Confessions of a Second Story Man

by Allen M. Hornblum

  The postwar period, however, disclosed the stark human and manufacturing trends that would ultimately drive Kensington into a long, steady social and economic decline. Returning veterans took advantage of the G.I. Bill and began to recognize possibilities beyond Kensington’s borders; new housing developments like Levittown offered an affordable suburban lifestyle; more and more industrialists moved their businesses south to avoid aggressive trade unions and high wages; and minorities began to encroach on the once exclusively white neighborhood. Once again, Kensington was under siege, but the majority of residents struggled on as they always had. Tough, stoical, and fiercely independent, most Kensingtonians seemed oblivious to the prevalence of alcoholism, the astronomical high school dropout rate, the foul factory odors and soot-belching smokestacks, the endless noise from train yards and manufacturing plants, and the limitations of their tiny, postage-stamp row houses.

  As Paul Melione, a 78-year-old barber and life-long resident fondly recalls, “Kensington in the 1950s was a nice place to live and raise a family. You could walk down the street with your wife and kids and shop on the avenue in comfort. It was a great place to live.”

  “GOOD, CLEAN, HARD WORKING PEOPLE LIVED HERE,” says Paul Green. “They were church-going people, mostly Irish. It was one of the best neighborhoods in the city.” Green, now in his late eighties, has been a witness to Kensington’s variable fortunes for most of the twentieth century. As proprietor of Economy Shoes on Kensington Avenue just below Allegheny, he has observed the area’s highs and lows from the storefront window of a family business that first opened its doors in 1915. “Friday nights were really something back then,” says Green. “It was family night and everybody was on the avenue. And they were all shopping. It was wonderful.”

  The shopping under the noisy El line was so good that it was not uncommon to find residents who had never ventured into center city Philadelphia, two miles away. The neighborhood was self-contained and relatively safe; for many working-class families, it had everything you could ever want. “It was a great place to grow up,” recalls Bob McClernand. “Nobody had a lot of money, but we managed to get by. It was a close neighborhood; everyone knew each other.”

  “You never had any problems there,” says Gil Slowe. “You could leave your keys in the car and it would still be there when you got back. Folks washed their front steps and took pride in everything they did.”

  “It was a very good neighborhood,” adds John Kellis. “Even late at night hundreds of people would walk the streets. The avenue was busy; people were shopping.” In other words, there was no need to leave the area, no need for the Bradys, O’Donnells, and Gallaghers to travel to the large department stores downtown like Gimbel’s, Lit Brothers, and John Wanamaker’s, or the fancy Chestnut and Walnut Street shops like Jacob Reed, Bonwit Teller, and Nan Duskin.

  The businesses on Kensington and Allegheny Avenues—“K&A” to most Philadelphians—were the axis of Kensington’s commercial district. Jack Bell’s, Al’s Toggery, DiNelli’s, Mike the Tailor, Flagg Brothers, Thom McAn’s, and Father & Son were just a few of the men’s haberdasheries and shoe stores on the avenue. Six-foot-six, 300-pound “Uncle Miltie” Fields ran a popular sporting goods store that always offered a good deal on Chuck Taylor canvas sneakers. The Levin and Rosenthal families sold home furniture. Moe’s Meats was said to have the best cuts of beef east of Broad Street. Morris Auto Parts, a shop for serious car enthusiasts, sold a surprisingly large number of sturdy, arm-length screwdrivers nicknamed “brutes” that some in the neighborhood found indispensable in their unusual line of work. Woolworth’s and Kresge’s 5&10s attracted neighborhood children, and the entire family enjoyed outings to the Midway, Lafayette, and Iris movie theaters (the Iris always offered military servicemen free admission). Restaurants such as White Castle, Horn & Hardart’s, and the Majestic Diner, drug stores such as Samit and Sun Ray, Lee’s photo store, Shalo’s baby shop, a couple of Army/Navy stores, the Acme food market, and a host of other businesses were also present on the avenue and heavily patronized.

