The police had been investigating a numbers racket for a month when Anderson Wise was arrested at the end of November, 1948, his pockets full of lottery slips and small change. He was released on $300 bail, which was confiscated in lieu of a fine when he failed to appear in court. Anderson worked in a locomotive crane plant and lived in a small house on Levine way, near the Moravia street rail yards, with […]
Braily Muse was fifty-two years old when, in the early hours of Monday, the twenty-first of May, 1945, he was arrested for being drunk and disorderly. There is no record of his life before or after the event. Braily’s picture is one of the hundred or so New Castle mug shots for which I haven’t been able to find a story, but I love it anyway—his torn cardigan; his ratty dreadlocks; the cataract in his left […]
Benjamin Deiger’s father delivered candy for J B Nessie’s confectionery for more than fifty years. He started in 1904, making deliveries across Lawrence County by horse-drawn wagon. He switched to a truck in 1918, a year after Benjamin’s birth and a few months before his wife’s death from pneumonia. The truck was a great help, although he missed the horses. When Benjamin grew up and left school, he got a job in the Red and […]
Before the war, Everett Eakin was the assistant superintendent of the Jordan game farm, east of New Castle, one of dozens of game farms that kept the woods stocked with birds for small-game season in the fall. Each year, Everett would release around twenty thousand birds into the wild, and Lawrence County’s twelve thousand licensed hunters would kill their share of the quarter of a million pheasants, woodcocks, doves, wild turkeys and Hungarian partridges that […]
The Marousis brothers James, William and Speer, left the Greek village of Lyrkeia for America in 1906 when Speer, the oldest, was just eighteen. They arrived in New York and headed straight for New Castle, where they shone shoes and cleaned hats until they had enough money to open a cigar store on East Washington street. In 1912, James returned to Europe to join the Greek army, fighting in the Balkan wars and the first […]
The Warner brothers opened their first cinema in a converted room on the ground floor of the old Knox hotel on South Mill street in 1905, when John Whitten was six years old. Harry Warner bought the fixtures and fittings from Whitten’s hardware store on East Washington street, which was owned by John’s father, who helped the Warners install the chairs that they rented from a nearby funeral parlour. The cinema did well, and the […]
Sam Wilson was arrested for burglary in 1937, but there is no record of the case. At the time, he was living in an apartment above the Davis Coal and Supply Company store on Moravia street with his wife and five children. A decade earlier, he had a place above the Gloria Tire and Rubber Works, two blocks away, and made money working in a limestone quarry and selling bootleg wine. It was a wild […]
Small Town Noir will not be updated for the next couple of weeks, as I’ll be out of the country and hopefully nowhere near a computer. In the meantime, you might want to revisit a few of the earlier posts, as I’ve rewritten a lot of them as I found out more about the lives of the subjects. For example, I came across the interesting story behind the first arrest, at the age of sixteen, […]
Dick Hitchcock grew up working in his father’s butcher shop by the Grant street bridge and playing football for New Castle High. After he left school, he switched his game to golf. Throughout his twenties, he won tournaments for Trinity Episcopal in the church golfing league and for the independent grocers in the small business league. He organised charity golf matches, gave and received toasts at golf club dinners and helped with the annual banquet […]
Youtha Beverly arrived in New Castle from Covington, Virginia, in 1920. He turned eighteen in 1927, the year when a car in which he was a passenger broke the neck of a four-year-old girl who ran out into the street. The following year, he was arrested in connection with a disturbance during a whoopee party at a house in Sciota street that resulted in a man named John Sears being shot in the head. During […]
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