Stanley Balin, “Dis Cond”, 26 Jan 1941

Samuel Balin’s mother died when he was six. His father, a Polish immigrant who worked in the Farrell Steel works, sent him to the Margaret Henry home for orphans, which occupied an old mansion on Friendship street.

The house had been built by R W Cunningham, who had come to New Castle in 1836 and established a business forwarding wool, glass, iron and steel to the west. He grew prosperous and built a foundry, turning out ploughs, stoves, mill gears and, after the civil war, cast iron pipes for the new oil wells and machinery for industrial plants. He backed the New Castle and Beaver railway, which secured New Castle’s future as a steel town, and was one of the founders of the International Bank of Lawrence County, which gave the town control of its finances. After he died, close to the end of the nineteenth century, his family sold his iron manufactories to US Steel, which soon came to own almost every industrial concern in the city, and gave his house, with twenty-seven rooms and acres of land, to a Catholic society to use as New Castle’s only orphanage.

The home had been open for over twenty years by 1929, when Stanley enrolled. It had a good reputation. Its children were clean and educated and were known to be able to secure decent employment and do well later in life. Very few ever troubled the police.

By the winter of 1936, just before his eighteenth birthday, Stanley and a group of southside boys—none from the orphanage—had begun to rob drunks and old men walking home late at night from the bars on Long avenue. Most of the victims were easy marks, but they had beaten a few badly enough to put them in hospital. Just before midnight on the seventh of March, they saw a drunk staggering down Jefferson street. When he stopped to lean against a telephone pole by an alley, they crossed over to him. They cursed at him and he answered back. When they attacked him, the drunk grabbed Stanley by his shirt, drew a blackjack and struck another boy on the shoulder, then pulled out a gun and said, “Someone’s going to get hurt, and it won’t be me.” A plainclothes detective ran out of the alley. Someone shouted, “Here comes the law.” The group fled, leaving Stanley behind.

The drunk was the chief of police, John Haven, setting himself out as bait. Stanley was taken to the station, where he co-operated and signed a confession naming the other members of the gang, who were arrested a few hours later. Four boys, including Stanley, were found guilty of assault and battery with intent to rob. Only three were sentenced to jail, each receiving one to three years in the Western penitentiary. Stanley was not among them.

Stanley went to work with a furniture manufacturer and trained as an upholsterer. In January 1941, he was arrested in South Mercer street for disorderly conduct and fined $10. That spring, he joined the army. Japan attacked Pearl harbour seven months later.

After the war, Stanley moved to Uniontown, south of Pittsburgh. His father, who had remarried, died in 1948. Stanley eventually retired to Florida, where he died in 1997, at the age of seventy-nine.

February 23, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Norman Ross, “Intox Driver”, 7 July 1948

Parades were held almost every day throughout New Castle’s sesquicentennial week—the veterans parade, the youth parade, the agricultural parade, the old-timers parade, the fraternal parade. Tuesday, set aside for the celebration of industrial labour, was a quieter day. Nevertheless, the carnival midway on the city parking grounds by the central fire station was open and busy until after midnight.

No alcohol was sold at the midway, but much was consumed. While driving home at twenty to two in the morning, Norman Ross—who had earned a purple heart when he was shot on Christmas eve, 1944, during the battle of the bulge—was stopped by police and arrested for driving a motor vehicle while under the influence of intoxicating liquor. He was fined $100 and jailed for three days. When he got out, sesqui week was over.

(More on the sesquicentennial here.)

February 16, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Robert Modrak, “Burglary”, 10 July 1948

The last day of New Castle’s week-long sesquicentennial celebrations (more on them here) started with a golf tournament at Sylvan Heights, followed by a parade of the city’s fraternal organisations—the Elks, the Sons of Italy, the Eintracht singing society—through the downtown and southside streets, accompanied by floats and high school marching bands. Thousands of people packed the sidewalks. The sun blazed down all afternoon.

Robert Modrak and three of his friends avoided all of that. They drove out of the city and spent the day walking along Slippery Rock creek, a shady gorge to the east of New Castle. When they got hungry, they broke into a cottage—the owner, Earl Dufford, was in town, watching the parade—and stole a little food and some blankets. Nearby, they found an unattended picnic hamper. They carried it off up the creek and had eaten most of its contents when they were disturbed by Clair Shaner, a brass worker at Johnson Bronze, who shouted at them to give him his hamper back. They threw it in the water and Robert pulled out a pistol. Shaner backed off and the men ran back to their car.

They were arrested later that day. In light of their previous good records, the judge gave them light sentences—$100 fines and a year’s probation.