  In short, for most Kensingtonians the neighborhood offered everything you could ever want—especially jobs. “If you had just lost your job, you could walk from factory to factory and get another job the same day,” recalls Paul Melione. “The place was loaded with jobs; factories were making rugs, lace, clothing. Everything was being made here. The plants were everywhere.” Philco, for example, which manufactured televisions, radios, refrigerators, and many other home appliances, was located just a few blocks from K&A and employed more than 18,000 workers in a complex of nine large factory plants.

  But some men in the neighborhood were not enamored with an assembly-line job’s long hours, monotony, and 60 bucks a week with periodic layoffs; some men longed for more and were willing to cut corners to get what they wanted. “They lasted a month,” recalls Gene Pedicord. “They couldn’t take the regimentation.” “They didn’t want to work,” says another observer. “They didn’t want to work at all. They just wanted to hang on the corner day and night,” and still “have the girls, cars, and clothes.”

  As Jimmy Moran neatly puts it: “You go in a bar after a long day at work and see a couple good-lookin’ chicks sittin’ together and you think about buyin’ them a drink, but all you got is a dollar and change in your pocket. Next thing you know, a guy from the neighborhood, a guy who ain’t done an honest day’s work in months, pulls up in a Cadillac, walks in with an expensive suit on, drops a hundred-dollar bill on the bar, and buys the girls a few drinks. Right off the bat, the game’s over. It wasn’t too hard to figure out. If you wanted the cash, the clothes, the cars, and the girls, you had to do something other than bust your hump on a lousy assembly line in a dirty, stinking factory. You had to become a burglar.”

  And for most, once you had become a successful second story man, there was no turning back. For row house Kensington boys who grew up in the shadow of smelly rug and textile mills and watched their fathers struggle all their lives in low-paying factory jobs, thievery—and the good life it brought—was tough to give up. Even when pressured by family members to get out and clean themselves up, the lifestyle and perquisites were just too appealing. Many found themselves, like Georgie Smith, having to forcefully educate loved ones about the facts of life.

  “I told my wife to get in the car,” says Smith of the unique and poignant excursion. “I said, ‘We’re going for a ride.’ She wanted to know where we were going, but I told her we’re just goin’ out for a ride. I kept quiet after that. For the whole journey, I kept my mouth shut.

  “She had been bothering me about it for a long time. Over and over again, she’d be pestering me to stop doin’ what I was doin’. ‘Why do you have to break the law? Why do you have to break into houses? Why do you have to live the life you do? Why can’t we live like other people?’

  “Well, I get her in the car and we drive into the city and I’m still not saying a word. She doesn’t know what’s up, but she soon calms down, bites her lip, and just looks out the window at the scenery. After a while I get to Kensington and start driving real slow. I just take it real easy going up one street and down the other. The streets are dirty and filled with trash and garbage. Kids, dirty and unkempt, are yelling and screaming. There’s shabbily dressed people with vacant, beat expressions on their faces sitting on their front steps looking at us, and the houses are tiny matchboxes with no character, no nothing.

  “This goes on for some time; I’m in no hurry. Just one street after another, and I’m not saying a word. Neither of us is. I drive her under the Frankford El, pull by some of the factories like Craftex, Robert Bruce, and Philco, and take her on a good number of streets the average nine-to-five, lunchpail-carrying factory worker calls home.

  “I just got fed up with all the nagging one day and took her for a ride. We lived in a nice community in the suburbs, my kids went to a good suburban school, and we had nice, established neighbors who kept their homes immaculate. But she was on me al
l the time to give up what I was doing and stop associating with the guys I was hanging with.

  Finally, after nearly two hours, my wife says she’s seen enough, we can go home. For a good, long time after that, she didn’t bring up what I did for a living. I didn’t even have to say a word that day, but she got the message all right.”

