Here’s a timely historical tidbit, in light of the recent Bernard Madoff scandal and other similar schemes. I came across this 1934 article while working on the “75-years-ago-this-week” section of the Eras Past column.
Charles Ponzi was the original pyramid schemer, or at least the crook whose caper became famous enough to have the concept named after him.
The article below was published in […]

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When a woman was found beaten and stabbed to death in her home south of Willow Street in November 2007, various news reports, citing various public officials as sources, stated that the crime was:
— “The first recorded homicide in the history of Pequea Township.”
— “The first homicide in Pequea Township since at least 1967, when […]

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When I spend time in the Lancaster Newspapers archive, I see lots of old court stories reporting that convicted criminals were sent to serve their terms in the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia.
The fortress-like prison near Fairmount Park opened as a solitary-confinement experiment 1829 and closed in 1971. It reopened as a historic site in 1994. I checked it out a […]

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I wish there would have been a picture of this guy walking the streets of Lancaster!
This short piece was published in the New Era on Dec. 23, 1908.
I thought it was an interesting, and somewhat unusual, little item of local color from the period, so here it is:

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Old-timers sometimes refer to how much less crime there was in Lancaster 40, 50 or 60 years ago, compared with today, but you wouldn’t know it from this list of warnings city police had for holiday shoppers in 1958.
Their recommendations: Lock your doors and windows when you go out, guard your pocketbook, avoid crowds, don’t talk to strangers, and beware […]

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I see a LOT of crime stories when I scroll through old Lancaster newspapers on microfilm (I’m still trying to figure out when those good-old ”streets were safe, never-needed-to-lock-our-doors” days were), but I don’t see very many stories referring specifically to illegal drugs prior to the 1950s or ’60s. A few, but not very many, and they tend to be […]

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Seventy years ago, on the night of Nov. 9-10, 1938, a wave of anti-Jewish rioting in Germany and Austria ushered in the period of intense, overt oppression that led to the Nazis’ systemic murder of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust from 1939 to 1945.
On ”Kristallnacht,” Jews were attacked, their busineses ransacked and more than 1,000 synogogues damaged. The anniversary was marked […]

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In the Sept. 8 Eras Past column, I included a 1983 article about a Hempfield School District survey that found that nearly one-third of the high school’s seniors had consumed beer at least once or twice a week the previous school year.
That survey also found that 57 percent of the school’s students had used tobacco, alcohol or […]

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