On the back of Harold Kelty’s mug shot, a police officer wrote, “With Bill Harlan and John Hawk, stuck up Hutchinson Gas Station near New Wilmington, Pa.” The ink growing thin, he dipped his fountain pen in the ink pot, and continued a moment later, in darker script: “Age 17 at time. Married Capt Smith’s daughter—Golf Course. Much family trouble.” Harold’s family trouble began early in his life. His mother and father lived with his […]
A sixty-five-year-old woman named Margaret Ashby was standing near the cab stand on Washington street one afternoon when a young woman she had never met before struck up a conversation with her. After they had spoken for a while—the woman was excited about the money she stood to get from a new job in Pittsburgh and Margaret had somehow found herself talking about how much money she had saved up—they noticed a man picking up […]
Volant, about ten miles up the Neshannock creek from New Castle, was a little market town that had grown up around an old grist mill. Robert Grim’s family had owned land there since before the civil war and was among the most respected in the borough. By the time he was twenty-five, with a wife and three children, Robert was the town tax collector, local auditor and high constable, and served as the catcher on […]
No record remains of the incident of burglary for which Francis Grim was arrested in 1940—six months after the arrest of his father, Robert, for passing a worthless check—or of the circumstances around his 1937 conviction for adultery, fornication and bastardy, other than the fact that he was ordered to pay the mother of his illegitimate child $2 a week for the care of the baby. He died in 1990, at the age of seventy-eight. […]
There has been a huge decline in the artistic quality of mug shots over the past hundred years, from the beautiful studio portraits that can be seen in the collection of Arne Svenson, for example, to the flat, poorly lit snapshots you can find on sites like The Smoking Gun. The four pictures below, taken just after the New Castle police department switched to color film, represent a mid-point in the decline of the art […]
Jimmy Pasta made his money running illegal numbers games. He called himself a bill collector. He was arrested from time to time on gambling-related charges, staying out of jail by paying hundreds of dollars in fines. Just after three o’clock on the nineteenth of September, 1940, he was sitting in his car in Ellwood City when he saw the chief of police, Ernest Hartman, stop a car on the bridge over the Connoquenessing creek and […]
Sylvester Newton’s family farmed land by the Shenango for a century until it was sold for industrial development. Sylvester’s father went to work in the new tinplate mill. He stayed there almost forty years, until the depression shut it down. Sylvester worked in the tinplate mill, too, except when he was sent to Europe in the first world war. He divorced his first wife on the grounds of cruel and barbarous treatment. The following year, […]
Angelo Pegnato was one of a gang of safe-crackers and burglars—most of whom, like Angelo’s brother, Frank, had fought in the war—who were arrested in March, 1947, after stealing thousands of dollars from businesses in town. They took almost $4,000 from the Strouss-Hirshberg department store, and $3,360 in cash and $6,250 in war bonds from the Rick’s Motor Car office. Smaller sums were taken from Lebo’s clothing store, the Lincoln-Garfield school, the Lawrence laundry, Exide […]
The Commodore Grill on East Washington street stayed open all night serving food and alcohol to shift workers at the mills. After prohibition, it switched to coffee but those who wanted a real drink could still get one as long as they spoke to Elmo Clarke, who boarded in the rooms above the restaurant. On 24 July 1930, Eugene Sullivan entered, shouting loudly that he wanted a pencil to write a check. It was 2.30 […]
Joseph Copple left school just as the depression hit New Castle. In 1934, after years without a job, he was arrested for stealing and stripping automobiles and spent a short time in jail. In 1942, when the war reopened some of the factories, he got work in Johnson Bronze. Later that year, he was sentenced to three months for failure to support his wife. As he was led from the courtroom, he looked back and […]
Small Town Noir 