WORTHINGTON -- One reason reading news is better than listening to news is, if you miss a detail, if something puzzles you, you can look back on a printed news account. When you are listening to news, if you miss a detail -- well, you miss it. There is no going back.
One of those TV people was talking about China and dungeons. I can't tell you much about this. I missed the first of it. Something about Chinese keeping people in dungeons. You know how those Chinese are.
This brought to mind a long, long ago peek into Nobles County's dungeon.
The red brick Nobles County jail at the corner of Third Avenue and Ninth Street was a two-story building that included the county sheriff's residence. There was a third-story attic. I remember standing at the top of that attic stairway and looking around. There was little to see. I think there was one window, on the west. Rough, unfinished boards for a floor. Red brick walls. Thick dust.
The most interesting thing was a brick wall that spanned the middle of the attic, roof to floor. At the center of that wall was a plate iron (or iron plate) door with a rusty, antique lock. There was no way of getting the door open. This had been attempted.
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Quite a long time after I first saw the jail attic, Harold Tripp, deputy sheriff, was going through a wooden box of curious things. I believe he found the box in the basement. There was a large, corroded key. This set Harold to wondering.
He saturated the attic lock with rust remover and he worked on the key, shining and polishing. A month may have passed. Harold climbed the old stairs one morning and pressed the key into the lock. The key turned. The lock clicked. The door swung open. Sheriff Harry Nackerud beamed a flashlight into the black.
The floor was stone. There was a heap of stone and brick from an abandoned chimney. "People better be on their best behavior," Harry chuckled. "Now we've got a place for them." A coal black dungeon under the rafters, freezing in the winter, stifling in the summer.
Was this ever used? Did Nobles County actually keep prisoners there? The only furnishings found in that dark place were a mattress and a chamber pot.
There would be no escaping the dungeon. That aside, Nobles County had an uneven record for keeping prisoners locked up. There was a jail break in January 1930, which brought (I believe) the last gun battle in downtown Worthington.
Two men escaped the jail that cold Sunday morning. Each went separate ways. Nothing was seen of them again until the next Friday. Patrolman A.W. Hawkinson, on night watch, shined his flashlight through a front window of Smith's secondhand store, a pioneer frame building that stood beside the alley on part of the space now occupied by Bank of the West.
To Officer Hawkinson's great surprise, his light was shining full on the face of Ira Moore, convicted chicken thief and Sunday jail escapee. Moore was routed from behind a washing machine and placed in locks "only a Houdini could get away from."
This was the second time Moore had been spotted. At 6 o'clock that morning, Officer Albert Levine came on Moore as he was climbing from a car behind the Hotel Thompson with a rifle in one hand.
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Moore began running along the alley toward Fourth Avenue with Levine in pursuit. At Fourth Avenue Moore turned, ran to 10th Street, and then began darting across the courthouse lawn toward Third Avenue. Moore was faster than Levine. He was winning the foot race.
The officer pulled out his pistol and aimed two shots above the fugitive's head. Levine fired a third time, directly at the man, but the bullet missed. Moore disappeared in the darkness.
There was excitement. Sheriff Elden Rowe was out of his bed in the jail, standing in the doorway. Workers looked out from the Third Avenue bakery. Guests in the Hotel Thompson were roused.
Nobles County officers surely did not want Ira Moore to flee another time. There is reason to wonder: Do you think they locked him in the dungeon?
Ray Crippen is a former editor of the Daily Globe. His column appears on Saturdays.
