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.

May 14, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

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.

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

John Whitten, “Intox Driver”, 20 Oct 1942

The Warner brothers opened their first cinema in a converted room on the ground floor of the old Knox hotel on South Mill street in 1905, when John Whitten was six years old. Harry Warner bought the fixtures and fittings from Whitten’s hardware store on East Washington street, which was owned by John’s father, who helped the Warners install the chairs that they rented from a nearby funeral parlour. The cinema did well, and the Warners were able to open sixteen others across Pennsylvania. In 1910, they sold their business for $52,000 and opened a film production company in New York. They never returned to New Castle.

In 1918, the year the Warners established a studio in Hollywood, a motion picture director named Henry Belmar suffered a nervous breakdown when the film biography of Lincoln that he was working on collapsed, leaving him heavily in debt and pursued for thousands of dollars by creditors. He fled to New Castle, a town he had never visited before, and took a room in the Henry hotel, where he lived in seclusion for the rest of his life, earning a little money selling Stay-Prest trouser presses. From time to time he would tell acquaintances about his ambition to one day finish his Lincoln picture, but nothing ever came of it.

Henry Belmar died in New Castle in 1931, the year John Whitten—who had by then taken over the management of his father’s hardware store—married a nurse from Youngstown. The store went bankrupt a few years later and John became a refrigerator repairman, fixing and maintaining the same appliances he had previously sold. His arrest in 1942 for driving under the influence of liquor was noteworthy only insofar as it made him one of the first drivers to be convicted through the use of the city’s newly purchased drunkometer, a machine in the office of the chief of police that could detect alcohol on a person’s breath. Other than the subsequent fine of $100, there is no further record of his life.

By the end of the century, the South Mill street block that had housed the Warners’ first cinema was largely derelict. In recognition of its historical and cultural significance, the city bought the property and transformed it into a shopping and entertainment complex, which, it was hoped, would help to regenerate the downtown area. Unable to attract sufficient tenants, it closed down after four years. In 2011, it was sold to a west Pennsylvania bank to cover its accumulated debt of $4,500,000.

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

Sam Wilson, “B&E Larceny”, 6 February 1937

Sam Wilson was arrested for burglary in 1937, but there is no record of the case. At the time, he was living in an apartment above the Davis Coal and Supply Company store on Moravia street with his wife and five children. A decade earlier, after he arrived in New Castle from the south, he had a place above the Gloria Tire and Rubber Works, two blocks up the street, and made money selling bootleg wine. While he was living there, he stabbed Cryp Williams in the chest with a penknife during an argument over a game of cards, was mauled by a guard dog that had to be shot by the police, and was almost killed when—for a reason that no one was prepared to tell—a drinking companion emptied his revolver at him and some other men who were gathered in an alley behind the old Shearer barn.

Sam’s wife divorced him in the forties. He moved to Wampum, a few miles south of New Castle, and married a woman named Mary Lewis. She died of cancer four years later, in 1956. He married his third wife only a short while before he was diagnosed with sugar diabetes and a heart condition. On the third of April 1960, a week after he had been released from a stay in hospital, Sam stayed up all night drinking in his kitchen. Around five in the morning, he said to his wife, “I know that I have to die, and you are going with me,” and attacked her with a pair of scissors. She escaped and called the police. Sam was taken to the county jail. There is no further record of his life.

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

Time Off For Good Behavior

Small Town Noir will not be updated for the next couple of weeks, as I’ll be out of the country and hopefully nowhere near a computer.

In the meantime, you might want to revisit a few of the earlier posts, as I’ve rewritten a lot of them as I found out more about the lives of the subjects. For example, I came across the interesting story behind the first arrest, at the age of sixteen, of Walter Jamison, who would go on to become an expert forger and doughnut baker. I was able to fill in a little more of the life of John Hutchison, a rather less expert forger, after I received an e-mail from his son, who had never heard of the criminal episode in his father’s life until he read about it here. I’ve also been able to shed a little more light on the crimes of William Fabian, Warren Dewyer and others as I’ve learned more about their context and what New Castle was like back then.

