Two days after Thanksgiving, 1941, George Velky forged four checks amounting to $64, with which he bought paint, wall paper and groceries from stores on North Mill street. His choice of alias— George Belky—proved insufficient to keep him out of jail. Four months later, his wife—her walls still in need of fresh paint and paper—obtained a divorce, which was soon followed by an announcement of her engagement to a young airman named Herbert Hribar, to […]
Robert Cole and Wayne Shotzbarger pulled a gun on Benny Panella as he sat in his car in an alley off West Washington street around 10 o’clock one Saturday night and told him to drive them to south New Castle, where they put him out of the car and drove off. When they were out of sight, they turned around and headed north, skirting the town on their way to New Wilmington. They stopped at […]
The Falls family had farmed the north hill since the beginning of the 19th century. As the town’s population grew in the prosperous decades up to the 1930s, they sold off portions of their farm to developers and, by the time that a boy named Bill Harlan had his mug shot taken in 1933, the open pasture above New Castle had been transformed into a well-off residential area with spacious streets lined with the sturdy […]
In the early hours of the fourth of July, 1941, a few young men—Alexander Aldan, Paul Voland and the Haza brothers, George and Phillip—took a bomb that they had made out of an old shell casing, gun powder, rags and clay and placed it against the back wall of the Victory cafe in Wampum, a few miles south of New Castle. When it exploded, it shattered the windows in the rear of the restaurant and […]
Small Town Noir 