photo by Jane Bell Goldstein
Wail of Sirens
by Margaret Liddell
For the superstitious, Friday the 13th is a day burdened with bad luck, but not for me. I don’t expect anything tomorrow other than an ordinary day at school and a football game in the evening. Graduation next June means this might be my last time to go to a CHS football game. Friday night at 8:00, the Chillicothe Cavaliers play their final game of the season against the Zanesville Blue Devils. The Channel 10 weatherman says a cold spell, blasting in from the Rocky Mountains, is coming on Saturday and the weather should be fine on Friday at game time.
Thursday after school, phone calls rush back and forth. Each of us tells the others what we’re planning to wear. I’m wearing my wool skirt, twin sweaters, saddle shoes and red leather jacket. I’m looking forward to Friday night, when I’ll crowd into Rose’s Chevy with Rae, Ila and Jodie for the one and a half mile ride to Herrnstein Field. When we attend football games, my friends and I usually stand along the fence at the far end of the field to watch the action. For some unknown reason, most of us colored kids don’t sit in the stands. We choose to gather at the fence instead. After the game, we go to the Carver Center where Negro teens congregate for the dance.
By the time I wake up on Friday morning, November 13, 1959, gossip about a fire and a shooting on Mechanic Street infiltrates each house and smothers the South End.
“Mack Ward shot Lee Campbell,” Mom tells my brother and me while we sit eating oatmeal. “Killed him on Friday the 13th, bad luck for both of ‘em.”
My mother can sometimes be very superstitious. She believes in spirits, too. We never open an umbrella in the house, and one night after we chased a bat around the piano room with a broom, Mom said we were doomed to have bad luck. Every now and then, Mom swears, especially if she’s been drinking, that she sees haints roaming around.
Flabbergasted and baffled, I stare out the window thinking about Mack shooting Lee. Do friends kill each other? I don’t understand. Folks may get drunk, argue, pull a knife, die in a car accident, but I don’t know anyone who has been shot by a friend. Why did he shoot him? I can’t comprehend the incident and I can’t imagine Mack killing Lee.
I know Mack and his sister, Jolene. Whenever either one of them turns to go up the alley, they always stop to say hi and chat for a minute or two. Mack’s pointy-toed shoes are the first things I notice when he saunters by. He always walks with his shoulders hunched over. Some of the girls think he has movie star looks; he has a thin frame like Montgomery Cliff and the smooth, fine looks of Johnny Mathis. Mack didn’t go to CHS with us. He went to the other high school in town, Catholic Central.
Friday morning at school, a group of kids are standing around buzzing about the events of the early morning hours on Mechanic Street. Before the homeroom bell rings, from the outer edge of the crowd, I strain to hear every word. South End guys are doing all the talking.
A male voice from the group boasts, “I heard fire engines about 2:00 in the morning, got out of bed and went out to see what was going on. There was a fire in a backyard shed on Mechanic Street where old man Clapper was living. Emergency Squad took him to the hospital with burns all over his body.”
Earl breaks in, “I didn’t hear the fire engines at 2:00, but around 4:30 I heard sirens. Everybody in my house heard ‘em. I looked out the window. There was cop cars blocking Mechanic Street. Put my clothes on real quick and went outside.”
I’ve lived in the South End long enough to see for myself how the sound of sirens lures people out of their houses, tempts them, seduces, entices them. The sirens’ wail is hard to resist. No matter what time, someone will come out to see what’s going on. Sharp ears know that the sirens’ song means danger.
Outside in the darkness in front of the Wards’ house on Mechanic Street, folks wait around like vultures ready to chew on any morsel of news they see or hear. They stand with coats covering chenille robes, flannel nightgowns, even wrinkled clothes thrown over a chair before going to bed. They’ll grab anything nearby to run outside in a hurry to witness what they hope will be an exciting event.
Tom quips, “Yeah, I saw Miss Lily Mae out there with them pink rollers all over her head. You know she lives close to the Wards’ house. She was saying, ‘Mack shot Lee with a shotgun’.”
Everyone’s talking at once. I don’t know who, but someone says that old man Quincy was out there in the crowd. He was standing in the November chill of Friday the 13th, smoking a cigarette, waving his hand with authority, “I saw them Emergency Squad guys wheel Lee’s body on a stretcher from the backyard. He was all zipped up in a black bag. I heard he was climbing out a window when he got shot.”
