IT HAPPENED HERE – A headline in the Herald-Dispatch Monday morning turned the memory calendar back to 1933 for this columnist, a memory that many senior citizens will recall…Franklin D. Roosevelt had just taken office and a national bank holiday had been declared…Ernest Bennett was Lawrence County Sheriff…The home of Dr. Joe Lowry was at Fourth and Washington streets, now the site of the Lawrence County Briggs Library.
The headline in the Monday paper read, “Famous murder case in the book at Briggs Library”…If the trees on the lots of neighbors’ homes adjoining the library could talk, perhaps they could tell a very sensational story of an unsolved murder of the doctor who lived in the big house and whose body was found of the bathroom floor.
The facts, as told at that time, were that the doctor was living alone in the big home…His wife had died a few months previous…Her final resting place was in a private mausoleum at Woodland Cemetery…The story was that doctor was worried about the nationwide bank holiday, declared by the president, and had withdrawn the gold coins and his late wife’s jewels from the safety deposit boxes at the banks and hid them in the mausoleum…A court order opened the big vault to make an investigation, and a big chain and padlock replaced the broken lock on the mausoleum…The sheriff, who was the chief investigating officer, was accidentally killed in a traffic accident on his way to Conneaut, Ohio on official business and the official investigation ended.
Representatives of crime magazines and detective books swarmed into town…At one time the Hotel Marting was so crowded with newspaper writers for Sunday magazine sections that they were interviewing one another…It is strange what a newspaper headline about a new book at the library can recall about an event from 32 years ago.
MORE ABOUT REPORTERS – The reporters who describe today’s auto wrecks as “two or four-door cars” may make an error sometimes and call it a “one-door car” or a “three-door car” and that will be amusing, but not exactly new…One of the first automobiles in Ironton in 1903, driven by Arthur Marting, had one door…It was in the middle of the back seat and those who sat in the back seat of the car called the tonneau entered the car via a step and a door…Those cars had no doors to enter the front seat…Dr. W. F. Marting was among the first auto owners in town and his 62 years of safe driving is excelled by no living Irontonian.
Written by Charles Collettt
Huntington Newspaper – November 17, 1965
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