Lou Miskinis got drunk and started fighting with Harry Hetrick and his wife on West Long avenue. Harry’s leg was in a cast. He broke a crutch over Lou’s head. Lou struggled with the police but was taken to the hospital for a deep cut to his scalp. He spent the night in jail and was released the next day. There is no further record of his life, until his death, in 1979, at the age of seventy-six.
I can find almost no trace of Lou (or Louis) Miskinis in my usual online sources—just one short report of his arrest—so I wasn’t going to publish a post about him, but this photograph might be the only record in the world of his remarkable moustache and it seems a shame to hide it away in a box of mug shots.
I’ve never seen a moustache like it on anyone else. (Click on the picture for a large version so you can examine it in detail. If that seems like the sort of thing you’d like to do.) Obviously, it’s a variety of pencil moustache, but one that has abandoned its traditional role of delineating the wearer’s top lip and has become instead a sort of horizontal smear bisecting the philtrum, which makes him resemble Groucho Marx caught in the act of removing his stage make-up, or maybe 1980s-period Robert Crumb.
If anyone knows what the style was called (if it even had a name) or has a picture of anyone else with something similar, they can leave a comment below.
Source: New Castle News, 22 August 1952, “Drunken Charge”.
Small Town Noir 
I would like to purchase a book for a Christmas present – did you publish yet?
I would love it if you could do that, Patty, but we’re still in the fundraising stage. If we raise enough pledges, I should think Christmas 2016 is likely.
Hope it has taken off again! I want my/your book. I am a very patient person, so Xmas 2016 is good but I hope it happens much sooner!
I think he looks like Crumb or maybe John Waters (Divine’s pal – only added that, as there are a lot of John Waters out there) but see no resemblance moustache wise. It looks to me as though he was trying to hide a scab or scar on the top left of his lip but wasn’t androgenically capable of it. It looks very strange to my eye!
Yep – I think it’s a one-of-a-kind moustache. I can’t imagine why it didn’t catch on…
He he he. Me neither!