LIMA — GE Bluem was walking the floors of his department store on a busy Saturday in the spring of 1924 when he came upon a man tampering with the lock on a back door of the store at the northeast corner of Market and Elizabeth streets. The man ran away, but Bluem was wary.
“The police were notified and an officer was assigned to guard the door,” reported the Republican Gazette of Lima on May 12, 1924. “The patrol and another guard took up positions inside and kept vigil during the night, but no suspicious persons appeared. .”
Suspicious people, meanwhile, showed up at half a dozen other downtown businesses that night.
Nearby, at 115-117 West Market Street, Max Falk, manager of Eilerman’s Clothing, entered his store Sunday morning to find “the heavy vault door blown off its hinges and the store in a distance of twenty feet …” according to the Gazette. Surprisingly, no one reported hearing the explosion.
Eilerman’s robbery was part of what the newspaper called “a carnival of robberies” in downtown Lima in the early hours of that Sunday morning, carried out by the “Vegs,” gangs of safes with a penchant for explosives that were active in three the first decades. of the 20th century.
“A ‘Yegg’ is a bank robber of a new kind,” wrote the New York Times on September 15, 1901, as “yeggs” began to appear in the eastern U.S. “He has few of the melodramatic ideas that made the . . . old – picturesque time clocks. Apparently he is just a working man, traveling around the country in search of a job…”
The Times traced the “increase of bank robbers by the thousands” to a California transit man named John Yegg, who, during his travels, came across a government report on experiments “with explosives in so-called burglar-proof vaults.” . Yegg, noted the Times, “soon became an expert in the use of nitroglycerine. Under his tutelage, many of his ‘fellows’ took lessons, and thus the use of dynamite and nitroglycerine by raft thieves spread.”
The Lima Times-Democrat wrote in December 1908 that “the tramp thief is the ‘Yegg,’ with his headquarters in the centers of population, but never operating there. He robs only in small towns, though it is customary in the cities, where the fraternity of it has its own means of communication, its meeting places and its diversions.”
In his 1994 history of the Lima Police Department, Joseph C. Bowsher wrote that the “yeggs” found Lima an ideal base of operations because “railroads and main lines for interurban cars from all the major cities intersected here. In In the early 1900s, the Jegmen often made themselves comfortable in Lima so they could wreak havoc elsewhere.
Lima, in the early years of the 20th century, was also an ideal place to rob nitroglycerine, which was used in the oil industry. In mid-September 1912, after caps of nitroglycerin and dynamite were stolen from the Dupont Explosives Company west of McBeth Park, the Gazette wrote, “It is supposed that the jegmen are preparing to pursue their work through the winter months and are laying out a supply of convincing for stubborn safes.”
They may not have waited until winter. On October 14, 1912, the Republican-Gazette wrote: “Excitement swept over the village of Columbus Grove yesterday morning when it was discovered that the jegmen had broken into the grocery store of BF Seitz during the night, blown the safe with nitroglycerine, stolen $150, and made an escape successful.”
“Yeggs,” judging by newspaper reporting in the early decades of the 20th century, were everywhere.
In October 1919, the Gazette reported that “yeggmen” had stolen $25,000 in Liberty Bonds from the People’s Savings Bank in New Knoxville. On November 23, 1919, The Lima News reported, “Yeggs cracked the strong box of the Farmers Savings Bank” in Rockford and “secured $100,000 in Liberty Bonds and War Savings Stamps.” The police have no clue.”
Five years ago, in December 1914, the vault at the post office in Glanddorf was blown up twice in a few weeks. In the second robbery, on December 19, the thieves “got away with about $20 in cash and stamps … A device, which the men had stolen, was found in Leipsic.” Among the many robberies or attempted robberies were incidents in Spencerville, Cridersville and Elida. Yeggmen apparently visited every city with a vault.
