On the summer evening in 1948 when the police raided liquor establishments across New Castle following the death of Anna Grace Robertson earlier in the year, fifteen people were arrested. Among them were Elizabeth Miller, a bartender at the Rex café, and Anagnostis Sakelliadis, who ran the Square Deal café on West Washington street, which was the last place that Anna Grace was seen the night she died. Anna Grace’s mother worked there, but was elsewhere on the night of the raid.

Anagnostis—who eventually changed his name to James Sakelson—had come to New Castle in 1910, from the Aegean island of Karpathos, and had run restaurants in town ever since. He bought the premises for the Square Deal in 1941, taking over from an unsuccessful grocery store, the Orange Car, which had sold nothing but fruit from the proprietor’s own citrus groves in Florida. He installed modern kitchen equipment, two thirty-foot-long formica-topped bars and all-new fixtures and fittings. By the time it was raided, the Square Deal was one of the most popular lunch counters in the city.

The police charged Anagnostis with selling liquor to visibly intoxicated persons and to persons of known intemperate habits, and the State Liquor Control Board shut the café down for seventy-five days. It survived the temporary closure, but nothing could save it from the decline of downtown New Castle.

From the middle of the fifties, the Square Deal suffered regular robberies—crates of liquor taken from behind the bar; hundreds of dollars lifted from the till. Fights—with knives, razors and guns—became quite common. In 1964, the year before Anagnostis’s wife died, there were three break-ins and a stabbing. The streets around the café had become dilapidated, most of the stores abandoned. Anagnostis sold the Square Deal to Buzz Panella, who ran it for only a few years until 1967, when the building was condemned. It was torn down the following year, along with every block in the surrounding nineteen acres, to make way for the Towne Mall indoor shopping plaza and a Sears, Roebuck store.

Anagnostis moved to Florida to live near his sons. He died there in June 1968, at the age of sixty-eight.

John Franell, a lifelong resident of Altoona, was an honor roll student in elementary school and sang in his local athletics club’s barbershop quartet when he was in high school. After graduation, he worked as a produce clerk and spent a lot of time in bars. He was arrested a few times—fighting, disorderly conduct, a little light larceny—and was conscripted into the combat engineers in 1942.

After the war, John became a small-time thief, stealing crates of produce, frozen chickens and other groceries from warehouses and selling them cheap in bars and cafés. By the middle of the fifties, he had become a well-known figure in Altoona’s court house, and was told by a judge that he would face years in jail if he violated his probation again. He left Altoona for New Castle, but his arrest for drunkenness in 1957 is the only record of his time in the city. He was back in Altoona by the following February, when he was arrested for burglary.

John was homeless at forty-six, sleeping either in the streets, in the Rescue Mission or in the city jail’s drunk tank. Over the next few years, he was arrested for siphoning gas from a truck, stealing a car, burglarly, larceny and receiving stolen goods. He turned sixty while serving a three-year sentence in the workhouse.

John was never arrested for theft again but appeared in court countless times on charges of drunkenness, disorderly conduct and breach of the peace. In August 1974, by which time he was known to everyone as Whiskey John, he was arrested seven times in four days. Every few months he was hospitalised with lacerations on his forehead, contusions on his head, abrasions on his arms, chest and sides and fractured ribs—all injuries that he sustained when he threw himself in front of moving cars. Once, a car crushed his foot and doctors had to amputate his toes.

On April 4th, 1976, John was beaten to death in the hallway of an apartment where he was staying. He was seventy-one years old. There were no leads, and his killer was never found.

Apart from the night in January 1945 when he stole a carburettor from a neighbour’s car—a crime for which he received no punishment as he was due back in the army—Nick Frank kept out of trouble. He was a truck driver all his life and was involved in collisions every so often, but none was his fault. He hunted deer, but always in season, and once got his picture in the paper for shooting a 180-pound, 11-point buck, which was believed to be the biggest deer ever to have been killed in Lawrence County.

In 1972, Nick’s daughter, Gloria, married a field artilleryman named Richard Jokinen. She accompanied him to Germany when he was posted to the US army base in Baumholder, a former Wehrmacht barracks and prisoner-of-war camp that had been built on the ruins of the homes of four thousand people who had been evicted by the Nazis. Gloria returned home two years later, in 1978, after Richard was killed when his helicopter crashed into the garden of a house in Unteralterheim.

