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.