Home

Uncommonlists is an ever-changing collection of lists that we think you will find interesting, entertaining, enlightening, surprising, and just plain fun. Our lists are all over the place, and that’s a really cool thing, because they can be about anything you can imagine.

Little Mtn. Grub 203 $7500
20 acre lode claim near Breckenridge

We have a list on gold mine claims for sale in Colorado, the locations for high crime activity in Denver's neighborhoods, the dress code for the Winkler County Court in Texas, the official list of over 550 Native American Indian tribes the US government recognizes (227 of which are in Alaska), and the 1930 census of San Quentin Prison!

You may be thinking, so what's up with the lists? Well the thing with the lists, is what is in the list. Sounds like a duh, but it's the real deal. You start looking through the lists, and you always find new, interesting stuff that you never knew about. And that stuff, will lead you to other stuff, and that stuff, and so on. Sometimes it's fun, it's always interesting, and if you're not careful, you'll find yourself saying “I don't know where the time went.”

… from gold mine claims for sale
to the story of a
14 yr. old federal prison inmate,
you’re bound to find something interesting

One day not long ago, while doing some serious list searching, we came across the list of inmates in San Quentin prison in the year 1930. It came up on a Google search for ancestry information, so we clicked on the link, and we’re looking at a list of 880 guys who were doing time in San Quentin. The list had their names, place of birth, year of birth, and a column for their age in 1930. As we looked over the list we saw that there were quite a few from Mexico and other places outside of the United States, and that the oldest inmate was 80 years old. Well, immediately we looked for the youngest, and get this, in 1930 he was 14 years old! The list said he was born in 1916, which would make him 14 in 1930. Unbelievable!

His name was Frederick Portie, he was born in California, and that's all we had. We did quite a bit of searching and came up pretty empty. A friend of ours took a stab at it and found out through one of the ancestry sites that he was black and that he worked in the shoe shop in the prison.

One of our rules is to never ask why we are chasing down part of a list. When you think about it, there is no answer. We are just doing it to do it. It's work for us, but it's whatever you want to be for you: fun, interesting, enlightening, depressing, it can be anything, but it’s never going to be dull.

We’re not really up on our penal history  as good as we could be, but we've read enough to know that San Quentin was a very corrupt and rough place, and we can only imagine what kind of prey a young black teenager would be in a prison with some of the worst criminals in the country. (We haven’t looked up the 3 guys in the picture (inset), but you can, their ID #’s are at the bottom of the photo. Check out the archive photo at http://www.sos.ca.gov/archives/collections/photographs/sq-album.htm.) Frederick started to dominate our conversations over lunch, dinner, even when we had a beer or two in the evening. We had to find out what he was convicted of, how much time he served, if he survived his imprisonment and if he did survive, what happened to him? So the main thing driving this quest for information was our imagination: how did it feel  for a young teenage boy, four years from his tenth birthday, to be in San Quentin prison? We had to find out something about him and what happened to him.

2/8/2012

The state of California has a pretty good archive system and a lot of records from the Department of Corrections. We gave them a call and requested information on Frederick. The first thing we found out was that his last name was Porter, not Portie, and that his date of birth was 1911 and not 1916. Finally! We were getting somewhere and now that we had some solid and correct information about Fred, we were on a tear! The guy at the archives said they had 20 something pages and that he would mail us all he had for $4.75! We jumped on that, and told to send it all to us. Our excitement and anticipation was running high as we opened the packet from the archives, and as we got closer to finding out more about this young kid who, as it turns out, and was revealed in the packet, had been in trouble with the law since he was 11 years old.

Here's a summary of what was in the archive packet: a transcript from the Superior Court of the state of California County of San Joaquin, on Wednesday, September 5, 1928 when Frederick and two accomplices appeared before the Hon. C. W. Miller, Judge. Case number 4695, assault with intent to commit robbery; the transcript of the trial (Frederick appearing before the judge, it was not a jury trial) four typewritten pages; a summary by the court entitled "Views"; document from the court specifying the case, details about the defendant, the charges, recommendation of maximum sentence, recommendation of no parole, etc.; the next several pages were what could be described as a history of everything that transpired; the next thing was a commitment form from the prison system and a history of Frederick’s time served; a photograph of Frederick; a Statement of Inmate entering San Quentin. It was like reading a movie script. We were totally immersed in the story and the events and people involved, and then we were blindsided! It was so unexpected, but then it was so cool to see what was in the last couple pages.

We want to stress first of all that the judge determined that Frederick was and would be forever a criminal and recommended that he not be eligible for parole and that he receive the maximum sentence by law (7 years). The big surprise we were blindsided with was that the court received 17 letters, plus one from his mother, from prominent business and civic leaders in Oakland urging the court and parole board to either grant parole, grant leniency, and even grant a complete pardon. The list of people included a member of the California state assembly, an attorney in Oakland, president of a company, another attorney, the president and chairman of the executive board of a civic improvement Corporation, executive secretary of the public welfare league, and past post commander of the American Legion, a funeral director, a merchant civil worker (what’s that?), vice president of the Oakland recreation department, a member of the North Improvement Club, and the chief executive of the Oakland district Council of Boy Scouts. In the packet was a form with the heading: State of California, Agreement to Employ, which was an agreement signed January 20, 1932 from someone named (looks like) Lundberg that they would employ Frederick and follow certain guidelines. Wow! He got paroled, survived his incarcerations, and at this point it appears he went straight, and got a fresh start.

We're going to take a break here and get back to telling you about what you can find in UncommonLists. We’ll pick up more of the story about Frederick Porter and hope that you'll join us as we pursue information on what happened to Frederick after he was paroled.