Small Town Noir

Floyd Armstrong, a fifty-five-year-old drifter who gave his profession as dish-washer, was one of several suspicious characters—including Charlie Tilden—who were arrested on the 27th and 28th of June, 1957, for loitering and various other minor infractions, pending further charges that might be brought against them. In the early hours of the twenty-seventh of June, someone had broken into two cars in the Castleton parking lot and tried, but failed, to hot-wire them. Little damage was […]

There were heavy snows on the last weekend of 1942, when Edwin Duff crashed his car on East Washington street. The day of the accident, the New Castle News reported that the snow was so deep that squirrels were having difficulty getting to the feeding stations that had been set up for them in the city’s parks. “On Saturday afternoon, Owen Fox, while at Gaston Park, watched the squirrels jump from treetop to treetop en-route […]

The guns of the USS Alabama, which fired more than a thousand rounds of sixteen-inch shells during the war in the Pacific, bombarding enemy-occupied islands in battles that resulted in the collapse of the Japanese military and the deaths of tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians, were kept in service for the last two years of the campaign by Charles Stitt, the descendant of a Scotch-Irish family who had opened a tailor’s shop in […]

Ernest wasn’t long out of the navy when, on a wet and windy night, he was caught driving a car while drunk (fine: $100). The year before, he been honourably discharged after having served five years on the USS Laffey, which had been involved in heavy fighting while taking part in the blockade of North Korean ports. The USS Laffey’s Class of ’52 yearbook, a souvenir booklet produced by the ship’s crew in their free […]

James and his brother Lee were arrested for the statutory rape of a fifteen year old girl, which occurred on June 9, 1947, and dates prior. James, who was twenty-two, was fined $100 and given six months in the Lawrence County jail; Lee got off with only an $80 fine or forty-five days in jail. The brothers appeared in court regularly throughout the forties and fifties. A few years before the statutory rape charge, Lee […]

The wet spring weekend in 1940 during which Loyes Langdoff was arrested for being drunk and disorderly was an extraordinarily quiet one for the town, and only one crime story appeared in the New Castle News of Monday, 4 March: “REPORT COAT STOLEN — Detectives were summoned to the Strouss-Hirshberg store, Saturday afternoon, it having been reported that someone had stolen a woman’s blue Chlnelle coat, worth $39.95.” Detectives Moore and Young were assigned to […]

Frank Wilson’s arrest on a charge of disorderly conduct didn’t make the New Castle News, even though it had been a slow weekend. The day he was arrested, Saturday, 5 October, 1940, began with the discovery of a crime at Keefe’s Cafe, on South Mill street. Some time before the cafe opened up, a thief had smashed the glass in the ventilator in the door, squeezed in through the small opening, stolen $57 in cash […]