Search


	Podcast:		Local Features by WXPR
	Episode:		The Toy Pistol Bandit of 1942
	Category:		Government & Organizations
	Duration:		00:02:55
	Publish Date:		2019-03-13 05:00:00
	Description:		This week's A Northwoods Moment in History tale from Tomahawk in the early 1940's has all the marks of a great story: a small-time group of bandits, a toy gun, and of course, an efficient Oneida County Sheriff. We'll let Gary Entz take it from here. Historians encounter lots of interesting stories, but once in a while a tale from the past resurfaces that just makes a person sit back and wonder how such a thing could have been allowed to happen. The experience of Earl Wing in the Northwoods is just such a story. Earl Wing was a ne’er-do-well from the town of Shiocton. He was born in 1902, but in the late 1920s, Wing, his brothers Lyle and Leo, Claude Metz, and Roscoe Baker were part of a small-time group of bandits that stole cars, robbed banks and saloons, and, in the case of a St. Paul jewelry store holdup that went bad, murder. Apprehended in Waupaca after a 1929 robbery of the Auburndale Bank, the men were tried, convicted, and sent to the state prison at Waupun. That should have
	Total Play:		0