An hour before daybreak, two more Emergency Squads arrive. Ward’s sister, hysterical with grief, collapses and she and Lee’s mother, who is overwhelmed with intense pain and heartache, ride with the blaring and whirring of sirens to Chillicothe Hospital.
Saturday afternoon, the events of Friday morning appear on the front page of the Chillicothe Gazette: “Fire on Mechanic Street and Shooting in South End Alley”
According to the article, at 2:00 a.m. Friday morning, neighbors smelled smoke and saw flames rising from an old decrepit shed in a Mechanic Street backyard. Fire truck sirens blasted along West Seventh Street alerting folks that there’s an emergency. Two hours after the fire commotion, a second call from the South End was made to police at 4:10 a.m. A man identifying himself as Mack Ward told police with a quivering voice, “I shot a man! Send the Emergency Squad.”
Police found Ward, 18, on his knees sobbing, slumped in a heap of regret near the man he shot. As Lee vaulted a wire fence, a twelve gauge, modified choke-shotgun blasted a hole in his neck from a distance of about 20 feet. Later that morning, a passerby found Lee’s teeth on the ground scattered among tufts of grass and small rocks.
Arrested Friday morning, Mack Ward was held in the City Jail on Main Street for questioning. By 10:00 a.m., the Police Chief and Prosecutor had filed second-degree murder charges against Ward. As the day crawled on, officials tried to learn the circumstances surrounding the pre-dawn shooting. At mid-morning, the Chief reported, “Apparently, the shooting was a result of some kind of argument. The facts are not clear.”
Saturday’s obituary announces that friends could call at the funeral home after 4:00 p.m. on Sunday. The service will be held on Monday the 16th of November at 2:00 p.m.
The sweet fragrance of white carnations, mixed with the chemical odor of embalming fluid, greets visitors clad in grays and blacks. Friends, church folk, neighbors, and those who never miss a funeral come to express their support and deepest of sympathies. The scent of death hovers over funeral-goers as they stop to sign the guest book and find seats at Heiby Memorial Home. Family members, the last to take their places in the front rows, hold tightly onto handkerchiefs to wipe away a cascade of tears.
Two ministers officiate. Outside on Paint Street, the rear door of a black Cadillac hearse waits for pallbearers to slide the coffin in for its last journey. It carries a young man, shot to death on Friday the 13th, to Greenlawn Cemetery in the East End. After the final rose is thrown, and the mourners leave, a lifetime squeezed into a few words beginning with “Lee Jefferson Sampson, born in 1938, died in 1959” will be etched on his tombstone.
Rumors surrounding the tragedy float on a bitter cold wind blowing in from the west. South Enders persist with their palaver.
“Mack was at the fire, so he probably wasn’t asleep by 4:00.”
“I bet all his family was up for that fire.”
“Clapper got burned on his hands and face. What was he doing living in that shed anyway?”
“He got burned trying to get his junk out.”
“Did you know Lee was married? They got a little kid.”
“What about his wife? Did she know what he was doing?”
“Humph, don’t know.”
“How long he been seeing Jolene?”
“Don’t know that neither, but her parents didn’t like it one bit. They told him to stay away from her.”
“Folks saying that Mack heard Lee in the house. They argued, then went out back.”
“Well, just when did he grab a dang shotgun? Why he’d do something like that?”
“If you ask me, Mack wasn’t the one who shot Lee.”
“What’d you mean? Then who shot him?”
“Mack’s daddy did it. That’s what everybody’s saying.”
While Mack sits confined in the Ross County Jail, idle chatterers claim that a select group of Catholics who have clout at city hall took his case to the Chief of Police, the Prosecutor and the Judge.
“He’s a good, decent young fellow. Comes to church. It’d be a waste for him to go to prison.”
Officials decide that Mack needs to get away from Chillicothe for a while. He needs to heal the images that roar in his head and claw at his mind.
The judge leans forward looking at Mack’s lean body and downcast eyes. “Young man, only the Good Lord up above can heal the sins that suffocate your heart.” He orders Mack to make a choice, prison or the Army.
I never saw Mack again after he went to jail and then the Air Force. When I knew him, he seemed like a normal teenager who had a bright, easy smile. But whoever grabbed the gun and aimed and pulled the trigger that night, shattered his psyche, cracked his life. Or maybe drugs and alcohol shut out that bad luck night and Mack’s memories of it. Daddy Ward died in the 1960s and William Mack Ward was buried in 2007, so we’ll never know who really killed Lee, but now it doesn’t matter.