Some years later, Robert moved to Arizona, where he died in 1988, at the age of sixty-nine.

February 9, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

William Brest, “Larceny”, 10 June 1960

A seventy-seven-year-old widow named Alice Johnson opened her door to William Brest, whom she mistook for a neighbor’s son. She let him in, leaving him alone in her living room for a minute. He took her wallet and left. After he removed the $16 that it contained, he threw it into the weed patch behind the United Presbyterian church on Countyline street, where it was recovered by police once William had been arrested and signed a confession. William returned the money, including the $2 that he had already spent, and Mrs Johnson withdrew the charges against him.

William had just turned eighteen. Within three years, he was married with two sons. He found a job at Rockwell’s auto and truck spring plant on Furnace street and got a place on its bowling team, which met with reasonable success in the town’s industrial league. In 1977, William was treated for smoke inhalation when the Rockwell plant was struck by lightning, which started a fire in the duct work. There is no further record of his life.

February 2, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Anagnostis Sakelliadis, “Liquor Violation”, 5 June 1948

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.

January 26, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

John Franell, “Drunk”, 31 July 1957

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.

January 19, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Nick Frank, “Larceny”, 15 January 1945

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.

January 12, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Emma Hilke, “Intoxicated Driver”, 25 July 1944

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.

January 6, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Charlie Tilden, “Loitering”, 27 June 1957

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.

December 29, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Samuel Webber, “Burglary”, 21 January 1949

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.

December 22, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Joseph Dando, “Indecent Assault”, 14 August 1946

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.

December 15, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Frank Heckathorn, “Indecent Exposure”, 11 July 1943

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.

December 8, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

John Parks, “Burglary”, 11 June 1945

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.

December 1, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Ernest McDole, “Burglary”, 16 January 1941

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.

November 24, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Ad Hambrick, “Stopping Traffic”, 12 November 1933

A Negro speakeasy on Mahoning avenue, run by a man known as Little Alabama, was raided by police in August 1933 in an effort to recover a fine watch that had been stolen from a white customer while he was spending time with a prostitute named Irene Smith. Eight people were arrested, including Ad Hambrick. All were released a few days later, having revealed nothing about the whereabouts of the watch, which was never recovered. Ad was arrested again a few months later for stopping traffic on Jefferson street. There is no record of any sentence.

Noah and Augusta Hambrick, Ad’s uncle and aunt, had come to New Castle from North Carolina in 1910. They lived in a house on West North street with their four children and other members of their families who followed them north over the years. Ad lived with them for a long time, even after he beat up his cousin’s wife, Myrtle, in 1937. He was still there in 1943, when he was admitted to the hospital after one of his brothers cracked his skull with a hammer.

After the war, Ad left New Castle and went to Pittsburgh. On a snowy night five days before Christmas, 1955, he was arrested on a vagrancy charge and placed in a cell, where he died a few hours later from what the coroner described as natural causes. He was fifty-six years old.

November 17, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Harold Geary, “Armed Robbery”, 2 February 1945

A broken eardrum kept Harold Geary out of the war. His friend, Ross Paswell, was drafted but came home early with a dishonourable discharge. They robbed the Wilson café in Ellwood City at gunpoint in January, 1945. The $50 that they took from the till lasted them four days, at the end of which they and their girlfriends were arrested. The women were given short sentences in the workhouse; the men were sent to the state penitentiary for six to twelve years.

Harold served his time without event and returned to Ellwood City, where he opened Geary’s Cycle Center and managed a motorcycle racing team that represented New Castle in state-wide competitions during the 1970s. He died in 1996, at the age of seventy-four.

November 10, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Ross Paswell, “High W Robbery”, 2 February 1945

On 25th January 1945, when Ross Paswell’s former comrades in the American navy were firing thousands of shells into the hillsides of Iwo Jima, destroying Japanese installations that were blocking the advance of the marine corps in the early days of a battle that would end the lives of twenty-five thousand men, Ross, who had been found unsuitable for naval service the year before and sent home with a dishonourable discharge, was robbing a café in Ellwood City, along with a man named Harold Geary, who was 4F on account of a broken ear drum.

Ross and Harold forced the café owner at gunpoint to hand over the contents of the till—$50—and drove off in a stolen car. They picked up their girlfriends—one of whom, Maria White, was married to an overseas marine—and drove south through heavy snow, stealing other cars in Washington and Uniontown on their way to Connellsville where, the police later said, “they lived as men and wives” for four days.

