EDMOND -Occasionally, Ruby Spear lets her head bow to her chest and then gently rolls it back Up, slowly piecing together a story she's set aside for nearly 70 years.
Although her memory has waned in recent years, the 100- year-old last surviving sibling of Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd remembers events from her brother's storied life as if plucked from a diary entry. She remembers the day in 1934 when a reporter came to her family's modest cotton farm in Akins to tell them about Floyd's death at the hands of a sheriff's posse in Ohio. "He thought we'd heard about it, too. He wasn't trying to be smart," Spear said. "He was really sorry he had to be the one who first told us." Spear knows Floyd as the brother who'd play horseshoes with his six siblings on the farm, attend church with his devout Baptist family each week and eagerly ride in a horse drawn wagon with the family into Sallisaw to shop. She chooses to think of him as the child in a framed, black- and-white family portrait, wearing black cowboy boots and a white dress shirt. He playfully looks aside in the photo; his distinctive baby face looks evident at an early age. History, however, remembers Floyd as a machine-gun toting outlaw who blasted his way through the Southwest, robbing dozens of banks and killing at least 10 men. Floyd's family never talked about their son's life but followed his exploits in newspaper headlines, Spear said. Lured to a criminal career by the poverty of the Dust Bowl and the wild tales of the outlaw, Jesse James, Floyd pulled off his first heist at 18 when he held up a post office for $350 in pennies. Later came a bigger haul of $16,000 from a Kroger grocery store. "We prayed the Lord would take care of him and that he would eventually be saved," Spear said. Immortalized in Woody Guthrie ballads and Oklahoma folklore, Floyd used some of the profits from his heists to payoff farm debts and buy groceries for the poor. He was dubbed the "Robin Hood of Cookson Hills" for his tearing up of mortgage papers in banks across the country. As swiftly as he cut his swath of gun-blazing heists, Floyd was fatally shot by federal agents near East Liverpool, Ohio. He was 30 years old. Divorcing Floyd's legend from reality proves to be a difficult task. Spear's son, Jack, said many people adopted romanticized stories about his uncle and are still eager to recount tales they heard a generation ago, however inaccurate. "They've credited him with 10 murders but were never able to prove how many he actually killed," Jack Spear said. "He did a lot of it, but he probably didn't do all the things he was credited with. Because of who he was, the crimes of others were attributed to him." Ruby Spear tires as she finishes her story, sometimes bowing her head and moaning in between sentences. Her family says she probably won't talk about her brother again because some of the memories are too painful. But on the occasion marking her 100th birthday in May, she decided to tell what she remembered about growing up with the boy who would become one of the most infamous and mysterious outlaws in history.