As Oscar Wilde said, “History is merely gossip.”
Thursday after school, phone calls rush back and forth. Each of us tells the others what we’re planning to wear. I’m wearing my wool skirt, twin sweaters, saddle shoes and red leather jacket. I’m looking forward to Friday night, when I’ll crowd into Rose’s Chevy with Rae, Ila and Jodie for the one and a half mile ride to Herrnstein Field. When we attend football games, my friends and I usually stand along the fence at the far end of the field to watch the action. For some unknown reason, most of us colored kids don’t sit in the stands. We choose to gather at the fence instead. After the game, we go to the Carver Center where Negro teens congregate for the dance.
By the time I wake up on Friday morning, November 13, 1959, gossip about a fire and a shooting on Mechanic Street infiltrates each house and smothers the South End.
“Mack Ward shot Lee Campbell,” Mom tells my brother and me while we sit eating oatmeal. “Killed him on Friday the 13th, bad luck for both of ‘em.”
My mother can sometimes be very superstitious. She believes in spirits, too. We never open an umbrella in the house, and one night after we chased a bat around the piano room with a broom, Mom said we were doomed to have bad luck. Every now and then, Mom swears, especially if she’s been drinking, that she sees haints roaming around.
Flabbergasted and baffled, I stare out the window thinking about Mack shooting Lee. Do friends kill each other? I don’t understand. Folks may get drunk, argue, pull a knife, die in a car accident, but I don’t know anyone who has been shot by a friend. Why did he shoot him? I can’t comprehend the incident and I can’t imagine Mack killing Lee.
I know Mack and his sister, Jolene. Whenever either one of them turns to go up the alley, they always stop to say hi and chat for a minute or two. Mack’s pointy-toed shoes are the first things I notice when he saunters by. He always walks with his shoulders hunched over. Some of the girls think he has movie star looks; he has a thin frame like Montgomery Cliff and the smooth, fine looks of Johnny Mathis. Mack didn’t go to CHS with us. He went to the other high school in town, Catholic Central.
Friday morning at school, a group of kids are standing around buzzing about the events of the early morning hours on Mechanic Street. Before the homeroom bell rings, from the outer edge of the crowd, I strain to hear every word. South End guys are doing all the talking.
A male voice from the group boasts, “I heard fire engines about 2:00 in the morning, got out of bed and went out to see what was going on. There was a fire in a backyard shed on Mechanic Street where old man Clapper was living. Emergency Squad took him to the hospital with burns all over his body.”
Earl breaks in, “I didn’t hear the fire engines at 2:00, but around 4:30 I heard sirens. Everybody in my house heard ‘em. I looked out the window. There was cop cars blocking Mechanic Street. Put my clothes on real quick and went outside.”
I’ve lived in the South End long enough to see for myself how the sound of sirens lures people out of their houses, tempts them, seduces, entices them. The sirens’ wail is hard to resist. No matter what time, someone will come out to see what’s going on. Sharp ears know that the sirens’ song means danger.
Outside in the darkness in front of the Wards’ house on Mechanic Street, folks wait around like vultures ready to chew on any morsel of news they see or hear. They stand with coats covering chenille robes, flannel nightgowns, even wrinkled clothes thrown over a chair before going to bed. They’ll grab anything nearby to run outside in a hurry to witness what they hope will be an exciting event.
Tom quips, “Yeah, I saw Miss Lily Mae out there with them pink rollers all over her head. You know she lives close to the Wards’ house. She was saying, ‘Mack shot Lee with a shotgun’.”
Everyone’s talking at once. I don’t know who, but someone says that old man Quincy was out there in the crowd. He was standing in the November chill of Friday the 13th, smoking a cigarette, waving his hand with authority, “I saw them Emergency Squad guys wheel Lee’s body on a stretcher from the backyard. He was all zipped up in a black bag. I heard he was climbing out a window when he got shot.”
An hour before daybreak, two more Emergency Squads arrive. Ward’s sister, hysterical with grief, collapses and she and Lee’s mother, who is overwhelmed with intense pain and heartache, ride with the blaring and whirring of sirens to Chillicothe Hospital.