  4. Production Work

  We were doin’ a big house up in Chestnut Hill one night. You know, one of those big, old, three story stone mansions set off from the road with lots of rooms and the best of everything inside. It’s the usual Effie crew: me, Jack, Vince, and Effie. Well, we’re tearing the place apart looking for anything of value—jewelry, furs, coins, you know, whatever we can find. We had gone through the place pretty thoroughly and know it’s time to get out. We had been there a while. Effie, however, is acting strange. Something is bothering him. He ain’t ready to leave, which is unusual ’cause he was always very cautious and professional. It’s one of the reasons everybody wanted to work with him. He knew the business as well as anybody and made a lot of money. And better yet, he rarely got caught.

  Me and Jackie are ready to go and have Vince pick us up in the car, but Effie’s walking through the halls and into different rooms saying, “There’s more money here. Something ain’t right. I know there’s more money in this house.”

  I told him we had gone through every room and torn the place up pretty good, but he keeps saying, “There’s something here. I know there’s more money here.”

  Me and Jack are holding a bunch of furs and pillowcases filled with an assortment of stuff and looking at each other like, what’s with Effie?

  Then Effie begins to storm through the house, lightly tapping on the walls and floors of the joint with one of those big 9714 screwdrivers that we used to break open front doors. He has a real intense look on his face and is completely disregarding our warnings that we better get the hell out of the place. You can hear him tapping all through the house like a crazy man, and then he suddenly calls out from one of the third floor bedrooms, “Yo, Jim, c’mon up here. I want you to hear something.”

  I go up to the room and Effie is still tapping away, but now he’s in this huge closet. It’s one we had already checked for a safe, and finding none decided to take a few furs and cashmere coats. “Listen to this,” he says. He begins tapping the wall again, about every four inches apart for the entire length of the closet. “You hear that?” he says, as he travels the length of the wall once again.

  Effie had discovered a hollow spot in the wall. He then starts digging at it with the screwdriver, right through the fancy wallpaper and the inch-thick wall itself. In less than a minute he broke through and into a hidden compartment that contained neatly packed bundles of wrapped money and a bunch of other things. Really ancient stuff—dusty newspapers and documents, old maps—but we grab it all.

  It’s not until we look at it later and take it to a fence that we learn the money was printed in the 1890s or earlier and had probably been hidden away in that house for 60 or 70 years. We figured the people currently living in the place didn’t even know there was a secret compartment in the master bedroom. The money had just been sitting there undisturbed all that time. Undisturbed until Effie got there, that is. Five minutes in that place and he knew the house better than the real owners did. I’m telling you, Effie was incredible. He had a sixth sense about money and houses. There was nobody like him.—JIMMY DOLAN

  JIMMY DOLAN’S ACCOUNT of Effie Burke’s extraordinary gift is no exaggeration. Effie’s individual exploits and overall career accomplishments are legendary among the old Kensington burglars.

  Although one of the most respected, widely traveled, and industrious members of the K&A Gang—his career stretched over three decades—he was not the first and certainly not the most famous of the K&A burglars. John Berkery, Junior Kripplebauer, and at least a half-dozen other burglars had greater public name recognition. In fact, Effie Burke, certainly assisted by the more restrained media standards of the day, had a relatively low-profile career. At loose ends and struggling financially on his return from military service after World War II, Effie Burke required the help and “professional guidance” of a fellow Kensingtonian, a tough, wily street kid who was destined to place his personal stamp on the art of burglary and ultimately become Philadelphia’s “Public Enemy No. 1.”

  William “Willie” Sears was the youngest of John and Elizabeth Sears’s six children. The family lived in Kensington, and the kids went to the Horn Public School, but most of Willie’s classmates (friends called him Billy) would probably have a difficult time recalling the chubby, good-looking youngster. Apparently, Willie developed a distaste for school at an early age and rarely attended. Truancy became an even greater problem after his quarrelling parents eventually separated. In a last-ditch attempt to corral his wayward spirit, Willie was sent to the Shallcross School, an institution for “predelinquents” in the city’s far Northeast. Unfortunately, his criminal proclivities may have already been well established. At the tender age of 12, he was arrested for shooting out factory windows and automobile windshields with a BB rifle, and it soon became clear that this relatively minor infraction would not be an isolated incident.

