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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 had left the army and was looking for work of some sort. He 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. Lloyd was arrested when he returned to the […]
Small Town Noir 