In Their Lives 11-7-30: Jesse James Returns!

Tweet

This is a series paying tribute to the family member with November birthdays, as I go through each day's newspapers using the years in which they were born (1930, 1952, 1953, 1963, and 1977). Whatever I find interesting, I highlight. And hey, my dad was a whopping two days old when this happened! 11/7/30: Train Robbery! You probably thought the era of the train robberies was in the "wild west," the late 19th century. Surely by 1930, with the advent of cars and airplanes, such a thing wouldn't happen anymore! It did. And don't call me Shirley. A Southern Pacific passenger train was robbed by five men near Berkley, California. One man, according to news reports, was on the train with a gun and forced the engineer to stop the train, at which point four others, wielding machine guns, hopped on board and robbed the mail car. The robbers grabbed the registered mail (how valuable mail was sent), which included a payroll of over $50,000. The only thing I could find regarding solving the crime came nearly a year later, when a man named Charles Aiken was arrested in connection with the robbery. This was the era of the Depression, so bank robberies were common at the time....but a train robbery seems to be a throwback! Here's a great Levon Helm song about the subject of train robberies: