Family talks about barber’s brush with bank robber

Kenney’s great uncle, Orville Rabe, “ran a barber shop there close to Lima,” she said from her home north of Springfield.

A photo taken in his shop shows a man the family identifies as Dillinger sitting in a barber chair while Rabe cuts a second man’s hair.

Although her great uncle died before she was born, her cousin, George Rabe “used to talk about it quite often,” Kenney said. “I guess (Dillinger) had to get his hair cut somewhere.”

The location of Rabe’s Barber Shop in Waynesfield, which is southeast of Lima, lends credence to the claim that Dillinger is in the photo.

Played by Johnny Depp in the movie “Public Enemies,” Dillinger was known to be in the Lima area twice.

On Aug. 14. 1933, his gang robbed the Citizens National Bank in Bluffton, which is in the northeast corner of Allen County.

As a result of that robbery, Dillinger was brought to the county jail in Lima after his September 1933 capture in Dayton.

He was in the Lima jail on Oct. 12, 1933, when his associate, Harry Pierpoint, broke him out, killing Sheriff Jess Sarber in the process.

Iron and irony

Dillinger was dead for 25 years by 1959, when Jim Gilbert began his career at the New Carlisle Federal Savings Bank.

But two people with connections to Dillinger’s June 21, 1933, robbery were still around.

“Dorothy Grisso, who never married, was the head cashier at the bank,” Gilbert said.

Grisso’s brother, Horace, was the first employee in the bank on the morning of the robbery, so he was the first to discover Dillinger’s gang had broken in overnight.

Another person with a Dillinger connection was Joe Wilcox, who was the bank’s chairman of the board when Gilbert was at the business.

Back then, Wilcox was a bank director and the owner of a local hardware store.

“The story goes that the Dillinger gang went into the hardware store (in New Carlisle) and purchased the carpet nails to throw on the highway” to throw off a police pursuit after the robbery.

Just as sure as there was iron in the nails, there was irony in the business transaction that brought a little money into the hardware store and was involved in the removal of $10,300 from the bank.