They were arrested when they returned the women to their homes in Beaver Falls. All four were taken back to New Castle, where they pled guilty to the charges against them. The men received six to twelve years in the state penitentiary for armed robbery and auto theft; the women got one to two years in the workhouse for being accessories after the fact.

Ross had difficulties in jail. He protested about the lack of educational opportunities, recreational facilities and an adequate diet. In return, he spent a great deal of time in the hole—a concrete cell with a concave floor beneath the administration building, with no furniture, toilet or light, where, after being stripped naked, he would have to sit, squat or lie in his own urine and excrement for up to seven days at a time.

After six years, Ross was paroled. He found that he was unable to buy a car, due to his criminal record, so he used a false name to sign the papers. His deception was uncovered, and he was returned to jail to serve the rest of his ten-year sentence.

Ross was released in February 1955. Four months later, he married a woman named Marjorie Dougal and moved into a house in Ellwood City, where he became a self-employed landscaper. Marjorie was pregnant for most of the next decade, producing two sons and six daughters before 1969, when she had Ross arrested for an assault in which he cracked two of her ribs. Ross and Marjorie were divorced as soon as the court would allow.

The following year, living alone in New Castle, Ross began to write long letters to the New Castle News in which he discussed the social upheaval that he saw going on around him. He said that the disillusionment of the young was entirely justified, that they had been betrayed by the capitalists and the communists, the liberals and the conservatives. He urged understanding of the Weathermen and other leftist bombers, whom he described as keeping America’s conscience awake. He spoke of the outright revolution that was to come and called for the United Nations to declare the ghettos, the Indian reservations and the migrant worker camps disaster zones and send in observers to determine if the under-privileged, the poverty-stricken and the down-trodden were being treated humanely. He said that the only way America could save itself and the rest of the world was to take all that was salvageable from the Judeo-Christian traditions and combine that with Zen Buddhism. He contemplated his time in jail and what he had done to Marjorie, and wrote that he considered that the dehumanising punishments to which he had been subjected had left him with a slow-burning animal rage that could burst into flame at any moment.

In October of that year, Ross was jailed for one to two years for passing bad checks at his local supermarket. He immediately began to campaign for prison reform, writing letters to congressmen, senators and the state attorney general to draw attention to the paucity of fruit in the jail diet, the lack of adequate light for reading and the fact that there were no laundry facilities. He also made “a silent commitment to the teachings of Christ” when he was given a few packs of tobacco and candy by a visiting preacher following an Easter service.

On his release in 1971, when he was fifty-one years old, Ross founded an organisation called IOU, Inc, which was made up of local business and professional people and ex-convicts who volunteered to help convicts reintegrate into the community when they got out of jail by providing them with employment, loans and fellowship. It became known throughout the state correctional system as an example of how to rehabilitate offenders. Ross was invited to speak at state anti-crime hearings. He was described as an inspirational figure by leaders of the community. His views on the political issues of the day—for example, that Richard Nixon had allowed “an arrogant clique of power mad political appointees to manipulate governmental agencies by adopting Nazi philosophies that are contrary to the morals and ethics on which our democracy was founded”—continued to find an outlet in the pages of the New Castle News.

Ross kept on working with ex-convicts until old age prevented him from doing any more. In one of his last published letters, he wrote, “Looking back over the life I have been compelled to live as a convict and ex-convict, considering the psychological scars imprinted on my mind, knowing that I could have been reduced to an animal, it has to be the continuing grace of God that I am alive, free and still a human being.” He died in a nursing home in 2008, at the age of eighty-eight.

November 3, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Harold Nicolls, “Burglary”, 8 July 1956

One September afternoon in 1932, when Harold Nicolls was five years old, his mother took him to Arlington avenue to visit his grandfather, Isaiah Engle, who would be arrested a few years later for performing a lewd act in public in Gaston park. Harold was playing outside the house when he chased a ball out into the street and was hit by a car. He was unharmed by the collision—cuts and scrapes—but he fell onto the car’s broad front bumper and was carried some way down the street before the driver stopped. It may have been his first journey by car.

By the time Harold was thirteen, he had developed a habit of driving around town in cars whose owners had left their keys in the ignition. One evening toward the end of winter, he and an eleven-year-old boy were arrested for stealing a delivery truck from behind the Kirk Hutton store and taking it for a joy ride across the Diamond and down East Jefferson street. They were sent to the George Junior Republic, a privately run correctional institution for delinquent boys, where Harold would spend most of his teenage years. He began his twenties in the Allegheny County workhouse, where he had been sent for one to three years after being caught riding as a passenger in a Buick that had been stolen by his friend. He was released on parole after eighteen months, but was soon arrested on two charges of burglary, nine of larceny and one of malicious mischief, and returned to jail in September 1949. He remained there for the next four years.

