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, 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 | 4 Comments »

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 | 13 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 »

Hugh Berger, “Burglary”, 18 Aug 1940

When he was nineteen, in 1930, Hugh Berger was the leader of a gang of youths who were arrested in Pittsburgh and charged with fifty-six counts of robbery, larceny, pointing firearms and carrying concealed weapons. Hugh spent ten years in the state penitentiary at Bellefonte. After his release in the spring of 1940, he ended up in New Castle, where he met two local men—Kalim George, who had just been paroled from the Western penitentiary following a three-to-six year sentence for sodomy, and James Ross, who had beaten an assault-and-robbery charge the year before. A new A&P supermarket had opened up on South Mercer street, and they decided to rob it.

Around four o’clock on a Sunday morning in August, Hugh and Kalim pried open a door into the furnace room at the rear of the A&P building, leaving James Ross outside as a lookout. They took $34 in quarters and dimes from the cash register and filled twelve sacks with food, cigarettes and candy. Just before dawn, as they were getting ready to leave, two police officers broke down the front door.

Hugh and Kalim ran to the rear of the store. One officer fired a shot and Kalim ducked behind a counter, where he hid until he was captured. Hugh stuffed his .32 revolver into a pile of canteloupes and hid under a table. He, too, was found and taken out to the street, where he saw James Ross handcuffed to a patrol car.

At the station, Hugh learned that the police had been tipped off about the robbery. He blamed Kalim. He told him that he would kill him with an ice pick when they got to jail. It turned out he was wrong. In court, Hugh got nine to nineteen years and Kalim got eight to sixteen years. James Ross was tried separately, and his sentence was not reported in the papers.

As soon as Hugh was admitted to the Western penitentiary, he wrote to the courthouse in New Castle requesting copies of the indictments brought against him, the true bills and grand jury subpoenas, the commitment from the city police jail to the county jail, the dispositions, the commitments to the penitentiary, the trial testimony and the claim of the A&P store. After studying the paperwork for two years, he found what seemed to be an inaccuracy. The indictment said that he had robbed a store that was owned by A&P but he had discovered that A&P merely occupied the building, which was owned by somebody else. Hugh wrote to the district attorney, saying that the error invalidated his conviction. The judge examined the evidence, announced that the arguments were “of the most captious and technical kind” and threw out the appeal.

Hugh was paroled in 1948 but, after another burglary conviction, he was sent back to the Western penitentiary to serve the rest of his sentence. He was over fifty when he was released, having spent only a few months out of jail since his arrest in 1930. He died in Pittsburgh in 1995, at the age of eighty-four.

September 8, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

Lloyd Hockenberry, “Larceny”, 15 March 1956

Lloyd Hockenberry drifted into New Castle in the spring of 1956 and took a room in Flora Williams’ apartment on East Washington street, above Westell’s gun store. He was looking for work of some sort, but had trouble finding any. Three weeks later, Flora Williams noticed she was missing two wedding rings valued at $175 each, as well as a $100 bill. She called the police, and Lloyd was arrested when he returned to the apartment at half past two in the morning. He confessed and was given six to twelve months in the Lawrence County jail, but was out in time to marry Cora Lee Kelly in November, just after he turned twenty-seven.

By 1958, Lloyd had left Cora Lee and New Castle and was living with his sister in Mount Union, four hours to the east, near the farm where he had grown up. One afternoon, while passing time in a diner in the nearby town of Huntingdon, he met a sixteen-year-old girl called Anna Grace Carper who had stopped off on her way home from school. They left together and walked up Fifth street and on over Flagpole hill, a local necking spot.

It wasn’t the first time Anna Grace had spent some time alone with a much older man. When she was twelve, she had run away from home with a twenty-one-year-old ex-convict called David Beard. The affair lasted only two days, until police picked them up and charged Beard—Anna Grace’s aunt’s brother—with rape and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

Lloyd and Anna Grace had sex in the woods overlooking the town, then Lloyd walked her back to her house and didn’t think of her again until the following year, when a constable appeared at his door to serve a warrant on him for fornication and bastardy.

