In late July 2013, a man wearing dark glasses and a baseball cap robbed Great Southern Bank in downtown Iola. He darted away. Surveillance cameras in the bank’s lobby captured images, but the man was never found.
That was the last armed robbery — a hand in the man’s pocket may have held a weapon — in Iola and only one of a handful in many years.
In the 1920s and ’30s, crime occurred often in our town.
Yeggmen — a slang name for safecrackers — often hit two, three, even four businesses in a single night. Once, after cracking a safe, a hole was kicked in a common wall with an adjacent business and the burglars scooted through and went to work on its safe.
Rewards often weren’t great by today’s standards. The take seldom was more than $50, but that wasn’t bad for a night’s work when laborers were lucky to take home that much for two or three weeks’ toil during the Great Depression.
Robberies occurred often, with service stations a favorite target. Many stayed open late into the night, with a single attendant on duty. Railroad station clerks also worked alone at night and several of them came face to face with the muzzle of a handgun.
At Iola’s Santa Fe station, a clerk was contrary, pulled a handgun from under his counter and quickly fired six shots, all of which missed. The crook was more accurate; his return fire killed the clerk. A couple of weeks later a railroad station in Garnett was held up. The clerk was warned: “Don’t be stupid like the guy in Iola.” He wasn’t and lived to tell his story.
Iola police officers often were on foot to patrol the city of 9,000 or more residents — apparently why safes blown open with nitroglycerin didn’t attract attention of those on night duty.
The uptick in violent crime prompted Iola officers to ask for more firepower and better protection. City commissioners responded by buying a high-powered rifle and a submachine gun. They also acquired a patrol car with inch-think windshield glass that was supposed to stop a bullet. The windshield had a firing port for the officer riding shotgun.
During the Great Depression many families subsisted on welfare or an income meager by any standard that undoubtedly played roles in the upswing in crime. So did the notoriety of such outlaws as Al Capone and John Dillinger, as well as Bonnie and Clyde who once hid out in Joplin, whose exploits emboldened local thugs.
There is always a darker side
