### John and Clarence Anglin
John William Anglin and Clarence Anglin were born into a large, poor family in Donalsonville, Georgia — John on May 2, 1930, and Clarence on May 11, 1931. They were the fifth and sixth of thirteen children born to George and Rachel Anglin, seasonal farmworkers who moved their family repeatedly through the rural South and eventually to Ruskin, Florida, near Tampa, where they settled in the early 1940s.
The family traveled north to Michigan each June to work cherry harvests. The brothers grew up physically active, outdoors, accustomed to cold water. Stories within the family held that they were strong swimmers, capable of swimming in Lake Michigan even when ice still floated on the water. How precisely accurate these stories are is impossible to verify, but the swimming ability of the Anglin brothers became a significant point of discussion when investigators assessed whether the escape could have succeeded.
Clarence was first arrested at fourteen, caught breaking into a service station. By the early 1950s, both brothers were regularly participating in burglaries and bank robberies, usually targeting closed businesses rather than occupied ones. The family later claimed the brothers’ only weapon in their robberies was a toy gun — a claim that may be true for some incidents and that illustrates the difference between how the Anglins described themselves and how the criminal justice system classified them.
Their trajectory through federal institutions brought them to Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where they met Frank Lee Morris and a car thief from New York named Allen West. This meeting in Atlanta was the foundation of the escape plan that would eventually take shape at Alcatraz.