Lloyd drove to Anna Grace’s home, but was sent away by her father who would accept no visitors on a Sunday. The next day, Lloyd was told by a court official that, nine months after he had met Anna Grace, she had given birth to a baby girl and had named him as the father, and that her family were seeking a financial contribution from him. Lloyd denied that he had ever had a date with Anna Grace and insisted that he had been in West Virginia looking for work when Anna Grace claimed to have met him. The jury took twenty-five minutes to find Lloyd guilty, and the judge ordered him to pay $30 a month support money, plus hospital and doctor’s bills.

Lloyd was jailed for non-payment a year later, and again the following year. By the time he married a woman named Shirley Watkins in 1962, he had added a term in the Alleghenny county workhouse to his total. He was given a further two months in the county jail in 1965, also for non-payment. Amid all this, Lloyd fathered three legitimate children and another illegitimate child.

By 1969, Lloyd had left Shirley, his children and Pennsylvania and was living in Maryland, where he found work as a truck driver and continued to refuse to pay any child support. There is no further record of his life.

September 1, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

John Dagres, “Larceny”, 31 Nov 1930

Late at night on the last Sunday in November 1930, as flurries of snowflakes as big as half dollars fell from the sky (but failed to lie as the streets were too wet), Patrolman Richards noticed a broken ground-floor window in the HG Preston Wholesale building on Grove street. He called in his suspicion that there had been a break-in and two more officers were sent out to join him.

The three policemen walked around the outside of the building to find signs of entry. A man came out of a side door and ran off past the JJ Dean grocery. They shot at him, but he kept running. Inside, they discovered John Dagres—known around town as John the Greek—hiding behind an iron beam. He gave himself up and was taken to the station, where he made a full confession.

Some days previously, John had met a man called George Leasure in Lowellville, Ohio, a village between New Castle and Youngstown. They had agreed to come to New Castle to hold up a service station on the east side, but had changed their plan, deciding instead to rob the wholesale warehouse. They had carried two large boxes of cigarettes to the west doorway and were about to take them to Leasure’s car when Leasure saw the police and ran off, leaving John trapped in the building.

Leasure was arrested later that night. The house he rented was empty, so the police went to his brother’s house, where he was found hiding in bed with his brother’s three children.

Both men pleaded guilty to breaking and entering and larceny and were sent to the Western penitentiary—John for eighteen months to six years; Leasure, who had a prior conviction for burglary in 1924, for five to ten years.

John served less than his maximum sentence and by 1935 he was an employee of the JJ Dean grocery—located on Grove street, next door to the HG Preston building where he had been arrested. In November that year, he was arrested again on a charge of larceny, but no record remains of who was robbed or what was stolen.

There is no further record of John after he was sentenced to ten months in the Allegheny county workhouse in 1944. Three years later, during a particularly violent September storm, the HG Preston building was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. The JJ Dean building lasted another sixteen years before it burned down in unexplained circumstances.

August 25, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

Frank Nye, “Hold Up”, 12 Sep 1929

In 1789, a revolutionary war veteran named Andrew Nye, the son of a German immigrant who had left Europe forty years before, bought four hundred acres of land on the banks of the Connoquenessing creek and set up a farm, where he lived with his wife, a dozen or so children, a horse, three or four cows and a yoke of oxen. Later generations of his family spoke of him as the first white settler within the bounds of the present Lawrence County, which might well be true.

New Castle was founded a decade later, some miles to the north of Andrew’s farm. By 1851, it had gathered a population of a few thousand people, including Andrew’s grandson, Thomas, who lived in a log cabin on New Castle’s main square. The Nye family continued to clear the land around the Connoquenessing, creating fertile farms that, towards the end of the century, were sold off piece by piece to private developers and industrial concerns who were involved in the creation of the new conurbation of Ellwood City. Some parts of the family grew rich; others did not.

Nathaniel Nye—the great-great-grandson of Andrew Nye—died in 1914, leaving his three children orphans. They were placed in the care of an old farming friend of the family, who was named executor of Nathaniel Nye’s estate and proceeded to sell the remainder of the land that he had owned. What became of the money is unknown but by 1929 at least one of Nathaniel Nye’s children, Frank, then twenty-six years old, was a homeless drifter.

