Small Town Noir

The arresting officer typed “Attemp Rape” on William Robert Taylor’s file card; William signed a statement admitting “molestation”; and the court charged him with “intent to commit morals offense”. Each phrase, from the blunt, abbreviated police term to the expansive, lawyerly phrasing, is stronger and says more than the one that follows it. As the charge becomes formalised, the words contain less and less meaning and take us further away from the night when a […]

The New Castle police department’s catalogue of arrests for the last weekend in July, 1934 – the weekend, incidentally, of John Dillinger’s death in Chicago – ran as follows: fighting 1; drunkenness 4; violating parking law 3; drunkenness and disorderly conduct 2; interfering with officer 1. Helen Carter’s case was the last on the list. The circumstances of her arrest are unknown but may have something to do with a man. Helen’s troubles usually did. Helen married […]

Six years into prohibition, Frank Siegel was arrested for possessing liquor. He was a farmer who had come to America from Austria before the first world war, and he tried to explain that he was strictly teetotal and that the alcohol that had been found in his house had been meant for medical purposes – his wife was suffering from some malady that required a local application of the stuff. His attorney backed him up, […]

Hemlock street was a dead-end road on a wooded hillside to the west of the Shenango river, occupied by only a few small family homes. Paul Leroy Gold didn’t live there; he had a room a mile away in the centre of town. Yet, on a Friday afternoon in March, 1942, he just happened to be on Hemlock street when a nine-year-old girl named Eileen came by, with a younger boy. Paul struck up a […]

William Shovlin had a little too much to drink one Friday after work and ended up sleeping in a cell instead of his bed. It was a bad start to his weekend, but some households in New Castle had worse ones, and all they did was open the door to the telegram delivery boy. That weekend in 1945, news came that Henry Mateja had been killed in the south Pacific; that Chester Glenn and Louis […]

A year of fighting Nazis in Europe earned John Hutchison a chestful of decorations: the ETO ribbon, the good conduct medal, a purple heart and cluster (he was injured twice), four battle stars and the Luxembourg citation. He came home to Oil City, Pennsylvania, a genuine American hero at the age of twenty-one, and proudly wore his uniform when he married his girl, Thelma, exactly six months and one day after Adolf Hitler shot himself […]

In July, 1951, James Byers escaped from the hospital in Ohio where he’d been sent after being badly injured during his arrest for rape, and the Youngstown police alerted nearby towns that he might be headed their way. On the last day of the month, residents of Cascade Street, on the eastern edge of New Castle, informed the police that a suspicious couple had “slept all night in the weeds” nearby. When Officers Bartoshek and […]

In 1937, when he was eighteen, Frank Soda and a couple of his friends were arrested after a high-speed chase through Lancaster, Ohio, which started when they filled up their stolen car at a gas station and drove off without paying. The police shot out their tires. Frank’s friend, Pete Polinsky, threatened the police with a shotgun. They had only been trying to impress a girl who had accepted their offer of a ride. The […]

Floyd Armstrong, a fifty-five-year-old drifter who gave his profession as dish-washer, was one of several suspicious characters—including Charlie Tilden—who were arrested on the 27th and 28th of June, 1957, for loitering and various other minor infractions, pending further charges that might be brought against them. In the early hours of the twenty-seventh of June, someone had broken into two cars in the Castleton parking lot and tried, but failed, to hot-wire them. Little damage was […]

There were heavy snows on the last weekend of 1942, when Edwin Duff crashed his car on East Washington street. The day of the accident, the New Castle News reported that the snow was so deep that squirrels were having difficulty getting to the feeding stations that had been set up for them in the city’s parks. “On Saturday afternoon, Owen Fox, while at Gaston Park, watched the squirrels jump from treetop to treetop en-route […]