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Creator: Mathison, Robert, Jr.
Date Issued: [1888]
Source: Original Format: University of British Columbia. Library. Rare Books and Special Collections. R. Mathison printing collection
Permanent URL: digitalcollections.library.ubc.ca/cdm/singleitem/collecti...
The Blue Shingle
DUNES HI-WAY
FAMOUS - ORIGINAL
BARBEQUE
KUMBACK SAUCE
3 MILES WEST OF MICHIGAN CITY, IND.
COMPLETE LINE OF
WINES & LIQUORS
TOURISTS CABINS
Source Type: Matchcover
Publisher, Printer, Photographer: Unknown
Collection: Steven R. Shook
Remark: The Blue Shingle Barbeque operated near Tremont, Indiana, from 1930 to the early 1950s. The following newspaper article concerning the murder of an employee of The Blue Shingle Inn was published on May 26, 1961, in The Vidette-Messenger, Valparaiso, Porter County, Indiana [page 1, columns 1 and 2, and page 7, columns 3, 4, and 5]:
'Blue Shingle Murder' of 1931 Is All But Forgotten
By THE STROLLER
Porter County's "Blue Shingle Murder" in 1931 was called "the crime of its time," but today it is a forgotten incident.
Here is the story as revealed by an informant.
The victim was a middle aged man known as Harry Schumell, or Jerry Shumal. He was a short-order cook, waiter, and general factotum in several Porter county restaurants and taverns. [Note: The victim's name was Harry M. Schmuhl]
During the summer of 1931 he was working for James Pollard, who owned a place on Dunes' Highway called "The Blue Shingle."
On Sept. 15, during the mid-afternoon doldrums, an inconspicuous Ford card bearing an Indiana license drove up at the Inn. It contained three rather commonplace men and a young blond woman, attired in a smart, tailored pongree suit and a floppy wide brimmed straw hat.
Stop At Inn
It was too late in the season for Indiana women to be still wearing such mid-summer attire. Besides that, it was a goods and style that had been in vogue a year or so before.
Stopping at the Blue Shingle Inn, the girl surreptitiously got out and peered into the window, then returned to the car with a report of some kind. Then all four got out and went into the dining room and ordered sandwiches and coffee.
When Jerry Shumal, the lone employee in the place returned with a tray, the three men leveled pistols at him, and shot simultaneously. Then they coolly departed. Intentionally or otherwise, one of the pistols, a revolver type of .32 calibre, was left on the floor beside the victim.
The quartette -- or at least the three men -- gathered up sandwiches, stopped momentarily to pour themselves a quick cup of coffee, and piled back into the car, and returned westward munching their sandwiches as they traveled.
Finds Wounded Man
A few minutes later a random customer entered the place, and found the injured man struggling to crawl across the blood-saturated floor, toward the telephone. The stranger attempted to ask the victim a question or two, but got only a mumbled response, "Three men, three guns, three shots, Louisville, sheriff . . . ."
So the stranger called the Michigan City police station for an ambulance and officers. Then he quietly departed. For some reason he was not inclined to be questioned by officers nor interviewed by newspapermen.
The Michigan City police car and the ambulance arrived in a short time, and for the first time the other roadside stands and lunch counters learned that there had been a shooting. The victim, Jerry Shumal, died in the ambulance.
Abruptly the officers realized they were in Porter county. They called Sheriff Burney Maxwell, who came to the scene at once. Jointly the officers made an investigation. The assumed that the injured man had done the telephoning, for the blood marks on the floor showed how he had dragged himself to the phone shelf.
Get Description
It was from a nearby roadside stand that they got a description of the Ford car and its occupants, and of its hurried departure. After going over the description in detail the officers agreed that this was not a gangster killing -- for those individuals were always too well dressed, and always traveled in a Cadillac or other expensive car. This had been a more or less rustic outfit.
No one ever further identified Jerry Shumal. He left no papers, and there was nothing to indicate his family. He was buried in the charity section of the Michigan City cemetery. [Harry M. Schmuhl is buried in Greenwood Cemetery. Cemetery records indicate that he died at the age of 29 years.]
For several weeks the case attracted widespread attention. Inquiries in Chicago led to the vague information that a young woman of th officer's description had bought a ticket someplace in the south, via the Illinois Central about Sept. 16.
The car used by the murderers had been stolen in Gary and was later found abandoned in the South Shore parking lot. Evidently the three men immediately separated, for there was no trace of any three-man group hanging around Gary.
Perfect Alibi
For a time the owners of the Blue Shingle Inn was sought. But when he was finally located he had a perfect alibi. He had been in jail at Sycamore, Ind., on a bootlegging charge, from a day before the murder to some 10 days afterwards.
I don't suppose anyone at the time ever figured that he had deliberately courted arrest and had engineered his own incarceration, to make an airtight alibi -- but that is exactly what he did. He had been tipped off that his employee was going to be bumped off at a certain day and time -- and he was warned not to put the victim wise or in any way warn him of his impending death.