On his release, at the age of twenty-two, Harold moved in with his mother on Valley street. A year later, he served two months in the county jail for driving while under the influence. The following year, he was caught selling cartons of cigarettes that had been stolen from the East street market and was sentenced to another two months for receiving stolen goods. He was still living with his mother in 1958, when his girlfriend’s fourteen-year-old son, James, was found wandering near the Diamond at three in the morning and told the police that he had left his home after Harold had strap-whipped him. Harold admitted using his belt on James, but said that the boy’s mother had asked him to do it. He was charged with assault and battery and fined $50.

Harold drove a cab in the sixties and by the end of the decade, just after he turned forty, he had become the owner of a small cab company that operated out of White street. During the seventies, Harold’s drivers began to report that they were being held up and robbed by their passengers. Some of the stories were true; some were invented by drivers to cover up their embezzlement. Harold tried to operate as normal for as long as possible but, as the decade wore on, he was forced to reduce services, especially after dark. The robberies continued until the company closed down in 1977.

Harold died in New Castle in 2005, at the age of seventy-eight.

October 27, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

Julius Roth, “Intox Driver”, 24 May 1941

By the end of 1921, two years after the start of prohibition, illegal liquor was a major trade in Lawrence County. Jack Dunlap, a thirty-year-old former state policeman and private security officer for US Steel, was appointed county detective in January 1922 and told to shut down the bootleggers’ operations. He began a campaign of raids, uncovering stills in farms outside New Castle and houses around town and arresting hundreds of liquor manufacturers and traffickers, from the Serbian gang who had constructed a huge underground alcohol factory beneath a farm to the west of the city to small-timers like Julius Roth, a Carpathian-German immigrant who ran a domestic still on his farm on the county line road.

Julius arrived in the United States from Transylvania in 1920, a few months after prohibition became law, and bought a small piece of property on which to raise a herd of dairy cows. His land was the last remnant of the farm that had belonged to Charles Whippo, the chief engineer of the Beaver and Erie canal that had first made New Castle an industrial centre in the 1840s. Whippo’s grandchildren had sold most of the land to the Lehigh company, which had torn up the fields to get at the rich limestone below and built a cement factory on the portion adjoining the plot that Julius owned. Consequently, Julius grazed his cows on a high pasture on the Desprink farm a mile away, where, one summer, a quarter of his herd was killed by lightning.

Julius was arrested by Jack Dunlap on a liquor charge in May 1922 and given a short sentence. The next time Dunlap arrested him, he received a $500 fine and three months in the workhouse. On his third arrest, he was given eighteen months.

By the end of 1922, a year during which Dunlap had presented the court with up to eighty bootleggers a month, the county had earned $10,000 in liquor-related fines. In 1923, the sum doubled as Dunlap and his deputies—known in the press as the three musketeers—made ever more arrests. On 19th June 1924, fifty pounds of dynamite exploded under Dunlap’s home on Epworth street. The kitchen was utterly destroyed and the lower floor of the house was wrecked. Dunlap, his wife and their baby, who had been sleeping upstairs, were unharmed.

That Sunday, more than a thousand people crowded into the First Methodist church to show their support for Dunlap. His character and work were praised by speakers who denounced the bombers as foreign anarchists who were determined to undermine law and order in America. One city official said, “How Lenin must have laughed if he heard of the atrocity.” The editor of the New Castle News said, “Get the dastards who attempted to destroy Mr Dunlap and his young family as they slept. Get these persons who would tear down the very foundations of this country’s freedom, and leave no stone unturned to see that they are brought to the summary justice they so richly deserve.”

Dunlap was not present at the meeting—the audience was told that he was out working on a case—but he later said, “This is not the first time that an attempt has been made on my life by bootleggers and violators of the eighteenth amendment. About a year ago, a foreign-born resident of this county planned to take my life. We have received many intimations in the past few months that the bootleggers were out to at least annoy us, if not take our lives. They have called on the telephone in an effort to frighten my wife. They have rapped mysteriously on the doors and windows and disappeared and many such little things in the effort to frighten me and those associated with me. However, despite their efforts, I expect to continue to do my whole duty.”

The police believed the bombers to have been part of an Italian rum-running gang that was consolidating its control of the liquor trade in western Pennsylvania. No one was ever charged in connection with the crime.

