from the animal example, you can just use it when it's safe to make a move. The coast is clear. Let's go ahead and do some pronunciation exercises. We'll use the statement, Hey guys, the coast is clear. Repeat after me. Hey. Hey guys. Hey guys, the coast.

Hey guys, the coast is clear. Repeat after me. I told him the coast was clear. You told him the coast was clear. He or she told him the coast was clear. We told him the coast was clear. They told him the coast was clear. That's it for the pronunciation section. It's time for a very interesting story. Today we're going to talk about Alcatraz and the Great Escape.

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Off the coast of San Francisco, there are a few islands. One of them is smack dab in the middle of the San Francisco Bay, and it's called Alcatraz. The name comes from La Isla de los Alcatraces. It was the name a Spanish lieutenant named Juan Manuel de Ayala that he gave it back in 1776 when he sailed by.

It translates to something along the lines of the Island of the Pelicans in Archaic Spanish. And that's all it was back then, a 22-acre piece of land covered in birds. Today, Alcatraz is one of the most visited tourist locations in the United States.

And for good reason. From 1934 to 1963, a prison there was home to the most notorious criminals in U.S. history. 1,545 feared criminals walked through its eerie concrete corridors, including some famous names you may know, like Robert Stroud,

aka the Birdman of Alcatraz, Machine Gun Kelly, and of course, the infamous mobster Al Capone, or Scarface. There are a number of bizarre and shocking things that have happened throughout history there, and the history with the United States inhabiting it started back in the 1850s.

If you remember back to episode number nine, California became part of the U.S., along with Texas and New Mexico, at the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848. And then shortly afterwards, gold was discovered in California.

Many of the residents of the state at that time got extremely rich. I mean, farmers, salesmen, waiters, just your average Joe, went from rags to riches overnight. In fact, the prospect of finding gold to build a better life was so attractive for so many people that hundreds and thousands flocked to Northern California in and around 1849. We call

We called these people, these newcomers, 49ers, like the San Francisco football team. And a lot of them invested in the city and settled there.

As our president at the time, President Miller Fillmore, saw it, San Francisco needed to be protected. It was the heart of the West Coast. So he ordered Alcatraz to be developed. In the early 1850s, a military fort was built there with troops and with cannons. They were ready for an invasion, but there weren't any attacks. Instead, up until 1850,

the 1930s, the facility was used on and off as a prison of sorts. Inmates, which is the name that we give to people who reside in a prison, so the prisoners, were mostly groups of people who opposed the U.S. government. During the Civil War in 1861, for example, sympathizers and just soldiers of the Confederates were housed there.

Shortly after that, Native Americans who opposed the U.S. government when they were attempting to assimilate them also stayed in Alcatraz. The 1930s was the height of organized crime in the U.S. Left and right, criminals were being thrown behind bars. Some were managing very cleverly to break out of prisons across the U.S.,

As a solution, the government ordered a federal penitentiary to be built on Alcatraz. What was left of that military fort was enhanced to build the most secure prison in the world. At least they said it was the most secure. The prison cells were built 9 by 5 feet in size, and they were essentially concrete blocks with no windows.

Each wall in a cell had a steel gate that couldn't be cut through, quote, not even with a hacksaw blade. No keys were used to get in and out of these cells either. With a pull of one bar, the prison guard on duty could open and slam all of the doors at once. Just beyond the prison walls, there were two barbed wire fences 12 feet high.

If that wouldn't inhibit prison escapes, perhaps the island's remoteness and inaccessibility certainly would. The prison is located one and a half to two miles from land, to the east of the world-famous Golden Gate Bridge. It sits in isolation out there, surrounded by strong ocean currents and icy water.

In a video by Obus Media, a former prisoner of Alcatraz was interviewed, and in the conversation, he claimed that he'd want to escape from anywhere, but from Alcatraz, it seemed impossible, so he gave up thinking about it. Guards were always on duty, and they did regular checks on the inmates to be sure that they were doing what they were supposed to be doing, for example, their assigned jobs during the day, or

or sleeping in their beds at night. In spite of the circumstances, though, some brave souls tried to escape. As we heard in the intro, 14 attempts of escape were made. 36 men total tried it. So it seemed impossible. That is until June 12th, 1962, when prison guards who were doing their rounds found that three men were not in bed.

In their place, lying on their pillows and nestled in their sheets, were dummies with flesh-painted faces and real human hair. So who were these three men? Who was missing? One man was named Frank Lee Morris, and he was the mastermind of this escapee pack.

Since childhood, he was a troublemaker. He'd committed every crime under the sun, from possession of narcotics to car theft and armed robbery. Frank landed himself behind bars in a Louisiana prison in 1950, but managed to escape. When he was recaptured in 1960, he was sent to Alcatraz.

For the sake of this story, it's important to note that Frank was brilliant. At one point during his prison sentence, his IQ test was taken, and he scored a 133, which put him in the top two percentile of the general public. The two other men, who, like Frank, disappeared from Alcatraz on that June night, were brothers, John and Clarence Anglin.

They were just a year apart in age and were partners in crime, a team of bandits. In their early 20s, they started robbing banks together. And at their last bank heist in Alabama, the cops arrested them and found that they were robbing the bank with toy guns, guns made of plastic. According to the brothers, they never wanted to hurt anyone. They just wanted to apparently rob some banks.

There was actually a fourth prisoner who took part in this master plan, but on the night of the escape, he got left behind. His name was Alan West, and thanks to him, the details of the rest of this story are known today. As soon as Morris, the Anglin brothers, and West had come to Alcatraz, they were already ready to get out.