One of the most notorious groups of yeggmen to find a home in Lima was the Slater Gang, which arrived in Lima in 1905. “These fellows always had a lot of money and spent it freely,” Bowsher wrote in his 1994 history. They were known as good fellows, as they were always friendly and pleasant and spent money well with the element of the saloon or perhaps with anyone they happened to meet.”
Although “there was no crime of any kind committed in or near Lima traced to this group…”, they were always suspected of being thieves, according to Bowsher. In November 1905, suspicions were confirmed when authorities arrived in Lima with warrants for five gang members in connection with blowing up a safe in a Ridgeville, Indiana bank. When the Lima police arrived at their headquarters on North Central Avenue, “the whole group, revolvers in hand, made a battering for the doors …,” Bowsher wrote, noting that, during the chase, the gang leader, Harry Slater, was shot. three times. He died the next day.
Lima eventually went from a reluctant host to a target. In February 1915, a heavy steel door leading to a vault holding a safe at Sealts Brothers Wholesale Grocery, North Street at Central Avenue, was damaged by an explosion but not broken, according to the Gazette, which noted that “bags of sugar had been piled around the door to muffle the noise.” The Harman Furniture store on the southwest corner of Market and Elizabeth streets, around the corner from Bluem’s store, was visited in May 1919. The paper reported that “the safe blowers blew the lock out of the safe door with a powerful blast of nitroglycerin and swept the safe .”
The May 1924 “Carnival of Robbery” was followed that June by the attempted robbery in late June of the Boston Department Store, less than a block away from Eilerman’s clothing store. Authorities believed it was the same group of “eggs” that had visited the city in May. “What spooked the scammers and frustrated the second big job here in the last two months has not been determined …,” reported the Lima News on June 3, 1924.
Perhaps the most spectacular robbery was carried out in mid-February 1926, when thieves looted more than 100 safe deposit boxes at the Metropolitan Bank, then located in the Metropolitan Block. They also received more than $1,300 in coins. The five burglars cut a five-and-a-half-by-four-and-a-half-foot hole in the wall between the hardware store next door and the bank, and then tunneled under the bank’s vault and drilled a circular hole in an eight-inch-thick circular hole. The newspaper wrote on February 15, 1926. When their getaway car disabled near St.
On February 16, 1926, The Lima News expressed the city’s dismay.
“Spammers: This is to inform you that you do not have a standing invitation to visit my city. If we never hear from you again, it will be very soon,” the paper read.
The undesirables did not listen. On December 12, 1927, the Gazette reported that “The Yeggmen broke open the safe of the Samuel G. Blattner store on South Main Street yesterday and made off with more than $1,000 worth of merchandise and $200.”
The Metropolitan Block as it looked in 1908 during a GAR (Grand Army of the Republic) convention. In February 1926, the victims opened a hole in the vault of the Metropolitan Bank, which was in the building at the time, and looted 100 safe deposit boxes. They also took more than $1,300 in silver coins, which they left with their getaway car, which was disabled and abandoned near St. Louis. The robbers forced a mechanic of St. Johns to take them to Columbus.
The front page of the Lima News from June 23, 1924, after the “yeggs” tried to blow up the safe at the Lima Store in Boston. The robbers, believed to be the same ones who robbed the Eilerman Clothing store and five other downtown businesses in May 1924, spooked and left empty-handed, but left behind the tools of their trade.
The front page of the Lima News on May 12, 1924, after “yeggs” robbed Eilerman and five other businesses in the downtown area. Using nitroglycerin, the “eggs” blew open two heavy vault doors twenty feet into the store. No one reported hearing an explosion.
Harman’s Furniture Store as it appears in 1922. The store was the target of “eggs” in May 1919. The Lima Republican reported that thieves “carried off nearly $3,000 in loot, leaving a ruined safe at Harman’s Furniture Store , Market and Elizabeth Streets, as the only given.”
The nitroglycerine works, located far west of what is now the intersection of Shawnee and Spencerville streets, were crude works. They were also a target for “eggs”, whose preferred method of opening safes involved explosives.
Reach Greg Hoersten at [email protected]
