The guns of the USS Alabama, which fired more than a thousand rounds of sixteen-inch shells during the war in the Pacific, bombarding enemy-occupied islands in battles that resulted in the collapse of the Japanese military and the deaths of tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians, were kept in service for the last two years of the campaign by Charles Stitt, the descendant of a Scotch-Irish family who had opened a tailor’s shop in […]
Ernest wasn’t long out of the navy when, on a wet and windy night, he was caught driving a car while drunk (fine: $100). The year before, he been honourably discharged after having served five years on the USS Laffey, which had been involved in heavy fighting while taking part in the blockade of North Korean ports. The USS Laffey’s Class of ’52 yearbook, a souvenir booklet produced by the ship’s crew in their free […]
James and his brother Lee were arrested for the statutory rape of a fifteen year old girl, which occurred on June 9, 1947, and dates prior. James, who was twenty-two, was fined $100 and given six months in the Lawrence County jail; Lee got off with only an $80 fine or forty-five days in jail. The brothers appeared in court regularly throughout the forties and fifties. A few years before the statutory rape charge, Lee […]
The wet spring weekend in 1940 during which Loyes Langdoff was arrested for being drunk and disorderly was an extraordinarily quiet one for the town, and only one crime story appeared in the New Castle News of Monday, 4 March: “REPORT COAT STOLEN — Detectives were summoned to the Strouss-Hirshberg store, Saturday afternoon, it having been reported that someone had stolen a woman’s blue Chlnelle coat, worth $39.95.” Detectives Moore and Young were assigned to […]
Frank Wilson’s arrest on a charge of disorderly conduct didn’t make the New Castle News, even though it had been a slow weekend. The day he was arrested, Saturday, 5 October, 1940, began with the discovery of a crime at Keefe’s Cafe, on South Mill street. Some time before the cafe opened up, a thief had smashed the glass in the ventilator in the door, squeezed in through the small opening, stolen $57 in cash […]
Between July and November, 1936, Louis Deluria broke into the Lewis confectionery, the Lief saloon, the Davis Tydol garage and the Shaffer & Snyder drug store, all on the south side, within a few blocks of his home. He stole razor blades, gum and cough drops from the confectionery; liquor, cigars and a peanut machine from the saloon; oil and a battery from the gas station; and compacts, cigarettes and candy from the drug store. […]
Before the sale of fireworks was banned in Pennsylvania, as many as six people in the state had been killed by fireworks every 4th of July. By 1940, the second year of the ban, no one had. Firework injuries for the holiday were down from more than three thousand to fewer than a hundred. The state medical society, the fire departments and the police were happy, but others, nineteen-year-old Gerald Schooley among them, missed the excitement. […]
Just before midnight on 25th April 1948, Officer George Sigler saw a car smash into a parked car on South Mill street and weave on down the road. He caught up with it on Moravia street and arrested the driver, Andrew Masters, who was drunk and bleeding from the nose. Andrew was given the usual sentence of thirty days in the county jail, out in three if he paid the $100 fine and costs. A […]
Joseph Augostine, a house painter, was arrested for disorderly conduct in February 1943, one week before Chief of Police Willis McMullen announced that New Castle would no longer tolerate such behaviour and ordered city policemen to clear all undesirables from the streets. McMullen told the press, “With the good boys of the community fighting for their lives, others sweating in vital industrial concerns to furnish war material and their elders engaged in various war activities, […]
A wealthy north hill citizen named W S Harlan returned home just after dark one December night in 1906 to discover a gang of burglars in his hallway. They were armed with blackjacks and pistols, but Harlan overpowered one of them and kept him captive while the others ran off. The burglar was fifteen years old, the son of a prominent north hill family. He confessed to other recent burglaries and named his accomplices, a […]
Small Town Noir 