HISTORICAL COMMENTS BY GEORGE CHEVALLIER 7-6-13

Last Chapter

The end of my grandfather’s life was precipitated by an event that was noteworthy in the history of Salisbury.

Although he was 78 at the time and was failing due to his age and the fact that he had gotten about as much out of his small body that could be expected, an event occurred in late 1968 that helped Mother Nature along.

One night about 11 o’clock, he answered a knock at his front door. He said that he would never have opened the door except that the person called him by name. When he opened the door, they hit him on the head with the butt end of a pistol. They then proceeded to tie him up with the phone cord and put an arm chair over him. There were two perpetrators and while the one was attending to my grandfather, the other one went upstairs. He obtained my grandfather’s wallet and came down the stairs announcing that he got $400. This always made my grandfather smile, because he knew he had $810 in it. He said it was typical of crooks to steal, even if from each other.

When they had left, my grandfather freed himself and cleaned up the mess they had made, including scrubbing the blood out of the carpet. He never told my grandmother and said that it was lucky she was deaf and slept through the whole affair. Also, the thief never opened the door to her bedroom. My grandfather said if they had threatened her, he would have had to open his hidden wall safe and give them its contents. The next morning he went across the street and asked his daughter, my mother, to drive him to the hospital and have his head wound examined. I subsequently encountered him walking down Main St. from my job at Ralph & Gaskill’s. When I asked him where he was going, he said he thought about it and thought the money in his safe would be safer in the bank. He then pulled his hand out of the pocket of the windbreaker he was wearing and had $18,000 in it.

They eventually caught the thieves and they were held in the County jail, which at the time was on the third floor of the Old Court House in downtown Salisbury. The third floor was also the home of the CountySheriff. While awaiting trial on the burglary charge, someone slipped a gun to the accused and he used it to break out of jail. During the breakout, the Sheriff, Sam Graham, and the bailiff, Albert Kelly, were killed. To my knowledge, the perpetrator, Joseph Bartholomay, is still in jail in 2009, some 40 years later.

A humorous end to the “Graham Saga” can be seen in the picture of the earrings above. The Sheriff apparently bought them out of a state catalog as a present for his wife, Dorothy, who was the Vice-Principal at Wi-Hi at the time. I’m sure he thought he had really done something to give her “state seal” earrings. I can’t imagine her wearing them and they look like new. I bought them at the auction of her estate.