One September afternoon in 1932, when Harold Nicolls was five years old, his mother took him to Arlington avenue to visit his grandfather, Isaiah Engle, who would be arrested a few years later for performing a lewd act in public in Gaston park. Harold was playing outside the house when he chased a ball out into the street and was hit by a car. He was unharmed by the collision—cuts and scrapes—but he fell onto […]
By the end of 1921, two years after the start of prohibition, illegal liquor was a major trade in Lawrence County. Jack Dunlap, a thirty-year-old former state policeman and private security officer for US Steel, was appointed county detective in January 1922 and told to shut down the bootleggers’ operations. He began a campaign of raids, uncovering stills in farms outside New Castle and houses around town and arresting hundreds of liquor manufacturers and traffickers, […]
On a spring night in 1956, Charles Peak and two of his friends were driving a souped-up car around downtown New Castle, looking for other cars to race. They found none, so they pulled up beside a parked police car on Mercer street, shouted obscenities at the officers and sped off. The patrol car chased them south for several blocks then north on Cochran way. The boys abandoned their car and fled, but were caught […]
The police described seventeen-year-old Owen Ransom as a well-acting lad who came from a good family. They were mystified about why he had broken into several houses, garages and cars to steal jewellery and cash, much of which he had thrown into the Neshannock creek. He told them simply that he had robbed the homes for a thrill. The judge placed him on probation for three years. Owen left school and got a job as […]
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 […]
Late at night on the last Sunday in November, 1930, as flurries of snowflakes as big as half dollars fell from the sky (but failed to lie as the streets were too wet), a patrolman noticed a broken ground-floor window in the H G Preston Wholesale warehouse on Grove street. He called in his suspicion that there had been a break-in and two more officers were sent out to join him. John Dagres—known locally as […]
Small Town Noir 