LaHARPE — Bill Folkner eased back in his recliner and stretched his legs across the pop-up support. TWO ASSIGNMENTS Folkner was willing to talk about involved the Mexican insurgent Reies Lopez Tijerina and the Weatherman Underground movement. HOW FOLKNER came to spend the last 37 years on the outskirts of LaHarpe was happenstance.
“That’s better,” he sighed, mentioning that 15 years ago he was told one knee should be replaced, but that it wasn’t a commitment he was ready to make. “I got a NordicTrack and before long my knee quit hurting, although it has been acting up some lately.”
Folkner, 90, is retired 37 years from more than 20 years as a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Folkner likes to visit, but is reluctant to delve too deeply into his career “with the Bureau,” as he affectionately calls it.
“I don’t want people to think I’m a braggart,” he said.
Consequently, stories about FBI activities are limited and brief, including none about the time he spent in New York City working, as he puts it, “to make sure the nation was secure.”
FOLKNER WAS born in 1922, the last of eight children, on a place outside of Chattanooga, Tenn.
Before he was old enough to attend school, he was in the classroom at his mother’s side, a first-grade teacher.
That gave him a head start on education, being exposed to lessons meant for kids two and three years older.
His mother died when he was 9, and from then on he didn’t have her as a refuge. The result was a stronger constitution and a mentally tough young fellow.
Folkner was eager to carry his share of the family load, going to work in a jelly factory at 13 in 1935 for 10 cents an hour.
“The owner said after a day I couldn’t do a man’s work and cut me to 7½ cents an hour,” he said. “I thought we were poor then, but Dad and I and my siblings all worked.”
An aside of the jelly factory job Folkner likes to tell is that during World War II — he was in the Pacific with the Army — he opened a jar of jelly on New Guinea, “and it was made at that factory.”
He enrolled in Reserve Officer Training Corps service in high school, which gave him a step up in the National Guard and then the Army.
“When I joined the Army, at 19, I went in as a sergeant and three months later I was a staff sergeant, telling guys 35 years old what to do. We had discipline then, they (the older soldiers) did what I told them.”
After his discharge, Folkner was reluctant to take advantage of the G.I. Bill, which gave veterans a ticket to college.
“I didn’t believe you needed to be paid to fight for your country,” he said.
Folkner conceded a few years later. He was selling insurance, and dealt often with moneyed people. He realized that if he were going to get ahead, he needed more than a high school education.
He enrolled in a Tennessee college and after two years enrolled in law school, taking him a step closer to a childhood dream.
“I saw ‘G Men,’ starring James Cagney and wanted to be a G man,” an early nickname for FBI agents, Folkner recalled.
He knew that if he were to fulfill that dream, he needed either a legal background or have three years of experience as an accountant.
“That’s the only ones they were hiring,” Folkner said.
During the interview he was asked two questions: Had he ever taken bankruptcy and did he have anything questionable in his background.
“Well, I’d never taken bankruptcy, but I was worried about the other question,” he said. “There was the time I put down I was born in 1920 instead of 1922 to get into the National Guard.
“I guess the answer satisfied Mr. (J. Edgar) Hoover,” who was director of the FBI.
He got a telegram in December 1953 offering employment for $5,500 a year.
He reported to FBI training at Quantico, Va., outside Washington, D.C., in early 1954, and was greeted by Hoover, who told him “to watch my step, there were 2,000 men looking for a job with the Bureau.”
His first assignment was in Philadelphia, where “I got an education in the big city.” After only six months he was transferred to New York City. That was a time he refrains from discussing other than to say, “I worked on every kind of case” and that many had to do with national security.
Before college, Folkner worked a year for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Mexico, and acquired a working knowledge of Spanish, which he thinks led to him being assigned to Albuquerque, N.M., near the end of his career.
“I had applied for Albuquerque,” considered a plum assignment, but was near the bottom of the list and thought chances of being transferred were remote.
Tijerina led efforts in the late 1960s and 1970s to restore New Mexico land grants to the descendants of original Spanish colonial and Mexican owners.
He became a major figure of the early Chicano Movement, as well as famous internationally for his armed raid on the Tierra Amarilla courthouse, where the sheriff was killed.
Folkner become involved, even though the crimes Tijerina and wife Nancy were accused of committing were the province of state law enforcement.
The federal government was eager to see the movement quashed, though, because the land the Mexicans wanted repatriated mostly was in national forests and otherwise under federal control. The New Mexico National Guard was called out when the hard-core Mexicans became violent and took to the hills.
Tijerina’s downfall came when he was photographed setting fire to a sign on federal land. A tip given Folkner about the photos, which surfaced through the photographer’s mother, led to the arrest of Tijerina and his wife for destroying federal property. They were convicted and sent to prison.
Folkner also was involved in defusing the Weatherman Underground, organized in 1969 as a faction of Students for a Democratic Society. Its goal was to create a clandestine revolutionary party to overthrow the U.S. government.
“Every Sunday a TV show ended with pictures of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted fugitives,” Folkner said, several of whom were in the Weatherman organization.
One Sunday a truck driver thought he recognized Kathie Boudin, a highly sought Weatherman advocate, as being a hitchhiker. He called authorities and Folkner quickly was on the trail in northern New Mexico, near Taos.
The woman didn’t turn out to be Boudin, but Folkner did arrest another Weatherman fugitive, Anthony Grell, who had been traveling with the mistaken woman. Grell slipped up when Folkner looked at what proved to be a phony driver’s license and, when Folkner asked, he gave the date of registration as his birth date.
“I slapped the handcuffs on him,” Folkner said.
He and his former wife — they’ve been divorced since 1988 — were in the area for the burial of a relative.
“I had no expectation of living at LaHarpe, but I did want something other than a big city for retirement, as well as something affordable,” he said.
Today he lives in a comfortable home surrounded by countryside east of LaHarpe.
Sometime after he bought his “ranch,” as he calls it, he was asked if he’d sell a field to the east for a mobile home park.
“I said, ‘No,’” Folker said.
Getting away from the city means space — in all sense of the word.
LaHarpe home of former ‘G’ man
