My grandfather, James Milton Holman, whom I never knew, was shot and killed August 12, 1925. He was a corrections officer at the Oregon State Prison in Salem, Oregon. Four convicts broke into the prison armory, took guns, and started shooting.

My grandmother, who lived to be 94 years old, told me the details. My grandfather wasn't scheduled to work that day, but another guard was sick. As my grandfather left for work that morning, he and my grandmother talked about what to have for dinner. Grandma didn't remember what was to be on the table that night, but she remembered clearly that the last words he spoke to her on his way out the door was "make plenty of gravy." A few hours later she heard sirens at the prison.

He was stationed on the prison wall. One convict shot him in the leg and he fell to the ground, at which point another convict blew his head off with a shotgun. Another guard was killed and another wounded.

One convict was killed during the escape. The other three were arrested afterward, convicted of murder, and sentenced to death. One convict committed suicide before the sentence was carried out.

After the murder, my father, who was 15 years old at the time, had to drop out of school to help support the family. There wasn't any "workers compensation" at that time. He spent the next 50 years working as a low-paid cook and bartender. He was an alcoholic, a falling-down drunk, but quit drinking cold turkey three months after I was born because he didn't want his son to have an alcoholic father.

Grandma told me that before the other two convicts were executed, the governor of the State of Oregon heard a rumor that she wanted clemency for them. She had a meeting with him. I asked her "what did you say to the governor?"

Grandma Holman, always a woman of few words, replied "I said hang 'em."

And they were.