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 was heading for his home in
Bellevue, in Allegheny County, but his trip was cut short when the
manager of the Montgomery Ward store in Beaver Falls recognised him from
a previous visit and called the police. He ran out of the shop but was
chased and caught.
Paul waited in Beaver Falls jail while
the various jurisdictions discussed where he should be dealt with first.
New Castle won the argument, and he was taken there on the seventeenth
of January. There is no further record of his case or of Paul himself.
On 25th January 1945, when Ross Paswell’s
former comrades in the American navy were firing thousands of shells
into the hillsides of Iwo Jima, destroying Japanese installations that
were blocking the advance of the marine corps in the early days of a
battle that would end the lives of twenty-five thousand men, Ross, who
had been found unsuitable for naval service the year before and sent
home with a dishonourable discharge, was robbing a café in Ellwood City,
along with a man named Harold Geary, who was 4F on account of a broken ear drum.
Ross and Harold forced the café owner at
gunpoint to hand over the contents of the till—$50—and drove off in a
stolen car. They picked up their girlfriends—one of whom, Maria White,
was married to an overseas marine—and drove south through heavy snow,
stealing other cars in Washington and Uniontown on their way to
Connellsville where, the police later said, “they lived as men and
wives” for four days.
They were arrested when they returned the
women to their homes in Beaver Falls. All four were taken back to New
Castle, where they pled guilty to the charges against them. The men
received six to twelve years in the state penitentiary for armed robbery
and auto theft; the women got one to two years in the workhouse for
being accessories after the fact.
Ross had difficulties in jail. He
protested about the lack of educational opportunities, recreational
facilities and an adequate diet. In return, he spent a great deal of
time in the hole—a concrete cell with a concave floor beneath the
administration building, with no furniture, toilet or light, where,
after being stripped naked, he would have to sit, squat or lie in his
own urine and excrement for up to seven days at a time.
After six years, Ross was paroled. He
found that he was unable to buy a car, due to his criminal record, so he
used a false name to sign the papers. His deception was uncovered, and
he was returned to jail to serve the rest of his ten-year sentence.
Ross was released in February 1955. Four
months later, he married a woman named Marjorie Dougal and moved into a
house in Ellwood City, where he became a self-employed landscaper.
Marjorie was pregnant for most of the next decade, producing two sons
and six daughters before 1969, when she had Ross arrested for an assault
in which he cracked two of her ribs. Ross and Marjorie were divorced as
soon as the court would allow.
The following year, living alone in New Castle, Ross began to write long letters to the New Castle News
in which he discussed the social upheaval that he saw going on around
him. He said that the disillusionment of the young was entirely
justified, that they had been betrayed by the capitalists and the
communists, the liberals and the conservatives. He urged understanding
of the Weathermen and other leftist bombers, whom he described as
keeping America’s conscience awake. He spoke of the outright revolution
that was to come and called for the United Nations to declare the
ghettos, the Indian reservations and the migrant worker camps disaster
zones and send in observers to determine if the under-privileged, the
poverty-stricken and the down-trodden were being treated humanely. He
said that the only way America could save itself and the rest of the
world was to take all that was salvageable from the Judeo-Christian
traditions and combine that with Zen Buddhism. He contemplated his time
in jail and what he had done to Marjorie, and wrote that he considered
that the dehumanising punishments to which he had been subjected had
left him with a slow-burning animal rage that could burst into flame at
any moment.
In October of that year, Ross was jailed
for one to two years for passing bad checks at his local supermarket. He
immediately began to campaign for prison reform, writing letters to
congressmen, senators and the state attorney general to draw attention
to the paucity of fruit in the jail diet, the lack of adequate light for
reading and the fact that there were no laundry facilities. He also
made “a silent commitment to the teachings of Christ” when he was given a
few packs of tobacco and candy by a visiting preacher following an
Easter service.
On his release in 1971, when he was
fifty-one years old, Ross founded an organisation called IOU, Inc, which
was made up of local business and professional people and ex-convicts
who volunteered to help convicts reintegrate into the community when
they got out of jail by providing them with employment, loans and
fellowship. It became known throughout the state correctional system as
an example of how to rehabilitate offenders. Ross was invited to speak
at state anti-crime hearings. He was described as an inspirational
figure by leaders of the community. His views on the political issues of
the day—for example, that Richard Nixon had allowed “an arrogant clique
of power mad political appointees to manipulate governmental agencies
by adopting Nazi philosophies that are contrary to the morals and ethics
on which our democracy was founded”—continued to find an outlet in the
pages of the New Castle News.
Ross kept on working with ex-convicts
until old age prevented him from doing any more. In one of his last
published letters, he wrote, “Looking back over the life I have been
compelled to live as a convict and ex-convict, considering the
psychological scars imprinted on my mind, knowing that I could have been
reduced to an animal, it has to be the continuing grace of God that I
am alive, free and still a human being.” He died in a nursing home in
2008, at the age of eighty-eight.
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