Maybe you wonder how I know so much. Well that's simple. I happened to be the stranger who discovered Shumal's condition and phoned the Michigan City police. It just happened that I knew Pollard and had stopped in to see him.
It was two or three years later that Pollard told me what he knew of the story. It wasn't much of a tale. This man known as Shumal was a Louisville "executioner" for a mob down there. He was doing the Barber trade, organizing them and boosting their rates, and taking a weekly rake-off. One shop operated by the brother of the 'tall man' in the trio of murderers, refused to sign up, and Shumal shot him down.
Sees Shooting
Those Kentucky families don't do much complaining to the police, but they are determined feudists. The beauty-shop operator in the back of the shop had seen Shumal enter and shoot the barber.
A cousin, an uncle, and the brother, accompanied by the girl, came to Porter county to 'get' Shumal -- whose name by the way, had been Senigall. He worked in Valparaiso and Michigan City for perhaps five years.
From what I can gather this search had been going on all this time.
On Nov. 18 The Vidette-Messenger printed this final report on the case: "County officials have received word back from the factory the gun and the three shells found on the floor of the Blue Shingle Inn at the time of the Shumal killing. The factory experts say positively that three different weapons were used."
Just why one pistol was left on the floor beside the victim is a matter of mystery, continued the informant. But to me the answer is simple: That gun was probably the one the "executioner" had used to kill the Louisville barber.
Well, that's the story. It may or may not be the correct one. But it's the best one of the several that were attached to the killing -- the story of the Blue Shingle Murder.
[Note: "The Stroller," author of this newspaper column, was William O. Wallace. William was born November 13, 1888, in Kentucky, and died October 17, 1962. He and his wife, Eugenia, died of carbon monoxide poisoning in their garage in Liberty Township, Porter County, Indiana; both are buried in Rosehill Cemetery in Chicago. William was a printer, teacher, and columnist, writing over 700 columns concerning Porter County history for The Vidette-Messenger. It is known that many of the columns that Mr. Wallace wrote contained embellished "facts," as well as outright speculation. The accuracy of the column transcribed above is unknown.]
Copyright 2014. Some rights reserved. The associated text may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of Steven R. Shook.
Taken on June 11, 2012 at Chip 'n Dale Critter Breakfast at the Storytellers Cafe at Disney's Grand Californian (Disneyland Resort, Anaheim, CA)
Such history with old postcards. We recently drove to the Berkshires and the Mohawk Trail definitely didn't look like this. And when you go to Cape Cod you wish traffic looked like it does in the bottom photo. I also love the messages. One is from my grandfather (an avid fisherman) to my uncle asking him to dig up worms in back of the lettuce plants and bring them up to New Hampshire when he came on the weekend (there was no phone up there for many years). And I'm surprised that my mother was friendly with my aunt so many years when I read the message that my mom's cooking still gave her belly-aches. And how about finding a place that doesn't charge the exorbitant fee of 12 cents for coffee?
Created in the mid-twelfth century in Germany, this manuscript contains the much earlier writings of the Irish scholar Sedulius Scotus. Writing in the mid-ninth century at St. Lambert in Liege, Scotus famously penned this treatise on the duties and ideals of the Christian king or prince, and it is the earliest version of a genre that would become popular in the later medieval and Renaissance periods, often known as "Mirrors for Princes." This manuscript is the second oldest copy of Scotus' treatise known, the earliest being the ninth century Bremen Stadtbibliothek C. 36. The text is virtually complete, missing only its first and last folios, and is written in a clear Romanesque Caroline script. The nine inhabited initials, which include dragons and cranes, as well as the seven foliate initials have been left unfinished.
To explore fully digitized manuscripts with a virtual page-turning application, please visit Walters Ex Libris.
The trips of the sun Re through the sky.These daily travels from west to east and from east to west are made aboard a boat upon which the sun embark.
This entry is from January 1989, when I was 11 years old and in the sixth grade.
I discuss not wanting to return to school after Christmas vacation, recent movies I'd seen (Scrooged and Willow), our New Year's Eve activities, and my brother's bad behavior, LOL.
The interior page is from my pink Hallmark diary, seen here.
Calligraphy practise this morning involved writing out the names of 30 people who RT'd a Twitter message first. The result is a mix of English Roundhand, Fraktur, Textura, sharpened italic and various display lettering styles. I did all these a bit too quickly but it was fun and I'll do it again. Sorry if I missed anyone out, Twitter doesn't keep tweets chronologically so it was hard to establish precisely who the first 30 were.
WHY write
a letter
when --
POST CARDS
say it
better
Date: Circa 1930
Source Type: Postcard
Publisher, Printer, Photographer: Curt Teich
Postmark: None
Collection: Steven R. Shook
Copyright 2015. Some rights reserved. The associated text may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of Steven R. Shook.