The Plot Continues to Thicken
I’ve recently unearthed a couple of interesting tid-bits of information regarding the night in November of 1942 when my father admitted he stole a car in Bristol, Rhode Island. As you may or may not recall, the automobile that he took was listed in his Navy Service Record in the summary of his Summary Court Martial as the property of one John Hogan, whose address was given as Usher Place, in Bristol. I emailed several historical societies in that neck o’ the woods, about Usher Place, hoping to learn what type of building or home was at that address in 1942 and if there was any way to obtain the police report of the stolen vehicle, and I got back one reply from a gentleman named Derwent Riding at the Bristol Historical & Preservation Society. He wrote:
William –
Ray Battcher, our staff person called Richard Usher and this is the story: Yes, Usher Place was a street in Bristol. In 1941 there was a five alarm fire: for Usher’s place and the fire trucks went to Usher Place, which was a field. By the time they realized that it was the Usher’s place, the house had burned down. The street was subsequently renamed Usher Terrace to avert any other confusion.
As far as the police record, that would be through the police department * and I’m not sure that they keep records that long.
If you’d like more, you could call Ray Battcher at the Bristol Historical & Preservation Society, (401) 253-7223 and he might be able to find out more.
Hope this is helpful.
Derry Riding
President
Bristol Historical & Preservation Society
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The joy-ride my father took occurred on the evening of November 9, 1942, and he was missing without leave until the following day, when he was returned to the PT Boat base in Melville by the local constabulary it would seem. I began to think about the incident, and remembered how gasoline was strictly rationed at that time. I wondered how dad had gotten enough gasoline to drive to Scranton that night, if indeed that’s where he went. With mines going off in New York City harbor that next morning, and considering that he had trained at a mine assembly installation in Boston, earlier that year, it would have been quite remiss for the Navy and the FBI not to have suspected him of involvement, all things being as they were, and the distance to Scranton and New York City being practically the same from Bristol.
I wondered if anything might have been written in the local Scranton papers, if perhaps they had got wind of my father’s arrest that evening. Well, as the Russian immigrants in the area would say, “skazanna-sdyelanna” lo and behold, there it was. I found the following entry in an archive for the Wilkes-Barre Almanac:
“[November]9[1942]. Unidentified man holds up rationing board clerk at White haven and escapes with gasoline rationing coupons . . . “
I don’t know how common an occurrence that was during WWII, but further perusal of the almanac pages showed no other similar events took place for that month, and for as far as I searched. Nor do I believe in coincidence that much either.
If my dad did indeed drive to Scranton that night, he would have needed gas, and he would have figured he was too well known in Scranton to steal ration coupons there. I’m sure he was familiar with the area around Wilkes-Barre too, and it would have been right on the way. But stealing a car, and armed robbery, these are the acts of a desperate man, not a sailor going out for a joy-ride. Why would he have been so desperate to get to Scranton that particular night, in the middle of the week no less?
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Finally, I hit upon one final coincidence, that came up in the course of my search. I began to wonder who the District Attorney might have been in New York City at the time, and if he had written about the mines exploding that next morning, and lo and behold again, I learned that the DA was Frank Hogan, probably no relation to John Hogan, the man who resided in either a burnt-down home or an empty field in Bristol, RI but still another coincidence, I thought. And then I read this:
“The street address of the main office of the New York County District Attorney is “One Hogan Place” in his honor. One Hogan Place is the same building as 100 Centre Street, the main criminal courts building for New York County.”
Frank Hogan Wiki-pedia Article
So, my dad’s tale has become a curious one indeed, of two Walshs, two Hogans and two Places. And did you know, John F. Kennedy’s secretary was named Lincoln, and Abraham Lincoln’s secretary was named Kennedy?
[Note to self:] If the man who was held up in Wilkes-Barre turns out to have been named O’Malley Toole, then you’ve got something.
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