What I’m saying is, I’m sorry there will be no new stories until the middle of March, but there’s plenty of old ones in the archives, and some of them have changed so much that they might as well be new, so dig in.

March 31, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | 7 Comments »

Dick Hitchcock, “Intox Driver”, 22 Feb 1942

Dick Hitchcock grew up working in his father’s butcher shop by the Grant street bridge and playing football for New Castle High. After he left school, he switched his game to golf. Throughout his twenties, he won tournaments for Trinity Episcopal in the church golfing league and for the independent grocers in the small business league. He organised charity golf matches, gave and received toasts at golf club dinners and helped with the annual banquet for aged local golfers. His arrest in February, 1942, for driving while intoxicated, was uncharacteristic; the sole transgression in an otherwise blameless life.

The golf leagues had closed for the winter in October and the courses had been shut due to heavy snow since the new year. America had been at war since the beginning of December, and the third draft lottery was scheduled for March. By the time the golf courses reopened in spring, Dick was in the army. He was sent to Camp Blanding in Florida for training, then to north Africa to join the 5th army. He earned a good conduct ribbon and was promoted to corporal.

Dick saw his first fighting in September, 1943, when the 5th army invaded Italy. He landed at Salerno and took part in the battle to liberate the town. Five thousand men died in the first week as the army pushed north towards Naples. After twelve days, they reached Pompeii, where Dick was shot by a sniper. The bullet hit him in his hip, passing through the flesh without hitting the bone. He recovered quickly and rejoined his unit near San Pietro, where he was promoted again, to sergeant. A month later, a mortar shell exploded close by him. He was struck by a shower of rocks. His arm was broken; his elbow smashed to splinters. He made his way to the rear, where he was transported to the coast along with other wounded soldiers—a lieutenant who had been shot in the jaw; a Korean private from California who had lost an eye when a bullet had gone through his skull; a soldier whose feet had been shot through by machine gun fire—and sent back to America.

Dick was in the Valley Forge hospital in Pennsylvania until the summer of 1944. He visited New Castle when he got out. The summer golf fixtures were well underway. The First Presbyterians led the church league, with the First Baptists five points behind. In the small business league, New Castle Moose were eight points ahead of Universal Sanitary and Manufacturing. Mixed foursome tourneys were being held every Sunday. Dick was the guest of honor at a dinner at the Castle Hills golf club. He was unable to play, of course.

Dick spent the rest of the war at Camp Butner, in North Carolina. After he was released from service, he returned to New Castle. When his father retired a few years later, Dick moved away, first to Washington, DC, then to Big Bear City, California. He died in the veterans hospital in Santa Monica in 1970, at the age of sixty. He was buried in the Los Angeles national cemetery.

March 29, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Youtha Beverly, “Drunk, Disorderly”, 23 September 1934

Youtha Beverly arrived in New Castle from Covington, Virginia, in 1920. He turned eighteen in 1927, the year when a car in which he was a passenger broke the neck of a four-year-old girl who ran out into the street. The following year, he was arrested in connection with a disturbance during a whoopee party at a house in Sciota street that resulted in a man named John Sears being shot in the head. During the thirties, he was arrested on various occasions for the possession of liquor, disorderly conduct and assault and battery.

Youtha’s mug shot was taken in September 1934, after an arrest for drunkenness. He died six years later, in 1940, at the age of thirty-three, from what his obituary called a lingering illness. His only family was his sister’s daughter, Dorthula, who would be hospitalised several times during her married life following unexplained domestic accidents, until the day in 1973 when she shot her husband.