Nick died in 2005, at the age of eighty-one.

Around the time she was arrested for intoxicated driving, Emma Hilke and her husband, Emil, took over Eli Shifman’s grocery store on West North street. Emma had been born in America, to German immigrant parents. Emil and Eli had come to America from Germany when they were young men. It was July 1944, and it looked like the war was almost over. All three were waiting for news of cousins, aunts and uncles in Europe—Hilkes sheltering in basements as allied bombs dropped in the streets outside; Shifmans trying to survive the work camps to the east. There were reports that month that Hitler had almost been killed by a group of his own officers. Russian tanks were in Poland. British and American troops had taken Normandy. Everyone in town knew there wasn’t long to go.

Emma and Emil ran the grocery store for the next decade. Their son, Emil Jr, was arrested on a charge of molestation when he was nineteen, but was allowed to leave town to take up a post in the coast guard as a radioman. Emil died that year, and Emma gave up the store.

There is no record of Emma’s life between the death of her husband and her death in 1974, at the age of seventy-four.

Charlie Tilden’s great grandfather, Charles, was born a slave on a southern tobacco plantation. He was over fifty before he was freed at the end of the civil war and immediately came north to New Castle, where he lived for the remaining thirty years of his life, long enough to raise a son, Charles Jr—who worked in downtown barber shops and was arrested every so often for burglary, drunkenness, gambling and carrying concealed knives and razors—and to see the birth of his grandson, Commodore, who served in a Negro labour regiment in France in the first world war and died of a heart attack in 1942.

Commodore’s son, Charlie, was fourteen when his father died. A few days after Christmas the following year, Charlie broke into the Croton avenue apartment of Izora Boggs, the proprietress of Boggs Beauty Shoppe, and stole $1,700 in cash, which he had in his possession for less than an hour before he was picked up by police. Mrs Boggs did not press charges, and Charlie was spared punishment.

Charlie left high school at the end of world war two and spent five years in the navy, where he learned how to box. When he returned to New Castle, he was taken on by a local boxing promoter, Bob Latera, who touted him as a potential heavyweight champion but did not have the necessary connections to secure fights in which Charlie could display his talents. After four years, Charlie had fought in only a few competitions, so Latera sold his distribution business and took Charlie to Los Angeles on a make-or-break trip. They arrived in California just before Christmas, a quiet season for boxing. They returned two months later, having failed to book a single fight.

That summer, Charlie went to Pittsburgh to fight before a crowd of seven thousand people—his first public engagement in two years—and was knocked out in the first round of a scheduled six-round fight. Latera was furious. He told the sports writers, “He didn’t box the way he was instructed. He did not do anything right. He simply got knocked out. There is no alibi for his defeat.” He quit as Charlie’s manager and retired from the boxing world to open a car showroom.

Charlie never fought professionally again. He trained young boxers at the Shenango YMCA for a few years. After he was arrested in 1957—during the opportunistic round-up of loiterers that also netted Floyd Armstrong—he left New Castle with his brother, Commodore, to get work in Chicago. They later retired to a place near Modesto, California, where Charlie died in 1999, at the age of seventy-two.

The Bowens, an old couple who lived next door to the Clover Farm store on East Washington street, were awoken at almost two in the morning by the sound of someone prowling around outside. Mr Bowen went out with a flashlight to see what was going on while his wife called the police.

Samuel Webber and Frank Vanasco—two boys in the middle of their last year of high school—had broken into the store using a key that Samuel had stolen two weeks before. They had filled a sack with $40-worth of candy, cigarettes, gum and canned chicken when Mr Bowen’s flashlight shone in the front window. Frank ran out of the back door and drove off in his car. Samuel hid behind the candy counter before following Frank out the back and running to his house two blocks away.

Frank was caught when he circled back to try to find Samuel. Samuel was arrested in his home an hour later, after Frank gave the police his address. They pled guilty and were rewarded with a fine instead of jail. The following year, they both attended their graduation ceremony, where a local pastor delivered a commencement address entitled, “The Choices We Make”, in which he advised the boys—and the rest of the school—that certain choices in life have irrevocable consequences and that they should give thought to God before making them.

Frank joined the army and was sent to Korea. Samuel went to teachers college in Slippery Rock, joined the army when he graduated and spent a few years in an anti-aircraft unit outside Pittsburgh.

