“Spider”

From 1913 on, the man nicknamed “Spider” was one of The Umpire’s most prolific writers of verse. He was also one of the funniest and most real, penning weekly verse that spoke directly to his incarcerated friends, their foibles, and local happenings in and around Eastern State. Sometimes his advice is touching. In “Kindness in Our Hidden City,” he encourages others who find themselves locked within the Eastern State’s “Gray Stone Walls” to offer “a nice kind word to a pal that’s blue / How it shortens the day and helps him thro’. / And don’t forget the lifetime men / Show them a kindness whene’er you can.” But he is not afraid to razz his colleagues, either. Throughout the baseball season, Spider can be found ragging on umpires and mocking the inflated bluster of the players. “A gang of has beens,” he writes in the June 25, 1913 issue, “you struck a snag / From this time on, you better play tag.”

“J.P.C”

J.P.C. must have been involved in editing The Umpire and operating the printing press at Eastern State, since many of his poems offer insight into these processes. A humorous reflection published in the May 14, 1913 issue, titled “The Editor’s Nightmare,” is especially apt. In it, he imagines a “Timmie” falling asleep “on the Press room floor / Having written sos much he could write no more.” Timmie dreams he is riding “the ‘Umpire’s’ train”: a nightmarishly inky engine full of rude editors and botched engravings, each line an in-joke about the newspaper’s editorial team. He wakes up, “his clothes soaked and his hair standing high,” begging to never have to write for The Umpire again.

“Jingles”

Known in the registers as B-6388 and in The Umpire as “Jingles,” Edward or Edwin Franklin first appears in the historical record in November 1912, when he came to Eastern State after being charged and convicted of the crime of larceny. He was twenty-four at the time, a white bookkeeper from New York with previous convictions in Baltimore and New York for larceny and forgery respectively, according to his intake register. During his relatively brief incarceration, he was active in life at Eastern State: he managed The Library team on the prison’s baseball league, compiled of numerous gossip columns for The Umpire, and produced many lines of verse for the newspaper. After less than two years in prison, he was pardoned and released on May 24, 1914, at which point he – to my knowledge – vanishes from the historical record.

Part of what makes Franklin’s writing so entertaining is the way he uses it to foment community. Inside jokes, running gags, and occasional poems on the people and events of the week were key features of his work. For instance, he writes a charming poem about Warden Robert McKenty under the title “Bob,” extolling “‘Square Deal Bob’, / Who never rests, always on the job,” and another on the chaplain. Of course, he and his readers knew this style of poetry was intended, in part, to flatter The Umpire’s censors, and Franklin and the editor rib each other about his delightfully doggerel verse in print. In an April 1913 issue, Jingles writes:

I respectfully wish to suggest, that the least the Honorable Editor could do for a member of his staff of ‘dope slingers,’ would be to furnish him with a pencil once in a while. – Jingles.

The editor later jokes back:

Jingles: “Let me tell you, sir, that poem cost me a month’s hard labor.”
Editor: (who has read it)—‘‘Is that all? If I'd had the passing of the sentence you'd have got 2.5 to 10.”

This joshing spills out into a network of other writers (or possibly Franklin himself) calling themselves “Bingles” and “Tingles,” who exchange barbs in verse about who is a worse baseball player. Later, other editors relentlessly mock Franklin for being bald, such as this tidbit: “Just as we were about to go to press, it was discovered that for once, no mention has been made of Jingles’ bald head, so this paragraph has been hastily inserted to supply the omission.” Collectively, this “goofing off” in print has the effect of drawing the reader into a series of in-jokes. By “getting” the joke (and knowing who the pseudonymous Jingles, Bingles, and Tingles are in person), readers of The Umpire can see themselves as part of a friendly fraternity with a common culture – one that supplants their other shared label of “prisoner.”