March 22, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | 7 Comments »

Charles Cialella, “Lottery”, 27 October 1945

Charles Cialella played football for New Castle High and worked for his family’s florist business until he joined the army air service, immediately after the attack on Pearl harbor. Two months after the end of the war, he was arrested for playing a numbers game. He was released without being charged.

He went to work with New Castle’s parks department and became supervisor of the Cascade park swimming pool when it reopened in 1952, offering a pledge that, following a programme of improvements, it would now be impossible for bathers to contract skin diseases or sinus trouble through use of the facility.

In 1968, Charles’s cousin, Carl Cialella, became mayor and appointed Charles superintendent of all the city’s parks. By the seventies, the administration had changed and Charles was made foreman of the city’s sewers. In 1976, he was working in a sewer in Winter avenue when he found a 1942 class ring inscribed with the initials MAS hanging on a broken tree branch. He called New Castle High, whose staff checked their records and told him that it must have belonged to Mary Agnes Schetrom. Charles’s friend, Frank Gagliardo, had been the Schetrom’s paper boy and still knew some friends of the family, who told Charles that Mary Agnes was living on Kenneth street. Two hours after he had found the ring, Charles returned it to Mary Agnes, who told him she had accidentally dropped it down her toilet in 1946 and had not expected to see it again.

Charles was a Republican committeeman and president of the local lodge of the Sons of Italy. He played golf, went bowling and raised funds for charity. His wife bred exotic plants and worked as an Avon representative for fifty years. They raised five children and were both over eighty when they died.

March 15, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Fred Weir, “Dis Conduct”, 3 November 1947

Fred Weir came to New Castle from the south as a young man, just before prohibition began, and spent the twenties drinking and gambling in backroom establishments downtown and on the south side.

A woman named Mattie McKisson ran a Negro club in her home on the corner of Cochran way and South street, where she allowed dice, cards and liquor. On a spring night in 1922, Fred hired a taxi to take him there and told the driver to wait while he fetched Mattie. He called her out, but she refused to come with him. Fred drew a pistol and fired three bullets through the bolted door. He told the taxi driver to take him to the Mahoningtown district and waved the gun at him when he said he would rather not. Once they were on their way, the driver objected again and Fred fired three shots through the roof and the windshield. The driver stopped the car and Fred ran into Dieterlee’s lumber yard to hide. Mattie McKisson called the police. They found Fred on top of a tall pile of lumber, his pistol under some logs nearby. He was fined $25 for disorderly conduct and $5 for drunkenness.

In those years, Fred was often in court on charges of possessing liquor, gambling or being drunk. He was ordered to leave the city each time he was found in a raid on a disorderly house, but he never did. Around the time he turned thirty, he changed his ways. He stopped getting into trouble with the police, found himself a wife and concentrated on establishing a few quiet gambling operations in the south of the city. His arrest in 1947 for disorderly conduct—using a knife and a blackjack to threaten a numbers player who owed him money—was an uncharacteristic relapse, after which he returned to running his affairs in a manner that was less likely to draw the attention of the authorities. There is no further record of his life.

March 8, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Paul Conner, “Rec Money FP”, 17 Jan 1956

On Saturday, the fourteenth of January, 1956, many people throughout New Castle stopped to admire an unusual circular rainbow that hung around the sun above Lawrence County, a creation of the cold and frosty air. Fewer noticed Paul Conner as he drove south from Sharon through New Castle and onward, stopping at every department store and supermarket on the way to cash hundreds of dollars-worth of bad checks in the name of Joe Garrett.

Paul was heading for his home in Bellevue, in Allegheny County, but his trip was cut short when the manager of the Montgomery Ward store in Beaver Falls recognised him from a previous visit and called the police. He ran out of the shop but was chased and caught.

Paul waited in Beaver Falls jail while the various jurisdictions discussed where he should be dealt with first. New Castle won the argument, and he was taken there on the seventeenth of January. There is no further record of his case or of Paul himself.

March 1, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

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 | 2 Comments »

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 | 5 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 »