All had a history of theft and breakout attempts. And at Alcatraz, it took about six months to put a complex plan together. First and foremost, they would need to be able to get out of their cell without being seen.

No key existed to open the gate at the front, and going through the bars was impossible. However, there was a small vent in the wall, and they realized that if they widened it, they could possibly squeeze their bodies through the hole and get out. So they did this. They widened the vent hole with spoons that they brought from the mess hall,

Mess hall is another term we use for dining commons or the cafeteria. And a hodgepodge of other little things they used as tools. They even made a drill out of an old vacuum motor. Every day they would take their spoons and tools and scrape away the concrete of the vent.

This, of course, made some noise, so they made sure to take advantage of the prison music hour and work as fast as possible. As the songs played, they scraped. And little by little, the vent space widened and became big enough for their bodies to fit through.

Each night, the guards would walk by the cells and count the prisoners. When it was the last count of the day, Morris, the Anglin brothers, and West were ready to work. When the coast was clear, they would slide through the hole and then cover it up with cardboard they had painted to mask the entrance they'd dug.

On the other side of the vent was a sort of utility space where they couldn't be seen by watchful eyes. There were only pipes there, and they would shimmy up them to the top floor, which had a block of empty cells. That's where they built their workshop.

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First and foremost, they needed to fool the guards into thinking that they were still in bed. So they crafted dummies, in other words, fake human bodies, to take their place in bed. They molded heads out of a mixture of toothpaste, concrete dust, toilet paper, and soap. They painted their faces with flesh-colored paint.

and even gathered real human hair from the barbershop and attached it to the head, where the eyebrows should be, and in place of eyelashes. The end effect was surprisingly well done. Each head resembled each of the escapees. Secondly, they needed to piece together a boat and life vests.

According to the FBI, they'd managed to steal 50 raincoats and stitch them together to build a 6 by 14 foot raft. Logically, a boat stitched together with a bunch of different pieces would probably fill up with water. So to seal the seams where the stitches were, they used hot steam pipes found inside of the prison.

Later on, after their escape and their cells were searched, magazines were found, which may have given them this clever idea. To inflate the raft, they made a pump out of an instrument taken from the prison band. Lastly, they made wooden oars that would help them later move and steer the raft to safety.

The night of the escape was on June 11, 1962, and the men put their dummies in their beds and snuck out the vent in their cells. They climbed up the pipes on the utility wall, grabbed their raft, the paddles, life vests, and pump, and snuck up another series of pipes 30 feet high to a vent that led to the roof.

Prior to the day of the escape, they'd managed to open the vent to the roof and keep it unlocked with a bolt made out of soap. Once on the roof, they made their way down to ground level near the prison bakery and climbed over the two barbed wire fences. What happened next, however, is a mystery.

When guards woke up the next morning and did the morning check, they found dummies in the beds of the escapees, and they immediately alerted the authorities, including the FBI.

During the days that followed, the FBI, quote, interviewed relatives of the men and compiled all their identification records and asked boat operators in the bay to be on the lookout for debris. In that time frame, they found a packet of letters sealed in rubber that they say were, quote, related to the men, as well as words.

wood from the oars and rubber inner tube pieces in the ocean water. Later on, a paddle was discovered on Angel Island. And even later, a homemade life vest was found on Cronkite Beach.

This is interesting because presumably the trio ran towards the North Shore where they planned to make it out on the raft, paddle across the bay just about two miles, and land on Angel Island, cross Raccoon Strait, and land in Marin County. Could it be that that paddle on Angel Island and the life vest or life jacket in Marin County on the beach are signs that they made it?

According to the FBI documentation...

That's where they had plans to steal clothes and a car to make a getaway. The FBI says that there was no sign of a car being stolen that night, but some research says otherwise. According to a YouTube video by the YouTube channel Be Amazed, a 1955 blue Chevy was stolen from there the very evening of the escape.

The FBI made it sound as if the men had died at sea, as if they'd drowned in the cold water of the bay. What is odd, though, is that no bodies were ever found. None were discovered. The FBI and government made it sound impossible to swim from Alcatraz to land.

Which is not exactly impossible. First of all, land is only about two miles away, and these three men had a raft and life vests.

Secondly, it's important to note that on a yearly basis, around 2,000 participants take part in a triathlon called the Escape from Alcatraz Triathlon and manage to swim to shore. It's doable. Even another inmate swam from Alcatraz to Fort Point before.

But that's not the end of the story. A number of people reported seeing the Anglin brothers in Brazil in the 60s and 70s. Even a family friend said they saw them there. Rumor had it they bought a farm. In fact, a photo was taken in 1975 of the two men on the farm

According to facial recognition analysts, the image most definitely could be of the two. The thing is, they can't be 100% sure because both of the gentlemen in the photo are wearing glasses. Around the same time, Frank Morris was apparently seen by a former classmate. In the 80s, a decade later, multiple witnesses called in to report that all three of the men were in Florida—

In 2013, additional evidence of them possibly being alive surfaced by a man who supposedly was Clarence Englund, claiming to be on his deathbed and telling the FBI that he had in fact escaped. Nobody knows what happened to Frank Morris or the Englund brothers.

It is officially the longest manhunt in U.S. history. Hope you're having a nice day, and until next time, bye!

Thank you for listening to this episode of the American English Podcast. Remember, it's my goal here to not only help you improve your listening comprehension, but to show you how to speak like someone from the States. If you want to receive the full transcript for this episode, or you just want to support this podcast, make sure to sign up to premium content on AmericanEnglishPodcast.com. Thanks and hope to see you soon.

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