The negative was almost ruined by light flooding into the camera because the body wasn’t shut properly, and Earl was seated too close to the lens, which meant that his head entirely obscured the board with his booking number on it. (No one noticed that until after the print had been developed, when they wrote the number on the photograph in blue ink.) Whoever took this picture wasn’t used to taking mug shots – an […]
Every Friday, the Harvard sandwich bar in Cleveland cashed thousands of dollars-worth of payroll checks for workers from the Fisher Body plant. The only security was provided by an auxiliary policeman who had been hired to watch over the money. On the sixteenth of April, 1937, Anthony DeCaprio drove Joseph Taylor and Theodore Slapik to the sandwich bar and sat outside with the engine running while they went in. Minutes later, he heard shots—the sound […]
Driving home on Taylor Street after spending Saturday night in a bar, Lamarr Warter lost control of his car, crashed through a cement-block wall and collided with a fruit tree in Mike Russo’s front yard. Lamarr survived, but the fruit tree did not. It was the second road accident on Taylor street that day. Shortly before six that evening, a car driven by a young man called Joseph McKee hit a nine-year-old boy called Matthew […]
Robert Watkins was six years old in April, 1934, when his sister Daisy was assaulted by a neighbor who she had to fight off with a butcher knife. He may have watched Daisy being beaten or seen her stabbing the man. He would certainly have seen the blood in the kitchen. If he had been old enough to read the short, lighthearted report that appeared in the paper the next day, he might have wondered […]
Two months after Pearl harbor, New Castle’s chief of police, Willis McMullen, issued a statement to inform the citizens of the town that “War is here” and that, consequently, they should refrain from bothering the police with trivial complaints. “Enemy aliens admittedly are scattered across the United States. It may be that some of them would be saboteurs and may attempt to cripple industry or public utilities,” he declared. If police had to take time […]
Prohibition was repealed on 5 December, 1933, but not one legal drop of liquor was served in New Castle that night. Any 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 […]
Joe Relo joined the navy after he graduated from high school in Struthers, Ohio, at the end of world war 2. One Saturday night in 1948, when he was home on furlough from the Pacific, he drove his old school friends, Joe Mediate and Bill Marr, twenty miles to New Castle, just over the state border. They passed the night in the bars downtown and it was nearly one in the morning before they got […]
Frank Tomski was charged with the sale and possession of hard liquor while having only a malt beverages license. Prohibition had been over for four years, but the black market never went away. He paid a fine of $300 to avoid three months in jail, but he was arrested on the same charge later in the year and sent to the Alleghenny workhouse for six months. The morning he was taken away, his son, Chester, […]
Paul Bailey was arrested midway through the first sunny weekend of the spring of 1948, which followed weeks of heavy rain. All over Lawrence County, people went fishing, played baseball or golf or just took the opportunity to sit on their porches. For his part, Paul celebrated the good weather by getting drunk enough to be charged with disorderly conduct. Meanwhile, the town’s criminal element embarked on a minor spree, with four burglaries being reported […]
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 who she had been with, Martin Fobes, had been drunker still, as had most of the witnesses who testified that they’d seen Fobes and […]
Small Town Noir 