After the Korean war, Frank opened a nursing home in Mount Vernon and Samuel became a teacher in Butler County. There is no further record of their lives.

In the twenties, hundreds of thousands of people visited Cascade park every summer from across western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio to enjoy its amusements, its man-made lake and its carefully presented scenery. The park suffered during the depression, never to regain its former popularity, but the second week of August, 1946, was busier than normal for that period. Large family picnics were held every day by bible study classes, the Lawrence County Red Cross chapter, former pupils of Mahoningtown school, Lutheran women of the western conference of the Pittsburgh synod, the Grace Bible church, the Christian church and the Daughters of Rebekah. Everyone agreed that there were fewer mosquitoes than there had been in previous years, perhaps on account of the long dry spell.

During one of those picnics, a man took a four-year-old girl into the woods and repeatedly molested her. The following week, Joseph Dando, a fifty-one-year-old man from Hamilton street, was arrested and charged with open lewdness and indecent assault of a minor. He spent a month in jail in default of $1,000 bail before being released. The case was eventually abandoned without a trial.

That year, the dam across the Big Run broke and Cascade park’s lake ran dry. In the fifties, after the dam was repaired, the park was given an overhaul and enjoyed better attendance than it had for years but before long the lake began to silt up and had to be repeatedly dredged over the next two decades. In 1972, the dam broke again and the lake drained away for good. The town had no money to pay for the repairs. The park’s rollercoaster and other rides fell into disuse and were torn down in the eighties. The public buildings, paths and facilities were in disrepair by the end of the century, when the dilapidated open-air swimming pool was shut down. An annual nostalgia weekend featuring classic cars and oldies cover bands, called “Back to the ‘50s”, is Cascade park’s only significant remaining attraction.

Blackberries sold for about 25 cents a quart in the summer of 1921, when Frank Heckathorn and his cousins made a few dollars a day collecting them from the roadsides north of New Castle and selling them in the city. On the afternoon of July 15th, they had driven some miles out on the Pulaski road and Frank was searching for huckleberries in the bushes and trees by a lane on the old Greer farm when he came across an almost naked, battered body. He could not tell if it was a man or a woman. Frank heard “a slight noise” and ran back to his cousin and his cousin’s wife. He told them what he had seen and one of them suggested that it might be a case of murder. If it was, the murderer might still be nearby. They returned to their car and drove two miles around the farm to the lane, so that they could investigate in safety.

Parking at a spot near where Frank had seen the body, they shouted into the wood—“Hello? What’s the matter, buddy?” and “Are you sick?”—but received no reply. The men told each other that it was probably a passed-out drunk and they drove off. Frank’s cousin’s wife began to cry, and didn’t stop until they pulled over at a friend’s house on the Wilmington road and called the sheriff, who drove out to meet them.

Frank took the sheriff to the lane and led him to the place where he had seen the body. It lay on a patch of torn-up ground, wearing only a torn undershirt, one stocking and one shoe. A hat, broken glasses and blood-soaked clothes were scattered all around. The sheriff said, “My God, it’s the Lennox girl!”

Frank and his cousins had not heard the news but a fourteen-year-old girl from Moody avenue, Clara Bell Lennox, had gone missing the previous morning. Her parents had contacted the police some hours after she should have returned home. A description of her had been issued—she was “of quiet disposition”, she looked like a girl of sixteen, her shell rim glasses gave her a mature appearance, she had a squint in one of her eyes—and at that moment, groups of police and volunteers were searching the city and its environs for any trace of her.

The sheriff examined the body. Clara Bell’s back was covered in deep scratches. Her skull was cracked. Her left eye had been knocked out of her head. But she was still alive. Frank was sent to the nearest house to borrow some sheets to wrap her in but, by the time he returned, the sheriff and his cousins had left, taking Clara Bell with them to the hospital.

After Clara Bell recovered, she identified a local forty-one-year-old man named Thomas Verne Ryhal as her attacker. He had met her on Highland avenue, near her home, and offered to drive her into town. She had accepted but, instead, he had driven her out to the lane on the old Greer farm, where he told her that his wheels had become stuck in a rut. When she knelt down to see what the problem was, he hit her with a monkey wrench.

Four months after the attack, while Thomas Rhyal was on trial for assault, Clara Bell collapsed with convulsions. She died soon after. The autopsy discovered an abscess at the base of her brain, caused by an infection that had entered when her skull was fractured. The charge against Thomas Ryhal was changed to murder.

