C. Barrow’s House Is Up for Auction On the Internet

The Texas house where gangster Clyde Barrow was born is for sale on eBay. Put up for auction in mid-April, the rickety wooden structure – auction item no. 4456782864 – failed to sell yesterday, although the price had come down to $2,999 and the house was viewed by 4,017 people, 50 of whom put it on their watch list.“This has been unique for us,” said Justin Spence, proprietor of Drop to Sell It, the consignment service selling the property. Located in Telico, Texas, which is near Palmer, Texas, and about 30 miles south of Dallas, the structure does not come with the land beneath it.“It’s an old house that’s weathered the storm for all these years,” said Charles “Chuck” Knox III, who is a co-seller of the building where Barrow, a vicious gangster who was ambushed with his partner, Bonnie Parker, in a hail of bullets in Louisiana in 1934, is thought to have been born in 1909 or 1910.“It’s about the size of a double-wide mobile home, has old-type shingles. It would take a lot to fix it up,” Mr. Knox said. He added that the house is near an old cotton gin, where Barrow’s father worked.“A good wind will probably take it down,” Sandy Jones, a major collector of 1930s outlaw memorabilia whose large collection includes one of John Dillinger’s eyelashes, said.“It looked to me like it would fall apart if you moved it,” said outlaw historian Rick Mattix, co-author of the forthcoming “The Complete Public Enemy Almanac.”He said perhaps the wood could be cut into pieces and sold individually to collectors. The pants that Barrow wore when he was shot were sold in small pieces, he added.Have other gangster buildings been sold to the public? Mr. Mattix recalled the sale of the Little Bohemia Lodge in northern Wisconsin, where the FBI had a shootout with the Dillinger gang.Of Bonnie and Clyde, he said, “They were pretty small time, really.” The two robbed a few small banks and held up a lot of stores and gas stations, and killed about a dozen men over a two-year period from 1932-34. Their hold on the popular imagination stems in part, he said, from the romantic angle of the boy-girl bandit team. Their infamy also spread because they took a lot of photos of themselves, some in which they pointed guns at each other.Mr. Knox said a few historians believe Barrow’s birth house burned down, but, he said, this house had a big porch, which burned off. There are still scorch marks, he said. John Neal Phillips, author of “Running With Bonnie and Clyde,” said it is not known for sure whether Barrow was born in this house. Mr. Jones said the house looks like the one photographed in Phillip Steele and Marie Barrow Scoma’s “The Family Story of Bonnie and Clyde.”Barrow lived in Telico until the fifth grade before moving to Dallas, where he was enrolled in the sixth grade for two weeks.“There is always somebody out there for the right property,” said Debra Maltz, a San Antonio-based broker of residential real estate at Kuper Sotheby’s International Realty, who had not seen the property yet online.Mr. Knox said he may list the house again on eBay or possibly gather some investors and start a Bonnie and Clyde museum.There may be reason to save this bit of gangster history: A New Mexico house where Bonnie and Clyde hid out and kidnapped a sheriff was torn down last month. And Rachel Roberts of the Dallas Historical Society said the twice-yearly Bonnie and Clyde tours routinely sell out. “There’s a ton of interest in Bonnie and Clyde,” she said, adding that the service station where Barrow’s father worked is still standing, but the restaurants where Parker worked are gone.

C. Barrow’s House Is Up for Auction On the Internet

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