by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Former Fullerton High and University of Southern California football star Johnny Hawkins, who suffered a head injury that left him unconscious for six hours during a Trojan game in November 1924 and was arrested nearly four years later and admitted to committing more than two dozen burglaries in greater Los Angeles, claimed, though his attorney and former USC classmate Joseph Ryan, that the injury caused an uncontrollable urge to break into houses and steal up to around $100,000 in goods of all kinds.
On his lawyer’s advice, Hawkins pled guilty to five counts of burglary and threw himself on the mercy of the court, seeking probation instead of a lengthy state prison term. He appeared before Superior Court Judge Charles W. Fricke and, as stated by the Los Angeles Times of 12 October 1928,
A young man who four years ago heard thousands cheer his exploits in college football which made him the idol of the campus of the University of Southern California yesterday stood before Superior Judge Fricke and heard himself sentenced to from five to seventy-five years before gray prison walls for a short career in burglary.
The vast range in the sentence was because the standard for each count was 1-15 years, though originally he faced more than 30 charges. After Ryan explained to Fricke that it was the injury “which caused him to turn criminal and therefore a subject for probation,” Hawkins was offered a chance to make his plea directly to the magistrate.
He asked Fricke, “don’t you think I would be a respectable citizen after all this trouble if I were given another chance,” to which the judge responded, “I am sorry, but I am not certain that you would be.” With this brief exchange, Fricke then asked Hawkins if he was ready to hear his punishment. The paper remarked that “the dejection of the former Trojan star was more apparent as the court passed judgment” and that the courtroom was quiet in “a strange contrast to the football days when his name brought forth thunderous demonstrations.” When the sentence was pronounced, the convict shook Ryan’s hand “and with head bowed down walked from the courtroom manacled to a deputy sheriff.”
After he received his sentence, Hawkins was visited by a reporter from the Los Angeles Record and, on the 13th, the paper observed that he had “five years to serve as a convict instead of the football coach he hoped to be.” Telling the journalist, “I’ll try to come out a much better man,” Hawkins opined that the punishment was overly severe, and it was noted that he had tears in his eyes as he requested probation and was “resentful of his drop from fame to disgrace” while also “bitter toward the denial of his plea.” He added,
If I thought I had any criminal tendencies, I would want to be put in a penitentiary, but there’s not a chance of my ever doing anything like that again. It hit me hard. I wanted a chance to prove to the world that I’m not a criminal. Why, I didn’t pawn or sell anything I took from those houses. I intend to get into the library up there if I can and I believe I’ll study law.
His imprisonment “will cut him off completely from his ambition to become a coach” as the physical education degree he earned at U.S.C. would be no good to him because no school would accept an ex-con as an instructor. It was noted that his ties to Ryan and the world of the law “led him to the new path that may result in a better meeting with judges from the right side of the [scrimmage] line next time.”
Hawkins reiterated that his biggest regret was the effect his legal travails had on his family, while decrying the effort to use his younger brother Jimmy through charges against him as an accessory to Johnny’s crimes “just to get me.” He also insisted “certainly I’m going back to my wife” adding that she’d written him every day since he was jailed four months prior. He continued that “while I’m up there, I’m going to have an operation on my head” hoping that would help with his mental issues.
As the convicted burglar readied to depart “the city of his triumphs for the city of his penance,” he commented,
When I come out, I’ll have paid my debt to society. Then I can show Los Angeles and the world that I’m not the criminal they’ve made me out to be. I’ve spent a dreary 18 months fighting this thing. I didn’t average three hours sleep a night. I was morose and unhappy. But that’s going to be gone.
While it was added that the prisoner was to be sent immediately to San Quentin, this was delayed, as Ryan search for ways to prevent his client from reporting to prison. Two months later, the 21 December number of the Los Angeles Express reported that “charges that the county probation department made false and erroneous reports, in which they garbled the statements made by Dr. Rufus von KleinSmid,” the president of U.S.C., “and the head of Fullerton High School” were filed by Hawkins’ counsel.