Frank’s role in the trial was small—he was twice called to tell the story of his discovery of the girl—but his description of the scene helped the prosecution to convey the callousness of Clara Bell’s killer. Thomas Ryhal was found guilty and sent to the electric chair in Rockview penitentiary one year later.

Frank and his family moved to a farm near Volant, in the north of Lawrence County, in the thirties. In 1943, just after midnight on July 10th, six boys who were parked near Graceland cemetery, on the eastern edge of New Castle, were frightened by what they described to police as a half man, half beast that scratched on the car’s window and waddled away when they shone a flashlight on it. The canine control officer examined the area but could find no animal tracks. The police suspected it might be a pervert.

The next night, posses of youths roamed the Graceland and Oak Park cemetery districts looking for the creature. State, county and city police were out in force, too. They arrested half a dozen boys and girls for trespassing in the cemeteries and one man—Frank Heckathorn—for indecent exposure. Frank was given a $1 fine and four months in the county jail. The half man, half beast was never seen again.

Three hundred and nine bottles of whiskey were carried out of the state liquor store on Liberty street at three in the morning on 8th May 1945. The pinch bar that had been used to force the door was the only trace left by the burglars.

A month later, Archie Shoup, the chief of police in Bessemer, ten miles west of New Castle, was making a patrol at three in the morning when he saw two men behaving suspiciously near the state liquor store on Poland avenue. He was too far away to tell what they were doing, so he made his way toward them behind a row of houses, and watched as they carried cases of liquor from the store and piled them up beside a Buick coupe across the street.

Shoup shouted at them to halt and they started to run. He fired six shots and both men fell to the ground. One was hit in the arm and the shoulder, a bullet passing through his chest just above his heart; the other was not hit at all. He ran to the car while Shoup was distracted and drove off before he could reload.

John Parks, the wounded robber, was taken to New Castle, where he was kept in the hospital under armed guard. James Manseur, the other, drove to Cleveland, where he and John came from. He was arrested there two weeks later. John pled guilty to the Bessemer robbery. James was charged with the Bessemer and New Castle robberies. There is no record of the outcome of the cases.

Archie Shoup was Bessemer’s chief of police for twenty-two years, from prohibition to the second world war. He shot a handful of other men as they attempted to flee arrest, none fatally, and died of cancer in 1955.

The police spent almost a week hiding upstairs in the grain storehouse on Hugh Martin’s farm, fifteen miles south of New Castle in Big Beaver township, in the hope that the thieves who had taken a hundred bushels of corn would return for more. It was the middle of January. Freezing mist filled the valleys. Deep snow covered the hills. The officers were not permitted to light a fire to warm themselves.

On the fourth night, the officers heard someone unlocking the door. They gave the thieves enough time to sack some grain then came down the stairs. They found two full fourteen-bushel sacks of grain and two men whose forms they could only dimly make out. One man, Ernest McDole, surrendered, but the other ran out of the door into the night. Deputy Sheriff George Dean—who had a farm of his own in Slippery Rock township—fired both barrels of his shotgun after him, then fired six bullets from his pistol. A car started up and drove off. A torchlight search later showed blood splashed on the snow.

In the county jail, Ernest said two men had been with him, one waiting in the car, but that he did not know their names and had never seen them before they had driven up to his house in eastern Ohio, twenty-four miles from the farm, and asked him if he wanted to make a couple of dollars. It was an obvious lie, and of only limited help to his accomplices. A week after Ernest’s arrest, Albert White and Ernest Tuttle, the latter with buckshot wounds peppering the backs of his legs, were taken into custody. All entered pleas of guilty. Within the week, Albert White was caught in the act of sawing through the bolt on his cell door with a saw that had been smuggled into the jail by Dorothy Hardman—“a good-looking young woman, married, with three children”—who asked for leniency as she had acted out of love.

Ernest McDole was fined $1 and given from two to four years in the Western penitentiary. Ernest Tuttle, who had co-operated with the police, received a $1 fine and only eight months in the workhouse. Albert White, the ringleader, was given three to six years in the Western penitentiary. Dorothy Hardman was released from custody after spending a month in the county jail awaiting trial.

After Ernest got out of jail, he returned to Ohio. He died in December 1981, at the age of sixty-five.