The Sylvester Family of Plainview, Minnesota*

Passersby recognize Edwin Sylvester from newspaper photographs

February 6, 1926

PAGE 203

spent Thursday night in the noisy, dirty famous Cook county jail in Chicago.
In Chicago Sylvester faced a dozen cameras. He posed for his picture which was printed in all the Chicago newspapers. Then he went to the county jail, where they took his clothes away from him, gave him a hurried and not too gentle physical examination, made him take a bath, and returned his clothes and shoved him in a big bared room with a score of other wrong-doers.
"How’d you like to be put in with Martin Durkin?" a big husky uniformed guard asked Sylvester playfully. [HOWDER’S NOTE: In 1925 Martin Durkin was responsible for killing an FBI agent, the first to die in the line of duty. He was captured and returned to Chicago in 1926]

"Who is Durkin?"
"I don’t know," said Sylvester trembling. He wasn’t used to this sort of joking. After all, he was a country banker, and he didn’t know much about jails and crime and criminals. "I don’t know," he repeated. "Who is he?"
The jailer roared and several others standing around tittered. In the big cell room Sylvester bumped up against hardened criminals, low-browed swarthy men who had committed every variety of crime. A dope fiend reeled drunkenly against him. An unassuming young man sidled up and talked to him.
"What you in for?" said Sylvester in a friendly tone an old man uses towards a young boy.
"I dunno," the boy responded. "They said they pinched me for being Martin Durkin’s roommate."
A harsh-looking individual addressed the mild-mannered little Plainview man.
"Ever been in the pen before?" he said.
Full of Lice
"Nope" said Mr. Sylvester, "I don’t know much about this."
"Well, I been here lots of times," the hard-boiled individual said. "If you’re here very long you’ll be full o’ lice. This joint is lousy as hell." Mr. Sylvester shuddered.
At seven o’clock yesterday morning Deputy Sheriff Fitzgerald and County Attorney John R. Foley got their prisoner and brought him to the hotel for his breakfast. They ate their meal in the grillroom and Mr. Sylvester looked as out of place there as he did in the county jail, his worn clothing, his stubbly beard, his tieless collar gave him an air of incongruity. But he ate a hearty breakfast and stuffed half a dozen lumps of sugar in his pocket as he left the table.
The officers and their man hurried to the Chicago Union Station. Ed. Sylvester stood with the county attorney while the deputy sheriff bought the tickets.
Sylvester in Pictures
Passersby looked up from their morning newspapers, recognizing him as the same man whose picture appeared in their papers. He paid no attention to them, but peered at the great concourse through his glasses. "Mighty pretty building, isn’t it?" he said.
They boarded the train and it began to move slowly out of the station. Ed Sylvester was on his way home.
County Attorney Foley began to discuss with Ed, as he had all during the trip up from the South, the affairs of the bank. But Ed wasn’t very willing too talk.
It had been that way every day. The mornings seemed to give him courage. Every evening his sprits dropped and he talked freely in a voice broken by sobs.
But there was another factor yesterday. Every moment was brining him closer to home. Every station was one step nearer to the country from which he fled a year ago.
Sylvester Talks
Early in the afternoon Ed began to talk. And once he began he rattled on and on, telling everything. Frequently he broke down. Several times he almost collapsed, and he wept convulsively. But he always recovered his composure, and too off his glasses

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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."