In the year following the bombing, Dunlap made more arrests than ever before. The revenue raised from liquor-related fines rose to $35,000. However, when Dunlap’s four-year term was up at the end of 1925, the new district attorney declined to reappoint him. Dunlap tried to run for sheriff, but failed to win the Republican nomination. In the end, he had the support only of the organised prohibitionists; everyone else favoured a change of approach. There were significantly fewer liquor arrests in subsequent years.

Dunlap celebrated his last day as county detective with a raid on the de Mary farm, which resulted in the confiscation of the biggest still ever found in Lawrence County. A few days later, he became the county probation officer and spent the next forty years operating the city’s juvenile detention home and the industrial schools in Morganza and Oakdale. After his retirement, in the late 1960s, he organised New Castle’s annual old-timers’ day celebrations. He last appeared in the press in 1969, leading the old-timers through Cascade park as the band played, “Stars and Stripes Forever.”

Julius Roth continued to work on his farm beside the cement works. His only crime following the repeal of prohibition was driving while intoxicated, for which he was arrested—and had his mug shot taken—in 1941. He died in 1948, at the age of seventy-three.

October 20, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | 9 Comments »

Charles Peak, “Vio. Uniform Firearm”, 14 March 1956

On a spring night in 1956, Charles Peak and two of his friends were driving a souped-up car around downtown New Castle, looking for other cars to race. They found none, so they pulled up beside a parked police car on Mercer street, shouted obscenities at the officers and sped off. The patrol car chased them south for several blocks then north on Cochran way. The boys abandoned their car and fled, but were caught shortly afterward. Charles was found to be in possession of an Italian Beretta .32—someone’s world war two souvenir—for which he had no licence. He was fined $100 and given a year’s probation.

The following week, Charles’s father, Harry Peak, was charged with murdering his brother, Erwin. He was released when the autopsy showed the cause of death to be a heart attack brought on by acute alcoholism. There was no answer to the question of how Erwin came to be buried in a ditch off the West Pittsburg road, under several feet of dirt, rock and logs, but similarities were noted to the incident in 1917, when Charles’ grandfather, Ransom Peak, had been arrested for killing his nephew but had been released when it was found that the brain injury that had killed the boy had been sustained in a drunken fall on the rocky banks of the Shenango, rather than in the quarrel that had occurred before he had left Ransom’s house. There were no further proceedings in either case. 

Six months after his first arrest, Charles nearly died when his car overturned after it missed a curve on Butler avenue, at Cascade street, and slid on its top for a hundred yards until it hit a utility pole. He had been racing another car on the stretch of route 422 that the local boys used as a drag strip. His car was destroyed but he suffered only minor facial injuries. No charges were brought against him.

Charles got a new car as soon as he could. By the following spring, he had customised and improved it to his satisfaction and was ready to test its performance on the road. On April 10th 1957, Charles had a few beers with John Young and George Ramsey, two hot-rodders a few years older than him. After discussing their cars and arguing about whose was the fastest, they drove a few miles east of town on route 422 to Lipinski’s garage, the traditional start of drag races into New Castle.

They lined up across the three-lane highway and took off toward town, quickly reaching speeds of more than 120 miles an hour. After a short distance, they met a car travelling in the opposite direction, which pulled off the road as far as it could and came to a halt. John Young swerved to avoid it. He sideswiped George Ramsey’s car, clipped Charles’s car and spun across the road, directly into the stationary car. He was thrown through his windshield as his car went over the embankment and overturned. His skull was crushed against a steel guard post.

The other drivers and their passengers suffered lacerations or broken limbs, apart from Charles, who was entirely unharmed.

Charles and George were found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and were sentenced to up to two years in the Alleghenny workhouse. Charles was paroled after ten months; George after four. Neither was arrested again for a driving offence, although Charles fractured his rib in a crash two years later. (He was the passenger; his wife was driving.) He died in 1996, aged sixty-one.

The New Castle News published editorials throughout the fifties calling for drivers who caused deaths through drag racing—the “gasoline ghouls”—to be charged with second-degree murder. Others in the city wanted a drag strip to be built so that young men would have somewhere legal to race their cars. Arguments about where one could be situated carried on until 1961, when Mike Pollio laid an asphalt track and erected some bleachers on a site seven miles west of New Castle on the Youngstown road, which he called the Skyline. Weekly competitions were held. Unofficial races were allowed for a fee. Thousands of spectators attended during the summer.

The Skyline closed down after ten years. The structures were abandoned and later removed. All that remains is a patch of discoloured grass, two lanes wide.

October 13, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | 11 Comments »

Owen Ransom, “B&E Larc”, 21 March 1939

The police described seventeen-year-old Owen Ransom as a well-acting lad who came from a good family. They were mystified about why he had broken into several houses, garages and cars to steal jewellery and cash, much of which he had thrown into the Neshannock creek. He told them simply that he had robbed the homes for a thrill. The judge placed him on probation for three years.

