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 […]
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 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 […]
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. […]
The arresting officer wrote “This man is a roller of drunks” on the file card as Vincent DeLillo was photographed in the police station and charged with picking the pockets of citizens incapacitated through liquor. That night in 1937, Vincent was almost exactly halfway through his life. Up to that point, he had been charged with possession of illegal alcohol during prohibition, rape and fornication (not guilty of the former; guilty of the latter), robbery (multiple […]
Earl Phillips was married by twenty, separated by twenty-one and divorced by twenty-three. In February 1959 he and Jim Nelson were fined $10 after they were found drunk, stripped to the waist and fighting on East Washington street at 4 o’clock in the morning; in April 1959 he was beaten by three unidentified men on Kurtz street, near the Morella dairy bar; and in March 1961 he was involved in a fist fight with Patsy […]
Small Town Noir 