As a teenager, he had spent more than two years in the Morganza reformatory for his delinquent and vicious behaviour. He went to work in a tin factory in New Castle, then joined the navy, spending two terms in the Portsmouth navy yard. After his discharge, he returned to the city, took a room in a hotel and started to look around for something to do.

On a Monday morning in December 1929, Frank was loitering in New Castle’s main square—within a few hundred yards of the site of Thomas Nye’s log cabin, long vanished—when he met a man called Edward Harris. By the end of their conversation, Frank had revealed that he owned a pistol, Edward had replied that he possessed a blackjack, bought for $1 from a Negro in Pittsburgh, and the two men had agreed to work together.

They spent a couple of hours going from store to store, trying to find a suitable prospect before settling on a South Jefferson street clothing store that was run by Louis Ruzewich, a man in his sixties.

The next day, just before six o’clock in the evening, Frank and Edward entered the store and Edward immediately struck Ruzewich on the head with his blackjack. The blow failed to down Ruzewich, who broke free as Harris grabbed for him and ran out into the street, locking the door behind him.

His shouts attracted a crowd of people, who gathered around the store’s front and rear entrances. When Frank worked out how to unlock the door and tried to leave, Charles Chirazzi, who owned the barbershop across the street, pretended to reach for a gun in his rear pocket and told the men to stay in the store. Frank backed off and hid his revolver under a pile of clothes while he waited for the police to arrive.

Officer McMullen was the first on the scene. Frank gave himself up and allowed himself to be handcuffed. Edward was discovered hiding under a counter in the storeroom and also gave up without a struggle.

Frank and Edward were charged with carrying concealed weapons, entering a building with intent to commit a felony and felonious assault and battery. They were sentenced to two to four years in the Western penitentiary at Rockiew, where Frank was given a job as a mail clerk. Six months later, Frank was ordered to deliver a package from the mail office to the main office outside the stockade. On his way out, he stole a suit of civilian clothes and a hat from a changing room and kept walking. He was never heard of again.

August 18, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Ralph Largo, “Tampering with court witness”, 17 May 1940

Ralph Largo’s younger brother, Frank, had spent time in Huntingdon reformatory for larceny and had been arrested in the company of Vincent DeLillo, an incorrigible drug addict and thief, a few years before. He was on trial for living off a prostitute’s earnings—taking bawd money—and adultery. The prosecution’s case relied on the evidence of a young woman named Josephine Coloa, who was perhaps the prostitute in question.

Ralph arranged to meet Josephine for a drink at the Streamline café, then took her to the Rendezvous café, on the corner of Long and Moravia avenues—”Live Lobsters, As You Like Them! Chop Suey! All Food Prepared By Real Italian Chef, Big Sam Filippo!”—where he forced her to sign a statement that would clear his brother. He told her to stay off the streets and warned her he would kill her if she showed her face.

Josephine’s signed statement was read out in court, and Frank Largo was cleared of the first charge, although the jury found him guilty of adultery. (Frank’s wife divorced him the following year—1941—and a few months later he joined a government construction crew that was working to rebuild Pearl harbor. In 1946, he took part in a string of safe-cracking jobs and was sent to the Allegheny County workhouse for two years.) Ralph was arrested and charged with hindering and interfering with a witness. His trial took place before the first all woman jury in the history of the court house, which found him guilty. The judge sentenced him to time served (two months) and costs. On his failure to pay the costs, he was given a further six months in the county jail.

Ralph worked in the United Engineering and Foundry Co plant but was fired in 1942. He claimed he had been victimised for his union activities; his supervisor said he had been discharged for being an inefficient worker.

There is no further record of his life, apart from a handwritten note on the reverse of his mug shot, which reads, “Deceased Jan 1968”.

August 11, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Clyde McCombs, “Larceny Auto”, 13 Dec 1941

The man who crashed into two cars on Hiram way on 8 November 1936 told the other drivers his name was Charles McCombs, then drove a few blocks to Ray street before abandoning the car. At that moment, however, Charles McCombs was at the police station reporting that his car had been stolen.

