But then, this past May, the story broke that a small bank in the East Texas city of Tyler had been robbed by a sixty-year-old woman. The woman was dressed in black, wearing a black wide-brimmed hat and dark sunglasses that covered much of her face. She was polite and did not use a gun when she confronted the teller. She placed the money she received in a black satchel, nodded "thank you," walked out the door, and climbed into a twenty-foot Frontier RV with pretty purple shades around the windows. She turned on the ignition, pushed on the gas pedal, and headed south on Texas Highway 69, straight out of town.
After all those years, Peggy Jo Tallas had returned.
If you want to understand her, her friends say, you've got to go back to Dallas in the late fifties, when she was an irre-pressibly free-spirited teenager, her hair brownish-blond and curly and her green eyes as shiny as marbles. "She had a beautiful, wide smile that made you want to smile back at her," said Karen Jones, her closest childhood friend."And what was most special about her was that she loved doing things other kids didn't do. She once drove me around looking for stray dogs to adopt. And then she took me over to the Yellow Belly drag strip just to watch the cars race."
She was the youngest of three children.When she was four years old, her father died of cancer, and her mother, Helen, found a job as a nurse's aide to support the family. They lived in a tiny rent house in the suburb of Grand Prairie. Peggy Jo's sister, Nancy, was a high school majorette, and her older brother, Pete, played on the district's championship basketball team. Peggy Jo, however, dropped out of high school after the tenth grade. "She told me there was just too much else to do in life than spend so many days at school," Karen said. One day, in fact, Peggy Jo jumped in her car and drove to San Francisco because she wanted to see what life was like there. When she returned, she gave Karen a book of poems written by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the co-founder of San Francisco 's famous City Lights bookstore and an influential Beat poet whose work often decried the emptiness of modern life. (In one of his most famous poems, from A Coney Island of the Mind, he described America as a country of "… freeways fifty lanes wide/on a concrete continent/spaced with bland billboards/illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness.") "I laughed and thought, 'Of all people, Peggy Jo's been off reading poetry in San Francisco,' " Karen said. "But that was just who she was, always ready for an adventure."
When she was in her twenties, Peggy Jo got her own apartment in North Dallas and started working as a receptionist at a Marriott hotel near downtown. She and another receptionist, a cute blonde named Cherry Young, went out almost every night. Peggy Jo always drove in her little burgundy Fiat, gunning the engine, racing other cars from stoplight to stoplight. They hit all the great Dallas nightclubs: Soul City, the Fog, and the Filling Station, on Greenville Avenue, ordering Coors, playing pool, and flirting with men. They went to see the Doors and the Doobie Brothers and even the Rolling Stones, screaming at the top of their lungs as a young, wrinkle-free Mick Jagger gyrated madly across the stage. Peggy Jo took Cherry to a coffeehouse where amateur poets read out of their notebooks, and they also went to see movies. Peggy Jo's favorite, which she saw over and over, was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, the movie tells the story of the famous bank- and train-robbing duo who lived in the last days of the Old West: two good-natured, Robin Hood-like outlaws who never believed that what they were doing was wrong because they never hurt innocent bystanders and they always robbed from institutions that took advantage of downtrodden citizens. Although Butch and Sundance knew they had little chance of survival, they refused to walk away from the life they loved, and they ended up in South America, still robbing banks, finally dying in a hail of gunfire.
According to Cherry, Peggy Jo didn't have any immediate plans to get married and have children, she didn't care about finding the right career, and she didn't worry about money.All she wanted was enough to get by, to pay her bills and have a little left over for a few drinks or a couple of meals each week at El Fenix. "She told me she was saving a little so that she could someday go to Mexico, just to live on the beach in a hacienda and wear bathing suits night and day," Cherry said. "She was beautiful and she was rambunctious. She always told me that deep down she was wild at heart."
But just how wild? One afternoon, when Peggy Jo and Cherry were driving around in the Fiat, they passed a Wells Fargo armored truck, and Peggy Jo made a rather odd comment: "You know, I could go rob that and not have to worry about anything for a while."
"You'd need a gun," Cherry said.
"Oh, heck, I'm smarter than that," Peggy Jo replied.
Cherry laughed. It never once occurred to her that Peggy Jo would ever work up the courage to commit an actual robbery. True, she could get a little feisty:When a police officer pulled her over one evening for speeding, she laughed and tore up the ticket in his face. And there was the night when she and Cherry had a spat at a restaurant in Fort Worth.To calm down, Cherry walked to another bar. A few minutes later, Peggy Jo walked outside and saw an unlocked pickup with the keys in the ignition. She jumped in and drove away. The police caught up with her, and she eventually pleaded guilty to a felony charge of unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, receiving a five-year probated sentence.
Still, it's one thing to go on a joyride in a stolen car after a night of drinking. It's another thing entirely to become an outlaw. "And what everyone needs to remember is that my aunt was a wonderful, loving woman," said Michelle (who asked that her last name not be used)."When she came over to babysit me and my brothers, she made up funny games for us to play, she cooked us popcorn, and then at the end of the night, she told us ghost stories, where the ghosts were always creaking up the stairs and doors were squeaking. She truly had a heart of gold."
Her life was not without disappointment, of course. In the mid-seventies, she told her friends she had fallen in love with a man who lived near Dallas. Then, several months later, she mentioned that the relationship was over. "She told me that she had gone to the town where the man lived and that she had seen his car parked in front of a business," Karen said. "She said she then saw a woman getting into the driver's seat. Peggy Jo walked up to the woman, asked her what she was doing, and the woman said, 'Well, ma'am, this is my husband's car.' Peggy Jo was completely devastated. She had no idea she had been dating a married man."
Not long after that, she moved into an apartment in Irving to live with her mother, who was battling a degenerative bone disease. Peggy Jo found a new job near the apartment at a computer factory, and then she worked in the office of a mobile-home construction company. She remained friends with Cherry, who by then was working as a cocktail waitress."Every now and then, we'd have an old-fashioned night and hit all the old places and listen to rock and roll," Cherry said."And one day she called and persuaded me to quit my job so that we could go to Florida and live for a couple of months on the beach."
But by 1980 Cherry had married and moved to Oklahoma City. Peggy Jo's childhood friend Karen had also married. Peggy Jo, who was still quite attractive, with a slender body and, in the words of Karen, "movie star long legs," certainly had plenty of chances to start another relationship, but she kept her distance from men. "I don't think she was ever able to get over the pain of the betrayal from the married man," Karen said. "I think she decided to be alone."