Charles Cialella played football for New Castle High and worked for his family’s florist business until he joined the army air service, immediately after the attack on Pearl harbor. Two months after the end of the war, he was arrested for playing a numbers game. He was released without being charged. He went to work with New Castle’s parks department and became supervisor of the Cascade park swimming pool when it reopened in 1952, offering […]
Fred Weir came to New Castle from the south as a young man, just before prohibition began, and spent the twenties drinking and gambling in backroom establishments downtown and on the south side. A woman named Mattie McKisson ran a Negro club in her home on the corner of Cochran way and South street, where she allowed dice, cards and liquor. On a spring night in 1922, Fred hired a taxi to take him there […]
On Saturday, the fourteenth of January, 1956, many people throughout New Castle stopped to admire an unusual circular rainbow that hung around the sun above Lawrence County, a creation of the cold and frosty air. Fewer noticed Paul Conner as he drove south from Sharon through New Castle and onward, stopping at every department store and supermarket on the way to cash hundreds of dollars-worth of bad checks in the name of Joe Garrett. Paul […]
Stanley Balin’s mother died when he was six. His father, a Polish immigrant who worked in the Farrell Steel works, sent him to the Margaret Henry home for orphans, which occupied an old mansion on Friendship street. The house had been built by R W Cunningham, who had come to New Castle in 1836 and established a business forwarding wool, glass, iron and steel to the west. He grew prosperous and built a foundry, turning out […]
Parades were held almost every day throughout New Castle’s sesquicentennial week—the veterans parade, the youth parade, the agricultural parade, the old-timers parade, the fraternal parade. Tuesday, set aside for the celebration of industrial labour, was a quieter day. Nevertheless, the carnival midway on the city parking grounds by the central fire station was open and busy until after midnight. No alcohol was sold at the midway, but much was consumed. While driving home at twenty […]
The last day of New Castle’s week-long sesquicentennial celebrations (more on them here) started with a golf tournament at Sylvan Heights, followed by a parade of the city’s fraternal organisations—the Elks, the Sons of Italy, the Eintracht singing society—through the downtown and southside streets, accompanied by floats and high school marching bands. Thousands of people packed the sidewalks. The sun blazed down all afternoon. Robert Modrak and three of his friends avoided all of that. […]
A seventy-seven-year-old widow named Alice Johnson opened her door to William Brest, whom she mistook for a neighbor’s son. She let him in, leaving him alone in her living room for a minute. He took her wallet and left. After he removed the $16 that it contained, he threw it into the weed patch behind the United Presbyterian church on Countyline street, where it was recovered by police once William had been arrested and signed […]
On the summer evening in 1948 when the police raided liquor establishments across New Castle following the death of Anna Grace Robertson earlier in the year, fifteen people were arrested. Among them were Elizabeth Miller, a bartender at the Rex café, and Anagnostis Sakelliadis, who ran the Square Deal café on West Washington street, which was the last place that Anna Grace was seen the night she died. Anna Grace’s mother worked there, but was […]
John Franell, a lifelong resident of Altoona, was an honor roll student in elementary school and sang in his local athletics club’s barbershop quartet when he was in high school. After graduation, he worked as a produce clerk and spent a lot of time in bars. He was arrested a few times—fighting, disorderly conduct, a little light larceny—and was conscripted into the combat engineers in 1942. After the war, John became a small-time thief, stealing […]
Apart from the night in January 1945 when he stole a carburettor from a neighbour’s car—a crime for which he received no punishment as he was due back in the army—Nick Frank kept out of trouble. He was a truck driver all his life and was involved in collisions every so often, but none was his fault. He hunted deer, but always in season, and once got his picture in the paper for shooting a […]
Small Town Noir 