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are broken. His shirt has no collar and his clothing is hanging in baggy shape on his skinny figure. "I couldn’t face the people the way they would look at me in Plainview," he would continue, "When they learned their savings were lost, so I took all the resources of the bank I could reach and invested them in improved farm lands at the time there was a boom up there. I thought the land would increase in value. I paid $200 per acre for some of the farms. You know the bottom fell out, John. Those farms dropped to $100 an acre. I couldn’t face my friends so I run away." Sylvester has made this statement many times in the last 48 hours. It is no longer news to the little group that is bringing him back to Minnesota. His loyalty to his family is remarkable. Note one speck of blame has the old man placed on their heads. He has not mentioned the expensive living as disclosed in Winona by Senator James A. Carley, from bank records after the first bankruptcy hearing in an interview given the Republican-Herald. He almost refused to talk about his own bank account. "I had less than $100 in my pocket when I fled," he told Foley. "It was on Feb. 28, 1925 when I first knew the bank was doomed." I started for Florida but on the train I thought of the many northern people there and changed my route to Biloxi. Sylvester has not yet been told that banking experts traced his shortage back 22 years, and are very well acquainted with the methods he employed. He doesn’t know that Senator Carley has evidence to prove that he had planned to leave Plainview three months earlier than he really did. He likes to tell newspapermen of his rise from a bookkeeper working for $200 a year to the presidency of a bank, of his standing in the community, his church membership, and his Sunday School Classes. "Now of course I’ve got to go back and face it all," Sylvester concludes. "It makes me sick just to think of those folks among whom I spent my life. It makes me even sicker to think of my wife and children and the shame they will see. I didn’t do it for myself," he would repeat, "I tried to save the bank, and save the people who had invested money in it and the depositors who had put their money in it." "I got nothing out of it myself. It’s just a horrible nightmare from the time things began to go wrong. But as far as any dishonesty out of which I was to profit myself, I am innocent." Foley would then leave him in Deputy Sheriff Ed. Fitzgerald’s care, and go to the smoker apparently to think some more. In a few minutes he would return and the same story would be gone over again. Sylvester’s complete confession will come at any hour now. The authorities will doubtless have it before the party reaches Chicago. Gulfport, Miss., Feb. 4 – G. W. Hoffstetter, the man who gave the information that led to Edwin L. Sylvester’s arrest today told how it all happened. "This man was working for me on my truck farm," Hoffstetter said. "He came along and asked me for work and I gave it to him. He never seemed like other floaters and I was interested in him and watched him. Something about him always seemed queer." "One day I was reading a Minneapolis paper. I used to live up there, and I have read the paper ever since. There was a story about a banker named Edwin L. Sylvester, who had disappeared from his home and who was wanted on a charge of embezzling
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* SOURCE: Manzow, Ron (compiler), "The Sylvester Family of Plainview, Minnesota - a collection of information taken from the Plainview News, other newspapers, letters, and diaries beginning in 1884": Plainview Area History Center, 40 4th St. S.W., Plainview, MN 55964. Compiled in 2001.
NOTE: from Ron Manzow, December 2001: "Feel free to reproduce the pages for anyone who wants a copy. It was
compiled to be shared... All I ask is that they consider sending a check to the [Plainview Area] History Center to help us out. That
should be enough."
Howder; © 1995-2011 All Rights Reserved. Last Updated February 14, 2011.