“Name that Year” is designed to put your knowledge of Tracy and its newsmakers of the past to the test. Each week, we will publish a news item that ran in a past edition — maybe it was a major event, or a story about a Tracy resident — it’s up to you to determine in what year that particular news item hit the pages of the paper:
• A DRAMATIC ARMED ROBBERY TOOK PLACE IN JANUARY OF THIS YEAR AT CURRIE’S BANK. Guns were pointed, people were ordered about, cash was stuffed into a pillow case and the bandits escaped in their get-away car waiting outside the bank.
It was shortly after 10 a.m.. the bank had been opened just an hour on the last day of the year. “I knew we were going to have a busy day, but nothing like this,” said teller Mrs. Perry (Jeanne) Byrne.
“Everybody down on the floor! shouted the man who first entered the bank with gun pointed and ski mask over his head. Three customers and four bank staffers were there at the time and followed his orders. A woman, her face covered with a nylon stocking, later joined the man.
With the group all down on their stomachs and under control the man ordered Mrs. Byrne to get up and get him some money. She pulled out the contents of one cash drawer and it was gobbled up into a pillow case. Another cash drawer went untouched.
They fled. Meanwhile, Gordon DesLauiers of Currie was walking north to the bank and was coming in the door when the man and woman sidestepped him. and hurried over to an accomplice who was waiting in a car near the Gambles. Gordon was unaware what had happened.
Shortly after they left another teller, Mrs. Jerry (Collette) Peschges, made hurried phone calls, first to bank vice-president Chuck Doom in his office across the street, then to the Murray County Sheriff’s Department in Slayton.
As officers sped to Currie and police bulletins and special radio broadcasts were being made, news of the heist spread like wildfire.
Daily banking business returned to normal by 10:30; numerous customers might have just decided to do their banking then to see what was going on inside.
Other Currie residents gathered outside, in their cars, and at popular Ma-Pa Loma Lanes & Cafe, to discuss the robbery. The normal 10 a.m. coffee time was unusually busy and bigger; most conversations dealt with the recent hold-up.
‘It’s kind of comical now,” said one man as he watched things outside the bank. But I would have hated to go through it.”
Authorities later learned the get-away car, a 1956 white over yellow Chevrolet, had been dumped about two miles west of Currie on a side road near the Dave Bassett farm. The vehicle had been stolen earlier that day at Worthington..
• Last week’s answer: They year was 2018 when Dave Rialson discovered that a large number of feeder pigs had been stolen from Fultz Farms, just northeast of Tracy.