The damaged car was returned to Mr McCombs. The thief was never caught—at least, not in connection with that crime. The only recorded fact about him is that he knew the name of the man whose car he had taken.

Five years later, a car belonging to a man from Grove City was stolen in New Castle. It was found in the possession of Mr McCombs’ son, Clyde, a thirty-two year old carpenter, who was charged with larceny of an auto. If it occurred to anyone that Clyde was evidently not only capable of stealing a car but was also someone who would have known the name of the owner of the stolen car in 1936, the thought was not acted upon. Clyde protested his innocence and was released; the case never came to court.

The car from Grove City was stolen the night before the attack on Pearl harbor. Clyde was drafted in time for the invasion of Normandy and spent two years in the Quartermaster Corps, supplying petroleum to troops in France and Germany, before returning to New Castle. He took up carpentry again and did some general contracting. He and his wife, Rose, had three sons.

In 1975, he was driving over the Division street intersection towards the car wash when he blacked out for a moment and drove straight into a Pennsylvania Power Company pole on the sidewalk. The police took him to the hospital, where they informed him he had caused $800-worth of damage and cited him for driving without a licence.

Clyde had head injuries, a broken hip and internal bleeding. He went into shock before the operation on his hip and died five days later. He was sixty-five years old.

August 4, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

George and William Chatterton, “Mayhem” and “Agg.A&B”, 17 June 1936

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Henry Waters Hartman founded a new town to the south of New Castle, purchasing acres of farm land to parcel up and sell as sites for factories and housing developments. Isaac Ellwood, an industrialist who had grown rich from barbed wire, supplied the initial investment, as well as a name for the town.

Ellwod City’s grand future never materialised. In its early years, Hartman and Ellwood boosted the town’s prospects as they tried to convince industries to settle in the valley. The town had better railroad facilities than any town in western Pennsylvania, they said, and it had more valuable mineral products than could be found in any other one place. Dozens of new factories were due to open, they claimed, bringing with them thousands of workers. Their advertisements urged, “Buy now! Don’t wait a year until the town is four times as large and value proportionately higher!”

By the turn of the century, only two thousand people had come to Ellwood City. A handful of manufacturing concerns had opened up, but the town was never to live up to its ostentatious name.

In 1936, when George and William Chatterton were arrested for aggravated assault, the population was close to its peak of twelve thousand. The town had no court house so, like all Ellwood City lawbreakers, the brothers were dealt with in New Castle.

The 17th of June had been the hottest day of the year and had culminated in an electric storm with gales that tore down trees and lightning that flashed along overhead power lines, throwing off fire balls in all directions. At half past seven that night, George Chatterton went to the Ellwood City police station to tell them to come out and arrest a man named Adam Klink, who had hit him in the jaw. He was drunk, and the police refused to do anything until he had made out an information at a squire’s office.

George went to meet his brother, William, who accompanied him to Frank Rocco’s saloon on Lawrence street, where they attacked Adam Klink.

During the scuffle, William’s attention was attracted by something that was said by Walter Shinsky, a customer who was sitting at a nearby booth. William went over to the booth and glowered at Shinksy. Shinsky got to his feet and William struck him. Further blows were exchanged, and George came to William’s aid. Shinsky was beaten to the floor and George fell upon him, biting his chin. Other customers separated them, and everyone who was involved in the fight was thrown out of the bar.

In the street, Shinksy was knocked down again. William jumped on him and bit off his lower lip, which was left attached by only a shred of skin.

The police broke up the brawl. William and George were arrested and Shinsky was taken to the hospital, where his lip was stitched back in place. He was left with scars which he was able to display to the jury in New Castle court house three months later, when the Chatterton brothers were found guilty—George of assault and battery and William of mayhem. George was given a $50 fine and four months in the county jail; William a $100 fine and one to two years in the Western penitentiary. There is no further record of either brother.

