Prison Break at the Bingo Hall
Merle William Unger, Jr. spent most of his young adult life on the run. If anyone had ever pressed him on it, he could never fully explain the reasons for his restless soul. Growing up along the fields and farms of Greencastle, Pennsylvania, Unger was small and unremarkable. He was cellophane in human form. There are some who accept that as a shortcoming and move on with life. Merle Unger took what life dealt him and turned it into the great escape.
Dropping out of high school, Merle elected to graduate to a life of petty crime. It was not long after that in 1967, when most young American men were either dying in the quagmire of Vietnam or back home protesting it, that the 18-year-old bust out from his first jail cell. Merle Unger turned his escapes from prison into an artform.
Unger started his spectacular run with a flourish, tying bedsheets together to construct a makeshift rope that would spring him each night from his cell. He put into practice the proverb of the rolling stone that gathers no moss, splitting his time as a free man between visits with his girlfriend and bingo games at a neighboring Catholic church. Then Unger would slip back into his cell right before each morning’s roll call.
It took a sheriff deputy’s love of the game to ultimately catch the young escapee. For Unger, the word “bingo” must have taken on an entirely different meaning when the deputy handcuffed him. One can almost hear the elderly church members lamenting, “But he was such a nice boy.”
By 1975, Merle Unger was becoming nationally renowned. There were news articles detailing his many escapes. He had his own fan club, which hawked t-shirts and other souvenirs. Unger even wrote a poem that was printed in the newspapers.
But in December of 1975, Unger’s most intricate prison escape ended badly. Through a rope he had attached to a dumbbell weight, he was able to smash the skylight to his cell and climb to freedom. Not long after that, Unger held up a supermarket and was confronted by Donald Kline, an off-duty police officer. After an ensuing chase, Unger shot Kline three times, killing him. Suddenly, the harmless petty thief and escape artist had murdered a policeman. Any public sentiment Unger had gained was swept away. He had become a very dangerous man.
The holdup, shooting and capture that December took place within my hometown of Hagerstown, Maryland. Until then, there was nothing newsworthy, at a national level, in our little corner of the world. News was reported by newspapers and televised at 6 and 11 pm. At midnight, every television station played the national anthem, before the screen would turn to snow. For a sense of real drama, nothing could ever come close to the excitement and fear Merle Unger provided.
In April of 1976, Merle was languishing in a Hagerstown cell when I celebrated my ninth birthday. I was given a set of walkie talkies which I had wanted more than anything. My Uncle Bruce had shown me a CB radio courtesy of Radio Shack during a ride in his ’61 Chevy Impala. A gateway to the outside world, the device made me believe I could pick up conversations from anywhere on the planet. To me, it was exciting and new, the wave of the future.
My friend, Jason and I would take the walkie talkies on our bikes all over the neighborhood to chat with each other and with the tractor trailer drivers or the ham radio operators whose frequencies we would pick up. Most of the strangers to whom we talked wanted us off their frequency. But we didn’t have any frequency setting on our walkie talkies, and the truck drivers had the shortest fuse for kids interrupting them. With them, we’d use a long gray button at the bottom of the device to emit a series of squawks that masqueraded as morse code. It annoyed whoever was on the other end. And while we certainly kept our language clean, they most certainly did not.
It was sometime late in May 1976 when a news bulletin came over the radio: Merle Unger had once again escaped from prison. This time he used a hacksaw someone had smuggled into his cell. He was now considered armed and dangerous and somewhere within our city limits. The report also stated that it was rumored he had procured a sawed-off shotgun.
Warnings were sent over the radio and televised news stations for everyone to remain vigilant. But for two nine-year-old boys, the word ‘vigilant’ was not a word that Jason and I heeded. It had been months since Merle Unger’s capture, now with his escape he was once again the hot topic of conversation.
In the 1970’s, you could be as young as nine and still walk or bike within a full block radius of the neighborhood day or night. Along with Jason and I, there were two more friends, Jeff and Lee, with whom we all communicated on walkie talkies. We were connected by an alleyway we called the Grand Canal, which divided Maryland Avenue, Jeff and Lee’s domain, and Chestnut Street, where Jason and I lived. The Howard Street Market was just beyond one end of the alley, home to baseball cards, comic books and the best Italian subs anywhere. It was considered “Key West,” the absolute outer limits of where we could go. Anything beyond that was “Cuba,” and there would be a crisis that had nothing do with missiles if we traveled that far.
It didn’t seem likely that Unger was anywhere near our neighborhood. We wondered how far past Howard Street Market we could get and how many years we’d be grounded for doing so. And then something happened, something that I would’ve discounted as a misunderstood transmission if I had been the only one to hear it. It was a garbled sentence misconstrued for something else, a police frequency that Jason and I heard. An officer identified himself and stated that, “Unger is on the move, and we are in pursuit.” We quickly crossed the alley of the Grand Canal to inform Jeff and Lee. We all traveled beyond our perimeter to look for the armed perpetrator.
I would finish the third grade in three weeks. The late afternoon shadows of May were lengthening quickly and the dreaded call for dinnertime was imminent. We had to think fast.
Medals for heroism danced through my head. I imagined the four of us cornering Unger. Lee would pop wheelies to confuse him while the rest of us would convince him to lay down his shotgun and stop his foolish pursuit of crime once and for all. The key to the city was as good as ours.
“Dinner!”
It was my mom. We were closing in on Howard Street and setting our sights on blowing past the Market. Key West be damned! The cooling May breeze ruffled my hair. My Schwinn flew across the pavement. It felt like the purest sense of freedom I’d ever experienced. And it wasn’t some make believe playtime we were re-enacting. It was a real, honest to God police transmission that somehow had been caught on my walkie talkie. We had to respond
“David Leighton! Inside for dinner!” The Leighton part, my middle name, meant there would be trouble. Jason’s parents had come out by then, too. They must have heard something on the radio that Unger was close.
I hit the brakes and swung my bike around, telling the others to wait for me. I zoomed back to our little Cape Cod house on Chestnut Street and ran up the driveway to the back door. The door swung open with a bang, and I nearly slid smack into our refrigerator, I was moving so fast.
“Mom, I can’t eat right now.”
“Why not?”
“We heard a policeman on our walkie talkies. They’re chasing Merle Unger and we’re going to help catch him!”
There was the longest beat, the kind where time itself twists and stretches. And then-
“Oh, no, you most certainly are not!”
The others told me later that they were also called in by their parents. But apparently the police could have used our help. Unger evaded them all the way across the Pennsylvania state line and stole a car which he used to travel south to Orlando, Florida. There, he got busted setting off an alarm system trying to break into a bar.
I was a freshman in high school when I heard that Merle Unger broke out of a maximum-security facility with a hijacked dump truck. A national manhunt, led by the FBI, lasted until he was caught holding up a gun store in Clearwater, Florida. By then, I had traded walkie talkies and bikes for a growing interest in girls and the day I would get my driver’s permit.
Merle Unger got married and had two children, conceived within the confines of the prison bars he had eluded for years. It must have been a crushing realization, Merle Unger could never truly escape.
© DB Leighton
DB Leighton has written copy for the Baltimore NBC news affiliate where he managed to get the anchor to say “Gung Hay Fat Choy” on the air. He worked for three months as a Drape in Johnny Depp’s gang for the John Waters’ flick, Cry Baby. His work has appeared in LA Story, and he is currently writing a manuscript of fiction. Born and raised in Western Maryland, where “Prison Break at the Bingo Hall” is chronicled, he currently resides in New York.
The Loch Raven Review 