House Party

"When Mrs. Elizabeth Hill, 43, answered the knock at the back door one morning last week and saw the young man with a two days' growth of beard, she was terrified. Her husband, James Hill, a hosiery-company executive, had left for work; her daughters Betsy and Susan were in school. In the big, ivy-covered house in a Philadelphia suburb, there were only Mrs. Hill, her eleven-year-old son Jimmy and four-year-old twins, Clyde and Robert. On the 8 a.m. newscast she had heard about the three "desperate and vicious" bank robbers who had escaped from the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg.

"You probably know who we are," said 26-year-old Joseph Nolen of Woodbine, Ky. "We're not going to hurt you--we just want your house for a day. If you do what we tell you, nobody will be hurt." As Nolen pushed open the back door, his brother Ballard, 22, and Elmer Schuer, 21, of Chicago appeared from behind a trellis, pointing shotguns at Mrs. Hill. When the men had searched the house from cellar to attic, Mrs. Hill asked them if they would like some breakfast. "Yes, we'd appreciate it," replied Joseph politely. She fixed them some scrambled eggs, bacon and coffee.

Tonic & Lotion. Breakfast done, the three fugitives took baths and shaved, helping themselves to Hill's hair tonic and shaving lotion. Then they helped themselves to Hill's suits. When Joseph discovered that six-footer Hill's suits didn't fit, he sat down at an old treadle sewing machine and carefully altered the trousers and sleeves. The thread broke repeatedly, and Mrs. Hill kept rethreading the needle.

While one of the men stood by with a shotgun, Mrs. Hill called her cleaning woman to tell her that the car had broken down and she couldn't pick her up. A Fuller brush salesman telephoned, and she asked him to deliver the brushes she had ordered some other day. At 4 p.m., when Susan and Betsy came home from school and found Ballard guarding their mother (the other two had gone out somewhere on an errand), they thought it was some kind of joke.

Two hours later Hill came home from work, and Ballard ushered the whole family into the kitchen for dinner. They were all seated at a meal of canned soup, spaghetti, chili con carne, milk and coffee when Joseph and Schuer returned. "May I come in?" asked Joseph politely, standing in the kitchen doorway. Later the men played poker. They asked Betsy to join them, but she said that she played only canasta. The robbers told her they didn't know that game. Most of the time they kept the radio tuned to dance music, and they used no profanity.

Bedtime. "I guess you folks would like to go to bed," suggested Joseph at last. "If you do, just go ahead. I wish you would all go up to the third floor if you do go to bed." Hill observed that there was only one bed up there. So Joseph and the other two men carried up several loads of cribs and mattresses. Hill sat up all night in a chair while his family tried to sleep. At 3:30 a.m., 19 hours after the fugitives entered the house, he heard his car start up. The three men then drove away into the early morning blackness, where the FBI and most of the police in Pennsylvania hunted for them.

Following out orders from the trio, who had cut the telephone wires, Hill waited until 8 a.m. before going to a neighbor's house to call the police to tell them about his interesting house guests.

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