Universal News, Volume 35, Release 49. June 14, 1962

This complete Universal newsreel issue of 14 June 1962 comes from the MCA/Universal Pictures collection at the National Archives, which scanned it for its exhibit Spirited Republic: Alcohol in American History and posted it, with captions, on its official channel. Like any newsreel of the period it mixes stories: peace talks in Laos, then a look back 25 years at the Duke of Windsor’s wedding, a temperance convention and the 1937 U.S. Open.

The Alcatraz segment, titled “Flee Alcatraz,” reports the escape of Frank Morris and the brothers John and Clarence Anglin. The narrator describes the plaster dummy heads with paint-brush bristles left in their beds, the cardboard grills that hid the holes they dug around air vents, and their climb to the roof, and reports that Warden Olin Blackwell blamed the prison’s crumbling concrete and corroded metal, with some $5 million in repairs needed. It ends with the biggest manhunt in San Francisco’s history and the men still missing.

Newsreels like this shaped the public image of Alcatraz in its final year. The escape, and the cost of repairs the warden describes, fed directly into the decision to close the prison in March 1963. The three men were never found, and their fate is still unknown.

Most of the ghost stories now told about Alcatraz came later, after the island opened to visitors as part of a national park. Seen beside them, this contemporary report is a reminder that the prison’s most famous story is a documented escape, not a haunting.