It seems to me that you can know a ton about this story just by knowing the guy that robbed the Sioux Center bank in October, 1929, was driving a Graham-Page, a automobile that was not exactly rare, but scarce enough to draw a crowd when it was parked right there on Main.
If you're going to rob a bank in 1929, in a burg like Orange City or Sioux Center, it's not a good idea to leave your escape wagon, a brand new Graham-Page, a block down. Seems to me that there lies the tale.
What was the guy thinking? The plain truth is he wasn't thinking, not at all, didn't use his head. He parked that buggy down the street, walked into the bank, pulled a gun, emptied a cash drawer, walked out, and got back in his Graham-Page. Couldn't have taken all that long, but the car drew a crowd of people, who put two-and-two together once the news of the heist got told. "Must have been that guy in the Graham-Page," people said.
They even knew his name because some nosy guy climbed inside where they spotted something akin to a registration--"Rex Something or Other, LeMars, Iowa."
I'm not making this up.
Rex pulled off this heist in a fever. He didn't think. He had to have a bundle of cash, and he had to have it now. Hefty gambling debts probably, although to this day no one knows for sure. Anyway, he climbed into his fancy car and took off south to LeMars, to his wife's house, which may not have been a good idea because he hadn't been living with her for quite some time, once again for reasons no one really knows, which doesn't mean people didn't speculate because he kept a place in Sioux City, where he also ran a radio station.
Now some of those Sioux Centerites who'd read his registration got on their high horse, so to speak, and went to the address they'd seen. "Vigilantes," the local paper called 'em, a bunch of hot-head Hollanders looking to snare the sinner. Credit them this--they went to the law, the local Sheriff, and let him know what had happened.
There's some back story here that has to be examined. This Rex was, locally, a celebrity, a war vet, a football star, a comely champion man-about-town with a radio voice, even a sometimes preacher of the Word--a Richard Cory type. Let me quote the old poem
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
People loved Rex, loved his walk, loved his talk, loved his wake. He could walk downtown and part a crowd like Moses at the Red Sea. They didn't want their star robbing banks. Maybe that's why the sheriff lolly-gagged when the Sioux Center crowd demanded him arrested. Maybe that's why Sioux Center gets the bad rap in the local paper, when outlaw gets nothing but tears. You can read it for yourself.
Anyway, Rex took that Graham-Page out west of town to a farm his wife owned, where he grabbed that roll of bills, gave it to his tenant, and told him he was going into the barn to end it all, which he did, right then and there, those Sioux Center vigilantes rolling up just then, close enough to hear the shot that killed him.
Broke LeMars' heart because Rex wasn't a bad man, just down on his luck, you might say. Way down. Unmercifully down. If he was really a crook, a bad man, he wouldn't have pulled that heist in a Graham-Page parked right there on the street. He was crazy, is what he was.
All this happened ninety years ago, but it's still hard to talk about, and I'm still not telling you the man's last name. He has family after all.
But let me say this. Rex and his estranged wife had adopted two kids from a broken, boozy home, a home that wasn't a home. Those two kids, both deceased now, turned out just fine even though their birth parents were irresponsible and their adoptive father robbed banks and did himself in once it was clear to him what he'd gone and so thoughtlessly done.
Many years later, Rex's adopted son, after a forty years of teaching school in a number of places in Siouxland, used to tell people, "I could not have had a more wonderful life."
Isn't that something? It's just the way you want your bad stories to end, don't you think? "I could not have had a more wonderful life." How many of us can say that?
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