Ryan’s filing added that von KleinSmid and others mentioned would testify under oath “that the probation department report quoted them wrongly and presented ‘a false opinion of their view of Johnny Hawkins to Superior Judge Charles W. Fricke.'” Moreover, it was stated that the probation department’s report was a major factor in the jurist’s decision to send Hawkins to prison, but the filing’s “sensational charge . . . won Hawkins a two weeks stay of execution . . . when Judge Walton J. Woods deferred his transfer to San Quentin until after the [Christmas and New Year’s] holidays.”
The 3 January 1929 edition of the Times, though, observed that Ryan’s efforts to get Judge Fricke to modify the probation department report and the paper remarked,
One of the principal issues in the report concerned the injuries to Hawkins’ head . . . The probation officer’s report found that the injuries had been sustained by Hawkins in 1922, instead of 1924, as has been reported, and it was held this statement detracted from the defense theory that the injuries suddenly caused Hawkins to become a victim of kleptomania.
As was noted in part one of this post, however, Hawkins was knocked unconscious with a blow to the head in a U.S.C. game against St. Mary’s College in November 1924 and remained in that state for six hours, after which he had a large bump and scar on his forehead. Of course, the question of whether the serious injury was causative of his burglary spree 3 1/2 to 4 years later is the question, though this post also cited the opinion of a neurologist, John Mand, who felt that it was.
The Times of the 5th reported that, as Hawkins was on board a train headed for San Quentin, sheriff’s deputies rushed into the dining car where he and about a dozen other convicts were eating dinner, just minutes before departure, “and announced that Superior Judge Fricke at the last minute granted Hawkins a stay of execution of his sentence until the 10th inst.” This was because von KleinSmid’s attorney, Charles Craddick, “told the court that Dr. Von KleinSmid, who is recognized as a criminologist, wished to make a scientific examination of the former football star.”
Nothing could be located specific to what the U.S.C. president determined from his exam, but the Times of the 11th observed that Judge Fricke, after two hours’ discussion with von KleinSmid, Ryan and Wayne Jordan, assistant chief deputy district attorney, ordered that Hawkins be sent to San Quentin, despite Ryan’s request “for another stay of execution to permit physicians and psychologists to continue their investigations of Hawkins.”
The following day’s edition brought news of yet another delay in transport, this time until the 18th, because the head of the Sheriff’s Department transportation section sought “to prevent a recurrence of the difficulty experienced a week ago,” though why such an eventuality was seen as likely went unexplained. Ryan, meanwhile, stated that he was to go to San Quentin in advance to “attempt arrangements for special observation of Hawkins during his imprisonment.”
Finally, the Times’ edition of the 19th reported that, the previous day, the former “sensational star” was taken aboard a train and transported to prison after his efforts to seek further medical review were exhausted. When he registered at San Quentin on the 19th, the 27-year old gave his occupation as a clerk and his mug shot shows Hawkins wearing a light colored suit, open collar shirt and his black hair somewhat tousled as he grimly stared at the camera.
One of the very few located references to the convict during his prison term was from the Whittier News of 15 April 1929, about three months into his sentence, as the paper reported that “Johnny Hawkins, former Southern California grid star, who is serving a prison term at San Quentin now, is devoting most of his spare time there to development of prison athletics, especially baseball.” In the fall, however, his wife, Thelma, filed for and was granted a divorce, state law permitting a felony conviction as grounds for the proceeding.
The 1930 federal census enumerated the convict at the prison as John H. Hawkins, although again as 27, when he was actually 29, and he was listed as an office clerk, though at the beginning of the year, the Times asserted that he and Albert Marco, a convicted underworld boss from Los Angeles, were given special treatment because they “went to the jute mill on arrival at prison [then] they were removed to two of the best positions in the prison within two months” and inquired “where was the pull?” that allowed for the quick transfer.
There were occasional references to Hawkins’ glory days at USC while he was locked up, though not generally in much of a favorable light. Express sports columnist Sid Ziff, in his “Inside Track” column, recalled, in September 1929, the quarterback’s senior season in 1924 and opined that the team captain’s insistence to Coach Elmer “Gus” Henderson that he should move to that position from an offensive guard was done to the coach’s later regret. Ziff wrote that “Hawkins was found too temperamental and hasty” and “generally wasted his best plays at midfield,” with the loss to the University of California in Berkeley cited as “a glaring example” of his lack of solid judgment.
Don Roberts, whose Record column, “The Second Guess,” is an interesting title for an armchair quarterback, briefly referred, in an October 1931 piece, to the fact that another Trojan field general, Marshall Duffield, who played three years, was captain in 1930 and led USC to a Rose Bowl triumph over a previously unvanquished University of Pittsburgh. Apparently, Duffield made some unflattering, but typical, remarks on the radio about sportswriters not being qualified to comment on a game they didn’t play at a high level. In response, Roberts growled that “I do not care enough . . . to listen to this distinguished orator, who was the worst quarterback in U.S.C.’s history, next to Johnny Hawkins.”
By this time, Hawkins was free. Early in the year, the Pasadena Post reported that a San Francisco paper discovered that the prisoner, working on road crews on work release, was to be paroled in June. This was fast-tracked, however, as the Los Angeles Daily News of 8 June informed readers that Hawkins “prepared today to leave prison after serving more than two years” for a release the next day.
On his return, a friend secured a job for him at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (M.G.M.) film studio art department, while he remarried and resided in Culver City. He also realized his long-deferred ambition to coach, helming the team to a pair of film studio league championships and a third place finish in the national tournament of the Amateur Athletic Union. Another publicized achievement was the M.G.M. squad’s defeat of the world-famous Harlem Globetrotters in a December 1937 contest.
In its 23 May 1939 edition, the Times reported,
The fates which carried Johnny Hawkins to the glamorous role of football captain on a major college campus and then plunged him to the ignominy of a prison sentence for burglary gave him a grasping chance for complete vindication yesterday—in death.
The 37-year old, following dental work, died the prior day in a Santa Monica hospital and the paper remarked that this happened “apparently, from some manifestation of that same throbbing hurt in his head which he tried to tell people about back in 1928 when he was arrested” for his crimes. It was recalled that, when Hawkins entered prison, he told the press, “there’s something wrong. I believe a surgeon could make me right. If, after such an operation, I committed another crime, I would be willing to go to prison for life.” His death came after “those horrible head pains” which led to unconsciousness.
The next day, the Times dramatically claimed “Vindication of Johnny Hawkins Indicated By Report On Autopsy,” as assistant county autopsy surgeon, Dr. Louis Gogol, told the press that the primary cause of death was meningitis contracted from the oral surgery, but added “a direct contributing cause was a defect of the skull and a history of trauma to the head.” Specifically asked about whether this condition was causative for the crimes of eleven years prior, the surgeon answered, “it is very probable that it might have caused such actions.”
The paper paraphrased that Gogol identified perforations in the “boney upper plate of the orbit” and that “head pressures resulting from this irregularity might easily have caused otherwise unexplainable actions.” This led the Times to state, “a football injury was not only a probable reason” for his crimes, but “it was a direct contributing cause for his death.” It was noted that Hawkins continually insisted that an operation “might have cured him of the crime mania” and the article concluded that the results of the autopsy “was a tragic vindication.”
The Southwest Wave of the 26th employed the headline of “Johnny Hawkins, Assisted By Fate, Scores ‘Touchdown’ As Name Cleared In Death” as it asserted that, had he lived to know what was detected by Dr. Gogol, “it would have been a great victory . . . greater than his most sparkling triumph as captain and quarterback of the 1924 University of Southern California football team.”
The paper also offered the view that “the story of Johnny Hawkins . . . actually is stranger than fiction,” which certainly does seem to be the case. Given the increasing attention given to CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) in football players, his story also is notable on that score, though whether his brain injury was directly tied to that condition is an obvious question.