  At Shallcross, Willie was labeled “mentally normal” but “practically illiterate.” Despite his intellectual shortcomings—it was said that in ninth grade he was still unable to tell time—Willie Sears was “the most popular boy at the school.” Even the teachers and administrators were fond of him. “Billy was a good kid, a leader, a youngster of fine character,” says Sam Glassar, a Shallcross supervisor.

  Like many Kensington kids, Willie Sears was good with his hands and not easily intimidated. He won the lightweight boxing title at the school and became a standout on the baseball team. Though he had a tendency to “tease” and “needle” kids, including those older and bigger than him, Sam Glassar believes that Willie would have given any of them “the shirt off his back” if they were in need.

  A natural leader, Willie could direct his followers down some troubling paths. For example, he learned how to break out of the institution and on one occasion took three fellow inmates with him. The other three youths returned to their own homes after a day on the town, an option Willie couldn’t or wouldn’t take. When he returned to the school the next morning alone, Glassar asked why he came back. “What could I do? Where could I go?” the boy stoically replied. “I came back to take my punishment.” Willie’s unexpected return confirmed Glassar’s suspicion that the boy “used to misbehave deliberately so he would lose his weekend-at-home privileges.”

  Since the boy was unwilling or unable to adjust to the public school system and technically unable to continue at Shallcross now that auto theft was on his record, a judge decided that Willie and the community would be better served if he went to the State Industrial School at Camp Hill, better known to its unsociable clientele as White Hill. Willie was now learning the ropes from some of the most troubled and violent juveniles in Pennsylvania and on a well-worn path to becoming a career criminal. At White Hill, he honed his boxing skills, added to his criminal repertoire, and formed friendships that would be useful in illegal enterprises yet to come.

  Throughout the 1940s Willie was arrested fairly regularly for everything from vagrancy and disorderly conduct to burglary and car theft, but except for a year in a Georgia State Penitentiary, he more often than not beat the case or did relatively little time. It was a lucky pattern he maintained for a good part of his career, but one that aroused some suspicion in less fortunate colleagues.

  Willie Sears was not the only Kensington teenager in the forties and early fifties to reject a conventional lifestyle and employment at Craftex Mills, Stetson, or Philco for the allure of the streets and the prospect of “easy money.” Neil Ward, Bernard McGinley, Harry and Roy Stocker, Charlie McCullough, Maurice McAdams, Raymond Chalmers, Richie Blaney, Herman Cable, and other neighborhood youths were busy building their criminal resumes at the same time.r />
  Ward and McGinley, for example, had perfected a lucrative car theft business. They’d spot unlocked cars on the street or in parking lots and steal the identifying papers from the glove compartments. After requesting and receiving duplicate titles to the vehicles, they’d go back, steal the cars, and then sell them somewhere out-of-state. The enterprise was fairly successful, though occasional business costs could make for a jarring setback. In 1948 Ward and McGinley were found guilty of stealing 20 late-model cars and selling them in nine different states. A federal judge rewarded them with a three-year prison sentence.

  The Stocker boys focused on stolen checks and money orders. They, too, did well, but pinches could be painful and well publicized. One scheme, for instance, got them charged with stealing $164,000 worth of money orders from the home of an American Express agent. Charlie McCullough, on the other hand, took to carrying a gun, a rare and risky practice that most Kensington men rejected. A 1938 armed robbery that went bad proved why. Charlie was found guilty and given a hefty 30-to 90-year prison sentence.

  Though not book-smart in the conventional sense, Willie Sears was no slouch when it came to recognizing an attractive business opportunity or weighing the fallout from a scheme that went bust. He also took note of guys like himself, other up-and-coming Philadelphia hoodlums, and how they were managing. He studied their criminal inclinations, totaled their successful scores, and then divided by how often they were arrested and how much prison time they did. His rough calculations, considering such factors as opportunity to work, energy expended, monetary return, and the risk of getting caught, showed burglary to be the optimum choice. Criminal penalties for burglary were relatively light; most convicted burglars were getting sentences of 11 and a half to 23 months. And it would be county time—not “the House” (Eastern State Penitentiary) or one of the other tough, ball-breaking institutions in the state prison system.