Owen left school and got a job as a stock clerk before he was drafted in 1942. He spent the war in army camps in New York, Florida and Oklahoma. After he returned to New Castle, he became a foreman at the Shenango Pottery factory and, a few years later, he was married in a candlelit ceremony to Phyllis Dean, a secretary at the Haney Furniture company.

A year and a half after the wedding, on Sunday 21st May, 1950, Owen waited until his wife was asleep then drove to Youngstown, where he found a woman, Helen Bernt, walking alone. He stopped and offered her a ride home. He was well spoken, and he was driving an expensive car. Helen accepted.

When they got to her house, Helen tried to get out but Owen grabbed her and drove four or five blocks to a deserted stretch of the road, where he raped her and then performed what she later referred to as an unnatural act of intercourse upon her. Afterwards, he told her he wished it hadn’t happened like it had. He said, “The least I can do is take you home.” Helen got out of the car, took off her shoes and ran until she came across a taxi. She had the driver take her back to the street where Owen’s car was still parked. She wrote down its license number and reported it to the police.

By the time the police went to check on the car, Owen had gone. They passed the details to the police in New Castle, where the car was registered. For some reason, the New Castle police did nothing about it.

Two nights later, at around ten o’clock, Gisella Morganti was walking home along East Winter avenue when Owen appeared and said something about the weather—there had been showers on and off all day, and thunder was forecast. She was nervous and walked on, calling out to her father as she approached her house. Owen grabbed her from behind and threw her to the ground—“like a sack of potatoes”, she later told police. She screamed for help and a neighbour shouted her name. Owen ran off, taking her pocketbook.

Less than two hours later, just after midnight, Helen Brasile was walking down East Washington street, near Almira avenue, when Owen attacked her. He forced his fingers down her throat and dragged her into an empty driveway. He said, “No use struggling, sister, you’re not getting away.” Helen fainted or was knocked out. Owen raped her.

When Helen regained consciousness, she was bleeding from the mouth and her clothing was torn and covered in mud. One of her shoes was missing, as was her purse, which contained $28. She knocked on the door of an old couple’s house and told them what had happened. They called the police.

Owen was arrested at half past two the following afternoon. The mayor took personal charge of the case after learning that the police had failed to act on the information that the Youngstown police had passed on.

The three women identified Owen as their attacker. Owen said that he had had consensual sex with Helen Bernt in Youngstown and had committed no subsequent unnatural act. He and his wife claimed that, on the night of the New Castle attacks, Owen had been home, listening to a ball game on the radio and had gone to bed at a quarter to eleven.

The jury believed the women. Owen received a four-to-eight year term in the Rockview prison farm at Bellefonte. He was free by 1956. He and Phyllis had a son in 1958 and a daughter in 1960. He died in 1995, in New Castle, at the age of seventy-three.

Helen Brasile married a man called Raymond Wetling the year after Owen was jailed. She and Raymond left town. Gisella Morganti never married. She moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with her sister in 1970. There is no further record of Helen Bernt.

Sources: New Castle News ( 24 March 1939, “Youth Pleads Guilty To Entering Homes”; 25 March 1939, “Police Report Youth Admits More Burglaries”; 3 April 1939, “On Court House Hill”; 18 May 1940, “David Jameson Lodge Initiates”; 13 Jan 1943, “Men In US Service”; 18 March 1943, “Men In US Service”; 19 July 1943, “Men In US Service”; 12 Oct 1944, “Men In US Service”; 28 Aug 1948, “Dean-Ransom Wedding Plans”; 16 Sep 1948, “Evening Wedding Candlelight Event”; 25 May 1950 , “Police Grill Suspect In Attacks Here”; 26 May 1950, “Police Make Charges In Attack Cases”; 29 May 1950, “Deaths Of The Day”; 21 Sep 1950, “Levine Asks First Degree”; 22 Sep 1950, “Ransome [sic] Found Guilty Of Rape”; 26 Feb 1951, “Court Upholds New Trial Plea”; 1 Mar 1951, “Ransom Draws 4 to 8 Years”; 21 Sep 1953, “Ransom Seeks Release”; 18 June 1956, “Hayes Tomlinsons Take Up Residence”; 29 Nov 1958, “Births Reported”; 24 June 1960, “Births Reported”; 21 Aug 1970, “Amity Club”; 28 Mar 1975, “Deaths Of The Day”); Youngstown Vindicator, 15 March 1950, “Jury Fails To Agree: Ransom Case Continued”; The Lawrence Law Journal, Volume 10, (1951).

