Everett Ayersman was arrested in 1954 for driving a truck while drunk. He was assigned the number 8017 and photographed before the police discovered that they already had him on file as prisoner 3362, the number he had been given in 1940, when he had taken a dollar bill from a cash register in Murphy’s store and the shop girl had wrestled him to the ground and sat on him until the police arrived. He had been unable to pay the $20 fine, so he had spent two months in jail. He was twenty-two, and newly married.

He was arrested on two other occasions in the forties: once, a few months after his release from jail, for shoplifting (the staff at the J C Penney store had seen him enter, put on a jacket and leave); and once, the following year, for drunk driving (two months after he passed his test). He was drafted in 1942.

In 1957, Everett’s wife divorced him for cruel and barbarous treatment and indignities. A month later, he lost his job when the paint shop where he was working burned down. Just after his forty-first birthday, he was picked up by the police in the Diamond, too drunk to walk. He was unable to pay the $10 fine, so he spent a week in jail.

In the winter of 1962, Everett walked into Moder’s grocery store, holding his hand in his pocket as though he had a gun. The shop girl handed over $90 from the till. He hid out in the old hobo jungle along the Shenango. The police found him there in August. He got six to twelve months in the county jail.

Two years later, he used the same trick to rob the Spur service station of $75. The clerk called the police, who enlisted the help of dozens of off-duty officers who were attending a Fraternal Order of the Police meeting in the court house, just up the hill. Everett was found drinking in a tavern about a block away. He got six months in jail.

In 1974, when he was fifty-five, Everett was found unconscious on the loading deck of Double R Enterprises on Grove street, with a deep cut in his forehead. Shortly after, he moved into the Campbell home for the elderly, in New Galilee. He died in 1981, at the age of sixty-three.