Toothpick Carnival - The creative mind of William Jennings-Bryan Burke

FORMER FOLSOM PRISONER CONSTRUCTS STABLE LIFE WITH TOOTHPICKS FOR FOUNDATION

December 11, 1994

Section: NEIGHBORS

By Ross Farrow Neighbors staff writer

--William Jennings Bryan Burke spent much of his childhood exploring amusement parks in places like Venice and Santa Monica. That love of carnivals later led Burke to develop a hobby creating miniature amusement parks out of toothpicks at his longtime home, Folsom State Prison.

"It was the only way to keep from going crazy, I guess," he said. Burke, who at 18 was the youngest inmate at Folsom Prison, served almost 30 years there for burglaries, robberies, auto thefts, escapes from reform schools and an escape from the prison itself.

Known to prison and law enforcement officials as Billy Burke, he was sentenced to Folsom Prison for the first time in 1928 and spent most of the next 30 years there. Now 85, he is assistant manager for a North Highlands mobile home park.

During his incarceration, Burke began creating miniature carnival scenes using long toothpicks. His 8-foot-high Ferris wheel will be on display at the Folsom History Museum on Sutter Street through January. Burke glued together about 250,000 toothpicks to create his Ferris wheel, a project that he completed two years ago after six to eight months of work, he said. Burke also made 250 small wooden figures and placed them on the seats of the Ferris wheel. He completed the scene with carnival goers watching the ride and walking through the midway below. The Ferris wheel is so high - 10 feet including the platform underneath that Burke had to cut a hole in the ceiling of his cramped mobile home so the wheel would fit. "I undertook it as a challenge," he said, explaining why he didn't simply make a smaller wheel. "I wanted to know how high I could go." Having no idea what to do with an 8-foot-high Ferris wheel, Burke gave it to Robert Ratch, a neighbor at his mobile home park. Ratch didn't know what to do with the Ferris wheel either until he and his wife visited the Folsom History Museum last year and offered to donate it to the Folsom Historical Society. Ratch met June Hose, the museum curator, and Tom Hickey of Cameron Park, president of the Folsom Prison museum operated by the Retired Correctional Peace Officers Association. Hickey had met Burke in the 1960s and said he was surprised to learn that Burke was living in North Highlands. "We thought he was dead," Hickey said. For the past year, the Ferris wheel has been stored at the history museum. Hickey volunteered to set it up in the display area and install the motor.

Burke grew up in Southern California. He said he was smaller than most youths his age and resorted to a life of crime, burglaries and vehicle thefts because he felt the need to prove something to other youths. "I guess authority was the biggest thing to get to me," he said. "When you’re in reform school, you learned to not trust cops, don't trust authority." Burke said he was rejected by his family. His father was a druggist who didn’t have much time for his children, he said. His parents separated when he was 5, and he didn’t see his mother for many years. Burke said his brother was a "Boy Scout" type who later wouldn’t associate with a convict. "Everyone thought I was a happy-go-lucky kid, but it wasn’t that way," he said. After spending time in several Southern California reform schools, Burke was sent in 1925 to the Preston School of Industry in Ione, but after escaping several times, he was sent to Folsom Prison on May 19, 1928.

Fifteen months after entering Folsom Prison, Burke managed an elaborate escape. On Aug. 27, 1929, he hid in a coffin in the prison morgue for several hours. He and his cellmate had made a fake head from plaster of Paris that Burke had stolen from the prison dental shop so that it would appear to prison guards that he was in bed, his "head" poking out from the blankets. Burke waited for the graveyard shift, when security wasn’t as tight, then quietly slipped out the window of the morgue and crawled through the prison grounds to avoid spotlights. He climbed a wall 12 to 14 feet high and "sneaked very quietly" past the guard tower on the back side of the prison near the American River. He was wearing only a pair of shorts and lost the clothes he had been carrying when he tried to cross the fast current of a canal. Burke made his way through Folsom’s historic district, hiding in bushes whenever a car passed, and ended up in downtown Sacramento early the next morning. "I ran all night long," he said. Burke said he stole clothes from a clothesline in an alley behind a home that was then on the outskirts of Sacramento. He also stole an oversized man's suit and found a pair of shoes in a trash can. Burke said he then burglarized several houses to get some money. A 1929 newspaper report said he stole a car at 29th and M streets and drove to the outskirts of Stockton.

He later returned to Sacramento. An avid dancer, Burke said he met Virginia "Ginger" Norton, a dance hall girl at Pythian Castle at Ninth and I streets. "You bought a ticket and gave it to the girl when you danced," he said. He took a liking to Norton, but she told him he should leave town because law enforcement authorities would be looking for him if he remained in Sacramento. He said she bought him a train ticket to Salt Lake City and promised to quit her job at the dance hall and join him wherever he ended up. Burke hitchhiked from Utah to Philadelphia.

He was captured Oct. 12, 1929, and taken back to Folsom. After reading a newspaper account of Burke's capture, Norton wrote him a letter. Burke said he told her that they should stop corresponding because he knew he would be in prison a long time. "What a pretty, classy girl she was," Burke said. "I still wonder what happened to her." Burke and his cellmate tried to escape in 1930 and 1931, but were thwarted. Each attempt added five months, "mostly on bread and water," to their sentence, he said.

Burke was released from prison in 1937 and went to Long Beach, but he said he was arrested two or three months later after robbing a bus driver and taking money from the cash box. He was out on parole briefly in 1952 but was arrested Aug. 17 on suspicion of auto theft and parole violation when he and another man were spotted in a stolen car at 27th and O streets in Sacramento. "I didn't enjoy stealing," he said, but his prison record prevented him from getting a job.

During the 1940s, Burke began carving cars and model airplanes out of wood. He said he also dug up a railroad tie and made a boat out of it. "And model ships. Oh wow, he was good," said Jack Pert, a prison guard from 1938 to 1964 who now lives in the Arden area. Despite his criminal record, Burke is a likable person, Pert said. "You’d think he was put in Folsom Prison for putting too many nickels in the collection plate at church," Pert said.

Burke eventually began creating carnivals, including a roller coaster made of shotgun shells. He built three miniature carnivals while he was an inmate. He sold one more than 30 years ago to San Francisco’s Playland at the Beach. Burke sold a second one in Long Beach and one with a tunnel of love and a shooting galler with moving wooden ducks in it that he says still stands at an amusement park called Lake of the Ozarks.

Wardens often brought guests to the prison to look at what Hickey describes as Burke’s "toothpick circus." Burke said he was paroled for the last time in 1956, but a biography at the museum gives conflicting release dates of 1956 and 1958. Burke said he took odd jobs washing dishes and pumping gas, and did maintenance work at the old state fairgrounds at Stockton Boulevard and Broadway. He met a Bank of America employee at a dance, married her and managed several apartment complexes over a 10-year period.

Burke said he and his wife, June, created a miniature carnival together and displayed it at state fairs for five years. They divorced four years ago, Burke said, and he moved to Eleven Oaks Mobile Home Park on Polk Street in North Highlands. He said he was given a small mobile home in exchange for serving as assistant manager and performing maintenance work. In his home he has a small model of a merry-go-round, complete with a motor, and a replica of a gazebo that Hickey said was on the Folsom Prison grounds from about 1912 until it was torn down in the 1960s. The gazebo features a wooden model of a four-piece band with spectators. Hose said that Burke gave her permission to reproduce a book written by former Sacramento Bee reporter Nan Nichols Sharrer in 1979 called "Escape From Folsom Prison." Burke said that Sharrer wrote the book from his tape-recorded recollections. "There's so much to my life it would take five books to fill it," he said.