Some Will Rob You With A Six-Gun, Some With A Fountain Pen

Charles Arthur Floyd was born to a poor, farming family which turned to bootlegging to keep the family fed.

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At age 18, Charles was ready to work but there was none available. Eventually he bought a gun and committed his first robbery. He held up a post office in 1922 for $350 in pennies (about 242 pounds in those days, 195 pounds using today's mostly zinc pennies).

Shortly thereafter, he robbed a St. Louis Kroger store for $16,000, but was arrested because he arroused suspicion for all the fancy new clothes and the new Ford that he bought with the take.

He served 3 years of a 5 year sentence in the Jefferson City Penitentiary and vowed never to be locked up again.

When he got out he visited his parent's farm, only to find that his father had been shot and killed in a family feud with J. Mills, who was acquitted. Floyd took a rifle and went into the hills. J. Mills was never seen again.

While spending time in "Tom's Town," which would become Kansas City, he was given the nickname "Pretty Boy" by Beulah Baird Ash, a madam in a brothel. He hated the pseudonym, however, it stuck and made him into a colorful criminal.

Over the next 12 years he would embark on a crime spree in Oklahoma, robbing 30 banks and killing 10 men and causing bank insurance rates to double in the process.

In 1933, an attempt to free Frank "Gentleman" Nash as he was being returned to the Leavenworth Penitentiary resulted in the death of 5 men, including an FBI agent and Nash, became known as the "Kansas City Massacre." Floyd was implicated as a mass murderer, though he maintained to his death that he was not involved.

After the death of John Dillinger in 1934, Pretty Boy Floyd was named as Public Enemy Number One and a $23,000 reward was placed on his head, dead or alive.

Despite his notoriety as a criminal, Pretty Boy Floyd remained a folk hero to the people of Oklahoma. To them he was "The People's Bandit" and a "Sagebrush Robin Hood" because he would steal from the rich banks and help the poor by buying them groceries and tearing up mortgages during robberies.

He would also enter banks, brazenly in broad daylight, well groomed, immaculately dressed and never wearing a mask, and be courteous to his victims.

Pretty Boy Floyd was shot and killed in Ohio by Chester Smith, a local patrolman on October 22, 1934. Smith wisely suspected that Floyd, if encountered, would chose to run rather than to risk a gunfight. Smith, accordingly, carried a rifle on that day and took Floyd down in two shots.