July 28, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Forsyth Murphy, “Drunk, Dis Conduct”, 12 Sep 1944

The night sergeant in police headquarters from 1907 until 1925 was Gene Buckley, who passed his time composing colourful passages about the arrests of the day in the police docket. An entry from 14 April 1910 reads, “Sam Johnson (a pusson of color) was very much at large last night and in a feverish frame of mind. He had stowed away a considerable quantity of fire water and proceeded to give an imitation of a war dance interspersed with blood-curdling war whoops that made men who had retired for the night make a flying leap for their trousers hanging on the bed posts and grab their revolvers from under the pillow and hasten to the street, thinking a riot was in progress. The officer came at a two-ten clip. Seeing Sam giving a performance that might win him plaudits on the vaudeville stage, but was out of place on the street, he gave him the hook.”

One of Buckley’s later entries reads, “The prisoner and a friend of his went to the carnival on South Mill street and entered the side show. One of them didn’t like the show and amused himself by expectorating on the monkeys. The showman put him out and he got sore and further amused himself by throwing bricks at the showman.” The same carnival provided another entry: “The prisoner was earning his oats by allowing people to throw balls at his head. One of the marksmen hit him on the shoulder instead of the head and he became indignant. He pulled a revolver and threatened to perforate the crowd with bullets.”

After cataracts forced Buckley from the service, the dockets became more formal, recording only the names of prisoners, the property in their possession, the time and date of the arrest, the name of the arresting officer and the crime with which they were charged. The inclusion of only such basic information meant that each docket was capable of recording around ten-thousand crimes before it needed to be replaced. The first docket after Buckley retired lasted four years; each docket in the thirties lasted around three years; and by the forties and fifties, they lasted less than two years.

Forsyth Murphy was the first person to be entered into the fresh docket that was opened on 12th September 1944. He was charged with intoxication, disorderly conduct and “interference with a newsboy”. Nothing further is known of the incident, or of Forsyth.

July 21, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

Edward Kozol, “Larceny scrap iron”, 16 Jan 1937

Edward Kozol was seventeen when he was fined for stealing scrap iron from the B&O Railroad yard. It was 1937, and the scrap yards that had been packed with tons of junk for as long as he could remember were suddenly almost empty. Through the ’20s and ’30s, no one had been interested in scrap iron, no matter how low the price; now, foreign countries were willing to buy all that America could supply and the price had risen to almost $20 a ton.

Most of the scrap metal went to Germany, Italy and Japan, for purposes that were no secret. The consequences were obvious to those who sold it, and perhaps also those, like Edward, who stole it. Fred Rentz, the manager of the New Castle News wrote, “Since so many nations have been buying American scrap iron for munitions, we are afraid to throw away our old coffee pot for fear it may be shot back at us.”

Two years later, a re-armed Europe was at war. By 1943, Edward and his brothers had all been drafted.

Edward joined the 9th infantry division. He spent six months in training in America before shipping out to England to prepare for the invasion of the European mainland. On 10th June, 1944—four days after D-day—Edward’s regiment landed in Normandy. They fought their way up the coast to Cherbourg then headed inland. Outside Le Dézert, they came under fire from the remnants of a Panzer division that was pulling out of the region and Edward was killed. He had been in France for thirty-four days and had travelled twenty-five miles from the beach where he landed.

A year after the end of the war, a remembrance service was held in Edward’s church, Saints Philip and James’s, on Hanna street. More than a hundred men from the parish had gone to war and all but twelve had returned alive. After the mass, twelve little girls dressed entirely in white placed candles on the altar and the dead men’s mothers were presented with medals, which they held as the congregation sang “Dobry Jezu”, a funeral hymn that asks for eternal rest for the dead, and for eternal light to shine on them.

July 14, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Samuel Clements, “Intox.Driv” 1 March 1937

Hugh Clements, Samuel’s father, was born in Ireland in 1880. He came to New Castle as a boy and got work in the first tin mill in town when it was opened by the Greer brothers in 1893. Within a year of his marriage to Pearl Toy of Edinburg he had become a father and had appeared in court on charges of assault and desertion that were brought by his wife. The judge ordered him to move his family out of his parents’ house, where they had moved after the wedding and bound the couple to live in a home of their own, according to the following advice: “Both forgive and forget; make your dwelling a home for both of you and overlook small matters.”

