Prohibition was repealed on 5 December, 1933, but not one legal drop of liquor was served in New Castle that night. Private celebrations involved bathtub gin, bootlegged whisky from Canada or the moonshine that was locally referred to as Moravia Street bourbon, as nowhere in town was licensed to sell alcohol. That week, the state bought the old C Ed Smith Furnace Company workshop on Produce street, on the east side, and commissioned workmen to […]
Wilson Clemons, a minister in the Church of God in Christ, was found in his front yard at 405 Mahoning avenue, his head split in two by the axe that lay by his side. No one had seen the murder take place, but the neighbours told the police to look for the reverend’s twenty-eight-year-old son, David, who lived with him and worked in a steel mill twenty miles away in Farrell. David was known to […]
Frank Pegnato, sixteen years old, had been arrested for breaking and entering and larceny but found it possible to smile as he sat for his mug shot. New Castle had suffered seven auto thefts in just under two weeks, and Frank had been picked up because he was friends with Joe Fullwood and some other boys who had been stealing cars and driving them around town. Frank hadn’t been with them those nights, though. He […]
Wanda and her husband Steve ran Teddy’s Dairy Bar at 130 West Long avenue. They were arrested twice in 1950: once in the spring for disorderly conduct (when their mug shots were taken); and once in the summer for selling liquor without a licence in the milk bar, for which they received a small fine. A decade later, after Steve turned fifty and Wanda turned forty, they began using Steve’s family’s original name, Zoccoli, and […]
At the end of August 1936, as New Castle sweated through the hottest weekend of the summer—temperatures in the mid-nineties, with no breeze to stir the air—Alf Landon, the governor of Kansas, arrived in town to launch his presidential election campaign. Landon, the Republican nominee for President, had been born in the nearby village of West Middlesex. On Saturday afternoon, he gave a speech at the Tam o’ Shanter golf club there, which was heard […]
NOTE: An updated version of this story can be found here. Sophia Lyshooka was sixteen years old and married when she was admitted to hospital in 1942. Four years later, at the age of twenty, she was arrested for the crime of abduction. Those two facts, and whatever can be discerned in this photograph, are all that is known of her. Sources: New Castle News, 24 July 1942, “Hospital Notes”.
Betty Joan Edwards married Charles P Knight in July 1951, when she was seventeen years old. She wore a gown of slipper satin with a fitted bodice and a short net yoke trimmed with seed pearls, a fingertip veil of lace and a rhinestone tiara. At her wrist was a corsage of red roses. Eight years later, exactly a week before her divorce came through (she was divorcing Charles on the grounds of cruel and […]
Katie Payne took a razor blade to the house at the rear of 108 South Jefferson street where her husband, John, was staying with young, pretty Ethel McGowen. She slashed Ethel McGowen across the face, twice. When Ethel fell to the floor, curling up to protect herself, Katie slashed her legs, arms and hands. Ethel wasn’t going to be pretty any more. Katie was arrested and held in jail while Ethel was examined in hospital. […]
In January 1948, a young woman called Anna Grace Robertson suffered fatal brain injuries when she fell from a moving truck—or was pushed out; no one knew for sure. What was certain was that she had been drunk when her skull cracked on the road, and that the man whom she had been with, Martin Fobes, had been drunker still, as had most of the witnesses who testified that they’d seen Fobes and Anna Grace […]
Jessie Smith was one of the half a million black Americans who left the south during the first wave of the great migration, before and during the first world war, hoping to trade Jim Crow, klan violence and failed crops for a life of opportunity in the industrial north. However, when she arrived in New Castle from Spartanburg, South Carolina, she would have found that there was nowhere in town for her to stay. The […]
Small Town Noir 