When I read a tidbit about a robbery at Oakville State Bank in 1938 with bandits escaping on horseback, I thought I’d dig into the story to find out more.
But the more I searched, the less I found — at least about that robbery. So unless the news media at the time never wrote a word about the last robbery in Washington state by bandits on horseback, I need to agree with the late Jack A.C. Miller of Olympia.
Responding to a July 2002 writeup in The Olympian, which described how people in Oakville reenacted the notorious robbery by masked men on horseback during Independence Day festivities, Miller wrote a letter to the editor, which was published Aug. 14, 2002.
“Regarding the article itself, I think it is a bunch of what the horses left in the street,” he wrote. “In living my first 60 years in Oakville, I never heard the story until just four or five years ago. I was an eyewitness to the last holdup of the bank on July 5, 1940. I remember it well, as that was just one month and one day before my oldest son was born.”
He recalled seeing the bank’s vice president and cashier, Ed Fitzgerald Jr., pursue the robber into the street.
“I was standing in the doorway of my dad’s store when Ed Fitzgerald Jr. came out of the bank and started shooting at the robber as he ran up the side street. When the robber turned around and fired back, I was in the line of fire. Needless to say, I took quick cover. I was no coward, I just wanted my son to have a father when he was born.”
Miller, who died Sept. 21, 2003, was born in Oakville in January 1918 and, as he said, spent his first six decades there. He graduated from Oakville High School in 1936, married Agness Ostergard at Swede Hill in Elma two years later and operated two businesses in Oakville — Millers Grocery and JAGS Drive-In — from 1945 to 1968. He served in the Oakville Fire Department for 35 years, including time as fire chief.
And I believe he was correct in what he wrote.
When I searched newspaper archives, I ran across stories about two robberies of the Oakville State Bank.
The first took place on Jan. 31, 1927, when two armed men robbed the bank of $10,000, fled in a sedan, then stole a touring car in Oakville.
The following evening, police arrested 25-year-old Thomas E. Conway in Tacoma after garage owner D.M. Baker grew suspicious over the young man’s attempts to rent a car rather than keep driving the one he had. He searched the newspaper for descriptions of the robbery suspects and contacted police.
Conway, also known as Thomas E. Hardy, listed his hometown as Bellingham. He had $2,000 on him, confessed his role in the robbery, and led police to where they stashed their loot six miles west of Oakville. Officers recovered $5,000 in securities and warrants and $800 in silver. Conway refused to identify his accomplice whom he said had served time in the Montana penitentiary for a 1924 shooting.
He continued his life of crime, robbing post offices and escaping from federal authorities before he was recaptured and sent to serve time at McNeil Island.
The second bank robbery, the one Miller referenced, took place on Friday, July 5, 1940, when a lone gunman robbed the bank and fled in a hail of bullets.
At 2:50 p.m. an overall-clad man, unmasked but brandishing a pistol, ordered Edward Fitzgerald Jr., the bank’s vice president and cashier, to put cash he was counting into a paper sack he shoved through the grill. After the robber snatched the money and fled, Fitzgerald seized a pistol and followed him, firing shots. The robber returned fire.
George Clark, described alternatively in newspaper articles as a civilian, handyman, town constable and deputy town marshal, was drawn to the bank by the sound of shots. Carrying a light caliber pistol, he cornered the holdup man a few minutes after the robbery. He fired three shots at the robber who fired back. A bullet pierced Clark’s left ear and exited through his eye socket, critically wounding him.
Two posses of 30 men each — which may have led to the connection to horses — searched for the bandit in nearby brush-covered hills but never found him. They did discover blood spots in a culvert, indicating that one of Clark’s bullets struck its target.
The take from the robbery was $418.
Aided by the use of airplanes, searchers combed the woods near Oakville, looking for the robber, but to no avail. The Grays Harbor County sheriff did find a car with California license plates near the highway about three miles west of Oakville. He said the bandit likely left it there to use for his escape after the robbery. The car was impounded.
Clark was rushed to a Centralia hospital in critical condition. He slowly recovered but lost his left eye. By Monday, he had improved enough to be transferred to an Aberdeen hospital.
On Nov. 7 that year, newspapers heralded the news that a posse had shot and killed the Oakville bank robber after he held up the Bank of Amador County in Plymouth, Calif., for a second time. Fitzgerald, Clark, and three other witnesses identified 55-year-old Albert Heaton, who also went by Albert Fox, as the Oakville bank robber. A suspect in two other California bank robberies, he was an ex-convict who served time in Washington State at the federal penitentiary at Walla Walla and the state reformatory at Monroe under the alias Henry Barnea.
Clark, an unsung hero who lost his left eye trying to apprehend the bank robber, died in September 1961 at McCleary. He was born Dec. 6, 1888, in Anoka, Minn., and lived in Oakville for 35 years. “It was said of Clark that no stranger hit Oakville without being fed or given lodging,” his obituary in The Tacoma News Tribune stated. At his burial in the Oakville Pioneer Cemetery, he was survived by his wife, May.
A hole is still visible in the bank building from the 1940 shootout.
I may be wrong, and if someone has information about a robbery on horseback of the Oakville State Bank, please send it my way.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