Hugh stayed at the tin mill for forty years. When he was pensioned in 1937, he and Pearl moved out to the old Flynn farm at Parkstown Corners in Union township, which had become available when the Flynns grew too old to run the business and had no one to pass it on to as their only son, Charles, had died in a fall from an apple tree on the property at the age of thirty-nine.

Hugh Clements had been in charge of the farm just six months when he was killed. He was jolted from the tractor that was hauling in his first crop of wheat from the field, and the back wheel ran over his head, crushing his skull. Pearl went to live with her son, Samuel, who worked in the Republic Steel mill in Youngstown, Ohio.

The year before his father died, Samuel had crashed his car into another car on Long avenue and spent a month in jail for driving while intoxicated—the crime for which his mug shot was taken. Samuel and his mother lived together until the war, when Samuel was sent to Europe to work as a topographical surveyor in the army. After he returned home, Samuel and his mother moved to New Castle, where he found work as an electrician’s helper in the B&O railroad yards. He never married.

Samuel was forty-one years old when he spilled gasoline down the front of his overalls while he was filling up a tractor crane in the workshop. He went into an empty room that was used by electricians and, seconds later, ran back into the workshop with his clothing on fire. His fellow workers were unable to extinguish the flames until his clothes had been virtually burned from him. He suffered third-degree burns over his entire body and died three days later in the Jameson Memorial hospital.

Samuel’s mother arranged for him to be buried with military rites—a colour guard, riflemen and bugler. She went to live with her daughter, Gertrude, and died in 1964, at the age of eighty-one.

July 7, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Eugene Russo, “High Way Robbery”, 8 July 1945

The war in Europe had been over for two months and the war in the Pacific would be over in a few weeks’ time, when atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Eugene Russo was just sixteen and, unlike his brothers and his cousins, he had escaped world war two. His life was his to do with as he pleased.

He borrowed a .25 Colt automatic from his friend, Paul Logue, telling him he wanted to show it to someone. Just after lunch on a Sunday afternoon, he entered the Walter Dewberry tobacco store on East Washington street, opposite the Dome theater, and pulled the pistol on Mildred Donaldson, the girl behind the counter.

A beat policeman, Roland Fisher, happened to glance in the window of the store and saw Mildred raising her hands above her head. She saw the officer and screamed, “Help! He’s robbing me!” and “Watch out! He has a gun!”

Officer Fisher drew his pistol and shouted to Eugene to raise his hands and come out of the store. Eugene did what he was told; his gun wasn’t loaded.

On the other side of the world, Eugene’s cousin, also called Eugene, was just starting his third year in the infantry corps. He had been hospitalised for weeks with malaria, a recurrence of which eleven years later was assumed to be the reason why he became mentally unbalanced and shot his wife twice in the head before turning the gun on himself. His wife survived; he did not. A further ten years later, their son, Augostine, was killed when he stepped on a mine in Vietnam. Flags on city buildings were lowered during his funeral as his uncle was a municipal employee, in the sewage disposal plant.

Eugene Russo received a short stretch in the reformatory for his attempted robbery of the tobacco store. Paul Logue was fined for lending him the pistol. Neither was ever called on to fight in a war.

June 30, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Patsy Ross, “Drunk, Dis”, 13 June 1945

Wick Wood, one of the first reporters on the New Castle News back in the 1880s, was fond of sauerkraut, particularly the sauerkraut that was made by a Bavarian couple called Rentz, who farmed a small plot of land just beyond where the old Butler road crosses Big Run creek. On his visits to the farm, Wood got to know their only child, a boy called Frederick, who had been kept out of school from the age of eight to help on the farm. A vacancy opened up at the paper for a printer’s devil—someone to sweep out the print room, wash ink rolls, fetch type—and Wood arranged for Frederick to get the job. On a summer morning in 1883, the boy left his farm and walked into New Castle, along a cobbled Washington street in which pigs and cows wandered freely, to start his first day’s work at the offices of the New Castle News. When he died sixty-four years later, he was the manager of the company, a position he had held for fifty years.

