Small Town Noir

Before the sale of fireworks was banned in Pennsylvania, as many as six people in the state had been killed by fireworks every 4th of July. By 1940, the second year of the ban, no one had. Firework injuries for the holiday were down from more than three thousand to fewer than a hundred. The state medical society, the fire departments and the police were happy, but others, nineteen-year-old Gerald Schooley among them, missed the excitement. […]

Just before midnight on 25th April 1948, Officer George Sigler saw a car smash into a parked car on South Mill street and weave on down the road. He caught up with it on Moravia street and arrested the driver, Andrew Masters, who was drunk and bleeding from the nose. Andrew was given the usual sentence of thirty days in the county jail, out in three if he paid the $100 fine and costs. A […]