Saturday afternoon, the events of Friday morning appear on the front page of the Chillicothe Gazette: “Fire on Mechanic Street and Shooting in South End Alley”
According to the article, at 2:00 a.m. Friday morning, neighbors smelled smoke and saw flames rising from an old decrepit shed in a Mechanic Street backyard. Fire truck sirens blasted along West Seventh Street alerting folks that there’s an emergency. Two hours after the fire commotion, a second call from the South End was made to police at 4:10 a.m. A man identifying himself as Mack Ward told police with a quivering voice, “I shot a man! Send the Emergency Squad.”
Police found Ward, 18, on his knees sobbing, slumped in a heap of regret near the man he shot. As Lee vaulted a wire fence, a twelve gauge, modified choke-shotgun blasted a hole in his neck from a distance of about 20 feet. Later that morning, a passerby found Lee’s teeth on the ground scattered among tufts of grass and small rocks.
Arrested Friday morning, Mack Ward was held in the City Jail on Main Street for questioning. By 10:00 a.m., the Police Chief and Prosecutor had filed second-degree murder charges against Ward. As the day crawled on, officials tried to learn the circumstances surrounding the pre-dawn shooting. At mid-morning, the Chief reported, “Apparently, the shooting was a result of some kind of argument. The facts are not clear.”
Saturday’s obituary announces that friends could call at the funeral home after 4:00 p.m. on Sunday. The service will be held on Monday the 16th of November at 2:00 p.m.
The sweet fragrance of white carnations, mixed with the chemical odor of embalming fluid, greets visitors clad in grays and blacks. Friends, church folk, neighbors, and those who never miss a funeral come to express their support and deepest of sympathies. The scent of death hovers over funeral-goers as they stop to sign the guest book and find seats at Heiby Memorial Home. Family members, the last to take their places in the front rows, hold tightly onto handkerchiefs to wipe away a cascade of tears.
Two ministers officiate. Outside on Paint Street, the rear door of a black Cadillac hearse waits for pallbearers to slide the coffin in for its last journey. It carries a young man, shot to death on Friday the 13th, to Greenlawn Cemetery in the East End. After the final rose is thrown, and the mourners leave, a lifetime squeezed into a few words beginning with “Lee Jefferson Sampson, born in 1938, died in 1959” will be etched on his tombstone.
Rumors surrounding the tragedy float on a bitter cold wind blowing in from the west. South Enders persist with their palaver.
“Mack was at the fire, so he probably wasn’t asleep by 4:00.”
“I bet all his family was up for that fire.”
“Clapper got burned on his hands and face. What was he doing living in that shed anyway?”
“He got burned trying to get his junk out.”
“Did you know Lee was married? They got a little kid.”
“What about his wife? Did she know what he was doing?”
“Humph, don’t know.”
“How long he been seeing Jolene?”
“Don’t know that neither, but her parents didn’t like it one bit. They told him to stay away from her.”
“Folks saying that Mack heard Lee in the house. They argued, then went out back.”
“Well, just when did he grab a dang shotgun? Why he’d do something like that?”
“If you ask me, Mack wasn’t the one who shot Lee.”
“What’d you mean? Then who shot him?”
“Mack’s daddy did it. That’s what everybody’s saying.”
While Mack sits confined in the Ross County Jail, idle chatterers claim that a select group of Catholics who have clout at city hall took his case to the Chief of Police, the Prosecutor and the Judge.
“He’s a good, decent young fellow. Comes to church. It’d be a waste for him to go to prison.”
Officials decide that Mack needs to get away from Chillicothe for a while. He needs to heal the images that roar in his head and claw at his mind.
The judge leans forward looking at Mack’s lean body and downcast eyes. “Young man, only the Good Lord up above can heal the sins that suffocate your heart.” He orders Mack to make a choice, prison or the Army.
I never saw Mack again after he went to jail and then the Air Force. When I knew him, he seemed like a normal teenager who had a bright, easy smile. But whoever grabbed the gun and aimed and pulled the trigger that night, shattered his psyche, cracked his life. Or maybe drugs and alcohol shut out that bad luck night and Mack’s memories of it. Daddy Ward died in the 1960s and William Mack Ward was buried in 2007, so we’ll never know who really killed Lee, but now it doesn’t matter.
As Oscar Wilde said, “History is merely gossip.”