Frederick Loeffler Rentz was central to the development of the city of New Castle in the twentieth century. He lobbied for roads and highways, drainage improvements and civic construction projects, sponsored good works and served as mayor for a short stretch in the twenties. For decades he wrote a daily column of jokes, aphorisms and observations, such as the one that ran, “In some places it takes nerve to wear a silk top hat and one of them is New Castle—too many loose rocks lying around.”

In 1929, at the peak of New Castle’s prosperity and Rentz’s influence, Patsy Ross was a fifteen-year-old news boy—one of hundreds of news boys who sold the New Castle News on the streets every day, making about a penny a copy. He and some of the older news boys formed an organisation to set rules of conduct for news boys throughout the city, and Patsy was elected to the club’s special court that tried the members for misdemeanours and infringements of the rules. They called themselves the FRNBs, which stood for both the Fred Rentz News Boys Club and Fun, Right, Neat and Best.

Fred Rentz was glad to be associated with the club. At a banquet held in their honour, he told them that many prominent men once carried the New Castle News and were proud of it. It was true: the owners of the hotel that hosted the banquet, Saul Leff and Alex Silverman, had sold the paper in their youth. Evidently, there was no limit to the heights to which a news boy could expect to rise.

Patsy’s club also raised funds for the YMCA, took part in musical and theatre shows and organised a baseball team. The New Castle News itself declared that they were “a thriving group of boys who promise to develop into real hundred per cent American men,” but that was the year of the Wall street crash, and the FRNBs didn’t make it out the other side of the depression. The last mention of the club was in a report on baseball game in 1933, when Patsy and the other founders would have been at least eighteen. The younger news boys whose duty it would have been to carry the FRNB torch perhaps had other matters on their minds.

Twelve years later, Patsy—shirtless and bleeding—was arrested on a charge of drunkenness and disorderly conduct after brawling in the street and punching a taxi driver who refused to pick him up. He was held in the cells overnight and fined $25 in the morning.

Fred Rentz was probably unaware of the incident, unremarkable as it was. He died the following year, aged seventy-eight, and was succeeded as publisher of the New Castle News by his son, Jacob, who was in turn succeeded by his sons, Dick and Fred, who ran the paper until it was sold in 1988.

There is no further record of Patsy Ross.

June 23, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Homer Chrisner, “Bank Holdup”, 7 Feb 1935

The depression shut down Homer Chrisner’s Ellwood City sales business and threw him and his employees out of work. He remained a respected figure in the area, served as a borough councilman for a spell and continued to pursue his hobby of poultry breeding, which was something of a passion of his—only a few months before he walked into the state bank in Bessemer with a loaded pistol, he delivered a speech entitled, “My Favorite Poultry Breed”, which was reportedly well received by his audience of local farmers.

Homer spent the latter half of 1934 planning the bank robbery. His sales work had taken him through all the towns around the Ohio-Pennsylvania border north of Pittsburgh, and he settled on Bessemer—a couple of hundred houses in the shadow of a cement and limestone factory, ten miles west of New Castle—as the easiest target. He selected as his accomplice Edward Scales, aka Jack of Diamonds, a Youngstown barman and numbers writer who had recently been released from prison after serving a sentence for the attempted rape of a minor. Together, they planned the details of the hold-up and enlisted the help of a woman called Nellie Sellers who would act as their getaway driver.

On 31 January 1935, they drove up to the bank on Poland avenue in a red Chevrolet that Edward had stolen from a garage in Ambridge some days earlier. Homer and Edward pulled bandanas over their faces and walked into the bank, leaving Nellie Sellers—later described by witnesses as “a visibly nervous Negress”—in the car with the engine running.

