Everett Eakin, “Intox driver”, 11 October 1946
Before the war, Everett Eakin was the assistant superintendent of the Jordan game farm, east of New Castle, one of dozens of game farms that kept the woods stocked with birds for small-game season in the fall. Each year, Everett would release around twenty thousand birds into the wild, and Lawrence County’s twelve thousand licensed hunters would kill their share of the quarter of a million pheasants, woodcocks, doves, wild turkeys and Hungarian partridges that were shot in Pennsylvania between November and January, along with two million or so rabbits, squirrels, woodchucks and raccoons.
On the eleventh of October, 1946, not long after he had come home from the army, Everett was driving down South Jefferson street on the first rainy evening in weeks when Dominick Ross stepped out in front of him as the lights changed to green. Ross was a seventy-two-year-old retired carpenter. He had lived in New Castle since he left Italy in 1891, and had worked at the Pennsylvania Engineering plant for most of his life. When he was younger, he had earned some money on the side from selling bootlegged liquor. In 1900, he had founded the first Italian fraternal organisation in the city, the Casa Savoia. He was knocked to the ground by Everett’s car, breaking both of his arms and cracking his skull. He died in hospital a few hours later.
Everett was charged with driving while intoxicated. He pled not guilty to the charge, which no one had done since the thirties, and spoke vigorously in his own defence at the trial. The jury found him innocent.
By the time Everett retired, he had left the game farm and was working on an assembly line in south New Castle. He lived long enough to see his son become a professor of mathematics in Ohio and a chancellor of a university in North Carolina. He died in 1995, at the age of eighty-two.
Sources: Sources: New Castle News (5 March 1941, “Men’s Club Hears Kenneth Brenneman”; 23 July 1943, “Collect 70,000 Pheasant Eggs”; 12 Oct 1946, “Man Is Fatally Injured When Struck By Auto”; 12 Dec 1946, “Copple Case Is Now With Jury”; 13 Dec 1946, “Joseph Copple Freed By Jury”; 28 April 1947, “Kill 35,519 Deer And 325 Black Bears”; 3 Nov 1950, “Outdoor Rambles”; 19 Sept 1973, “County Report”); media.lib.ecu.edu, “President/Chancellor Bios”.Anna Mae Craven, “Dis Conduct”, 14 July 1946
Anna Mae Craven was twenty-two years old when she was arrested for disorderly conduct. A year later, she was married to Lawrence Black, a locomotive engineer on the B&O railroad. The marriage lasted less than three months before Lawrence divorced Anna Mae on grounds of immorality and indignities to person.
Lawrence, who never remarried, lived alone in a house in Mahoning township until he fell ill and died suddenly in 1971, at the age of fifty-five. There is no further record of Anna Mae.
Sources: New Castle News – “Marriage License Applications” 20 March 1947; “More Divorce Suits Are Filed” 16 July 1947; “Deaths of the Day”, 5 Feb 1971.George Marousis, “No.s Lottery” 19 Feb 1942
The Marousis brothers James, William and Speer, left the Greek village of Lyrkeia for America in 1906 when Speer, the oldest, was just eighteen. They arrived in New York and headed straight for New Castle, where they shone shoes and cleaned hats until they had enough money to open a cigar store on East Washington street. In 1912, James returned to Europe to join the Greek army, fighting in the Balkan wars and the first world war. He sent out their cousin, George, to replace him in New Castle. The brothers made George manager of their new store on the Diamond, while they concerned themselves with other businesses—a confectionary called Candy Land, run by William, and a cinema called the Dome, run by Speer.
By 1921, Speer had taken over four more cinemas—the Penn, the Regent, the Capitol and the Star. The Capitol burned down in 1930 and he lost all but the Regent in the depression. In 1940, Speer and William bought the Fountain Inn, the grandest hotel in New Castle. They ran it for ten years until their partnership dissolved. William retained the hotel. Five years later, Speer closed the Regent, blaming television for falling audiences. He bought the old Coliseum theater and had it razed and the ground cemented over for a parking lot. The rent from that and his other properties paid for his retirement. William ran the Fountain Inn until it burned down on Christmas eve, 1968. It, too, became a parking lot.
While his cousins’ businesses thrived, failed, rose and fell, George went to work day after day in the cigar store on the Diamond, changing its name from Marousis Cigars to the American News Stand not long after he was arrested for running a lottery on the premises, during the county detective’s crackdown on numbers operations in the city.
George worked at the store for fifty years, until he died in 1969, at the age of seventy-two. Two years after his death, Pennsylvania established a state lottery. The American News Stand was the only ticket agent in downtown New Castle.
10 May 1912, “Mercantile Appraisement”; 3 March 1913, “Local Greek Guards Turks”; 22 Feb 1915, “Youth Fails At First Job Of Burglary”; 13 Aug 1920, “New Candy Shop To Be Opened Here”; 7 Oct 1920, “Fine Art Work On Decorations For New Store”; 28 June 1921, “Big Theatrical Business Deal Is Consumated”; 16 March 1925, “Boyhood Ambitions”; 19 Feb 1942, “Arrest Four As Numbers Operators”; 24 April 1951, “Father Of George Marousis Is Dead At Home In Greece”; 31 July 1969, “Deaths Of The Day”; 16 Oct 1972, “Speer Marousis Dies In Hospital”; 28 Feb 1977, Pennsylvania Lottery advert.