October 6, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Leonard D’Antonio, “Burglary”, 26 March 1947

The Wasilewski grocery on the corner of Hamilton street and Carl street was destroyed in 1956 when a US Air Force training jet crashed into it. Nobody died. The crew had ejected after running out of fuel and the store was empty at the time. Several people in the neighbourhood were injured by flying glass and pieces of wreckage. The lot was cleared of rubble, but nothing was ever built there again.

Ten years earlier, at a quarter past ten on the night of 12th December 1946, two men wearing red, hooded masks walked through the doors of the store, pointing pistols at Rose Wasilewski, who was dusting a shelf, and her nine-year-old daughter, Donna, who was at the check-out counter. One stayed by the entrance while the other reached into the till and took $149 in notes, leaving the silver. John Wasilewski and his son, Eugene, who had been butchering meat in the back room, came into the front shop and shouted, “Get out of here!” The hooded men ran into the street and drove off in a car that they had stolen earlier from outside a nearby house. They abandoned it a few streets away and ran off in opposite directions.

Two weeks later, the Lawrence laundry on South Mill street was broken into by burglars who smashed open the safe and stole the 95 cents that it contained. It was the least successful robbery in a series of safe-cracking jobs that had had taken more than $7,000 that year. In March 1947, three months later, state police arrested a gang of seven men for the crimes. One of them, twenty-one-year-old Sammy Sams, confessed to breaking into the Lawrence laundry (along with Frank Largo, the brother of Ralph Largo) and later signed a separate confession in which he admitted to the Wasilewski hold-up but said that it had been the idea of his friend, Leonard D’Antonio, a foreman at Mellon-Stewart Construction, who had come to his house that night with two red hoods and told him that he knew a way they could make some money.

Leonard lived with his wife and children on Pollock avenue, in the home of his father-in-law, Frank Macchia, a New Castle police officer. He was arrested and taken to the state police barracks in Butler, where the confession was read to him. He said, “Sammy Sams must have quite an imagination,” and refused to say any more.

At the trial, Sams admitted his part in the string of robberies for which he had been arrested, but said that he had not written the confession implicating Leonard in the Wasilewski job and had signed it only after taking a beating from the state police. Nevertheless, the jury found both men guilty.

Leonard’s lawyers immediately asked for a retrial, which was eventually granted. (A similar request from Sams was denied, and he was sentenced to three to seven years in the Western penitentiary.) After Leonard had spent seven months in jail, but before the date on which his new trial was to begin, the case against him was dropped. Judge Braham criticised the state police’s investigation and the prosecution’s conduct and remarked on the general thinness of the evidence behind the conviction. Leonard was released the week before Christmas.

The following year, Leonard and his family moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a self-employed truck driver for twenty-eight years until 1975, when e died from a heart attack shortly after getting out of bed one Saturday morning. He was fifty-eight years old.

September 29, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | 7 Comments »

Gayle Goad, “Intox Driver”, 7 Sep 1953

When Gayle Goad went to war in June, 1943, he was only sixteen—he added two years to his age at the recruiting station. He was sent to Europe to join General Patton’s Third Army, which killed a hundred and forty-four thousand Germans as it fought its way from Normandy to Bohemia, at a cost of over sixteen thousand of its own men. Gayle had served for no more than a few months before he told his officers that he was underage and asked to be sent home, but they saw no sense in losing a trained soldier. In a battle not long after he turned seventeen, Gayle was almost killed when his unit was pinned down by machine-gun fire from above. The bullets struck his gun, knocking it out of his hands. The man next to him was shot dead.

Gayle’s father, Hobert, a conductor on the B&O railroad, died while Gayle was overseas. Hobert’s father, and all the other Goads for the past two hundred years, had farmed tobacco in northern Virginia, on former swampland in the Rappahannock valley that Abraham Goad had bequeathed to his children in 1733, along with a small sum of cash and his Negro servant, Judith. Abraham had been over ninety when he died; Hobert was only forty-eight.

Hobert’s death brought Gayle back to New Castle, in January 1946. A few months later, on the night of his nineteenth birthday, he attacked Harry and Helen Fraschetti, the owners of an inn in Croton who had refused to sell him meat or liquor at three o’clock in the morning. He spent two days in jail before the Fraschettis took pity on him and withdrew the charges. Gayle was sent to the Aspinwall veterans hospital, where he spent thirteen months in psychiatric care. He fell in love with a female psychiatrist and followed her to the west coast when he was released. She did not share his feelings and Gayle returned to New Castle after a spell in Nevada, where he made a living by gambling.