Homer stood by the door while Edward walked up to window number two and pointed his pistol at the cashier, Charles Weitz. Before Edward could speak, Weitz dropped to the floor and shouted for help. From the back room entered a large man, V I Mandich, a former Croatian soldier who had fought against the Germans in the first world war and taken part in the Russian revolutions of 1917 before emigrating to America, where he had taken up the post of assistant cashier of the Bessemer bank. He approached Homer and Edward, who lost their nerve and ran out into the street. Weitz took a revolver from under the counter and followed them.

The Chevrolet was already moving off as Homer climbed inside. Edward struggled to catch up with it and, when Weitz started shooting at him and the car (which took a bullet in the rear fender), he ducked off the road and headed in the direction of the creek that ran behind the cement factory.

The car disappeared up the Hillsville road and the cashiers called the police. A young man said that he had seen a Negro running into the cement company office building, and Edward was found hiding in the cellar, behind the furnace. He was unarmed, having dropped his pistol outside the bank.

Homer and Nellie Sellers drove thirty miles to Warren, Ohio, where they hid the car in a garage that Sellers had rented from a man who had been led to believe that she was hiding the car from her husband, who wanted to take it from her. Homer drove in his own car to Pittsburgh where, alone and dispirited, he threw his revolver from the Sixth street bridge into the Ohio river.

Their efforts to evade capture were useless. The police in New Castle, who had taken custody of Edward Scales, had already forced him to give up the names of his accomplices. Within a few days, all three were in custody, charged with assault and intent to rob. Homer and Edward were given five years in the penitentiary and Sellers was sent to the workhouse. Homer twice applied to the governor for a pardon, on grounds that are unclear. Both pleas were refused. Of him, and the others, there appears to be no further trace.

June 16, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | 7 Comments »

Edward Scales, “Susp.(Holdup)”, 20 Dec 1934

Edward Scales was arrested and photographed as a suspect in a hold-up that took place a few days before Christmas in 1934. He was released without charge but enjoyed only a month of freedom before returning to jail when a bank robbery that he had been planning for months went badly wrong.

Edward had a long association with the New Castle police, to whom he was better known by his street name, Jack of Diamonds. He ran gambling joints and unlicensed Negro clubs on the south side before the first world war. In 1921, to avoid jail, he assisted prohibition agents in a bootlegging case by buying a $1.25 bottle of raisin jack from a speakeasy run by a man named Nicholas Chikota and taking it to the district attorney, who used it as justification for a raid. After Edward testified at Chikota’s trial, the DA acknowledged that, although it was unfortunate that the state had had to rely on such a disreputable character, it was impossible not to. “I cannot go to the speakeasies to secure evidence,” he told the jury. “And neither can the county detective, as they would immediately become dry at our approach. It often happens that the only ones who can secure the evidence have been law breakers themselves.”

The jury accepted Edward’s testimony, and found Chikota guilty.

Edward’s co-operation with the law gave him no immunity from police interference in his business, and he was fined several times in the years following the trial for allowing “African golf”—dice games, such as craps—to be played on his premises.

In 1925, during a quarrel over a woman, Edward pulled out a pistol and shot at a man named Ben Higgins, who collapsed and was taken to hospital. He died ten days later. Edward was charged with murder and held in jail for three months until the date of his trial. A conviction seemed certain until the doctors who examined Higgins’s body told the court that Higgins died of pneumonia and pleurisy and that his body showed no signs of ever having been shot. None of Edward’s bullets had hit their target. Higgins had merely passed out from fright when Edward fired at him, and his death the following week had been unrelated to the events of that day, a fact of which the prosecution had been unaware until the day of the trial. The judge instructed the jury to return a verdict of not guilty, and Edward was released.

Edward stayed away from the courts until 1931, when he “attempted to seduce” Eleanor Wagner, a ten-year-old girl who lived on Mahoning avenue, and was given a two-to-four year sentence for assault and battery with intent to commit rape.

Edward turned forty in jail. After his release, he did some numbers running and got a job in a saloon in Youngstown, where he met a middle-aged Lawrence county businessman and poultry fancier, Homer Chrisner, who planned the disastrous bank raid that led him straight back to jail.

Homer Chrisner’s mug shot and the conclusion of Edward’s story are here.

June 10, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | 5 Comments »