On a Monday afternoon in 1953, Gayle was arrested on North Liberty street for driving an auto while intoxicated—the crime for which his mug shot was taken. He was sentenced to thirty days in jail, out in three if the $100 fine and costs were paid. He spent a great part of the following year in the company of a group of petty criminals—ex-soldiers and boys too young to have fought in the war—who broke into cars on the north hill and grocery stores across the city and tried unsuccessfully to rob a safe in a service station downtown. They were caught in February 1955, when their car broke down after they held up a gas station near Mount Jackson. Gayle fled, heading west, and was arrested in Arizona a week later. He pled guilty to robbing around $3,000-worth of merchandise and was sent to the Western penitentiary for one to two years. He was paroled after ten months.

Gayle got married in his early thirties, but it didn’t last. Gayle was difficult for anyone to be around. For the next twenty-five years, he was a professional gambler, moving constantly between the east and the west. He died in 1984 in a Las Vegas motel room. His body lay for six days before it was found. The funeral home used the $700 that was found in his wallet to pay for his cremation.

He was fifty-nine, according to his birth certificate, or sixty-one, according to the Army.

September 22, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | 10 Comments »

Samuel Doster, “Larceny”, 22 July 1941; “Murder”, 22 Nov 1962

Samuel Doster was born in Indiana in 1925 and moved with his family to New Castle while he was a child. They lived in the only house on the 1000 block on West State street, which they shared with a number of others. His mother hosted Baptist prayer band meetings on Monday afternoons.

In 1941, when he was sixteen, Samuel was arrested for larceny. He was processed by the police, who took his mug shot and filed it away with his details, but was discharged without penalty. Two years later, he was drafted. He survived the war comfortably, spending the last year of his service in Hawaii. On his return to New Castle, he got married and went to work in the Johnson Bronze factory. Within months, his marriage was in trouble, and he moved out of the house soon after his first child was born.

Samuel spent time organising charity events for the YMCA and became active in his trade union. When a new auxiliary police force was set up, Samuel volunteered for that, too, and was eventually promoted to sergeant. By 1953, he had remarried. That summer, he and his new wife, Evelyn, were among the three thousand people who attended the annual Shenango Pottery picnic in Cascade park, where children were given free access to the rides, entertainment was provided by an employees’ talent show, and he and Evelyn won first prize in the waltz contest. The Korean war ended the next day. The sun shone all weekend.

On a Friday night in August 1962, Samuel and two friends went to the colored Elks club on Home street, arriving just after midnight. Around three o’clock, Samuel and John James, Jr, the son of a cruiser patrolman in Farrell, got into an argument about how many Negroes had been employed by Johnson Bronze during the war. A wager was made, and Samuel placed a $10 bill on the bar.

John James left the club while Samuel was talking to one of his friends. Samuel noticed that the $10 was missing and followed James into the street. James told him that the bartender had taken the money. Samuel went back in to check, but the bartender said he hadn’t seen it.

Samuel went back outside and stopped James getting into his car. He took him back inside the club and James pulled out a razor and grabbed a microphone, which he swung at Samuel. James ran out of the club, followed by Samuel, who chased him down Home street onto Moravia street and into the space between two buses that were parked at a service station, where they tumbled to the ground together.

Samuel opened his clasp knife and he and James grabbed for each other, falling into a bear hug from which James broke loose only after Samuel had stabbed him once in the shoulder and twice in the back.

James ran to the service station office, followed by Samuel. Both insisted that the police be called. A police cruiser took them to the hospital, where Samuel was released after being treated for a cut to his thumb. After dropping his knife into a mop bucket—“because”, he told police later, “I knew I was going to get into a world of trouble behind it”—he filed an aggravated assault charge against James, who was kept in the hospital for treatment.

James died the following afternoon. Samuel’s knife had severed an artery and James had been bleeding internally all night without anyone noticing. Samuel was at a dance in Cleveland with Evelyn when he heard the news. He returned to New Castle and turned himself in to the police, who replaced their mug shot of the sixteen-year-old Samuel with one of the thirty-six-year-old Samuel and wrote “Murder” on the file card, under the old charge of larceny.

Samuel was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to two to four years in the Western penitentiary. While he was inside, Evelyn divorced him. Upon his release, he moved in with his mother, back in the house where he had grown up. A year later, Evelyn took him to court to force him to pay child support.

Eventually, Samuel moved out of town. He died in Columbia, South Carolina, in 2000, at the age of seventy-four.

September 15, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | 4 Comments »