“Hey, it’s 1932 and we’ve got a repo out in the country down in North Carolina. Let’s hire a couple of our debtors to do the repo for us. What could go wrong?” Said a pair of Detectives from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. What followed can be taken at face value, or perhaps another way?
On October 6, 1932, Lloyd Shoemaker and a brother working in Pennsylvania with an unnamed “negro” ventured into North Carolina to repossess a vehicle from a Clyde Archie Bare who had skipped from Pennsylvania to rural Ashe County, their common hometown.
Lured from by the promise of leniency on his own delinquent auto loan by Elmer Wertz and JC Beecher of “United Investigators” these men, inexperienced in repossession, managed to successfully help Beecher and Wertz recover the vehicle.
The investigators then passed the repossessed vehicle over to the unnamed “negro” to drive back to Pennsylvania and deliver it to United Investigators office while they returned to Shoemaker’s home in the area to rest before they drove back. As a favor, the investigators allowed Shoemaker to borrow their expensive sedan with the intention of visiting a nearby brother.
Not far from his brother’s house, Shoemaker was ambushed by two men with rifles and the sedan riddled with bullet holes. Shoemaker, uninjured, had somehow been informed that the “negro” driver had been killed and the vehicle taken back by the debtor Bare and that the two men were on their way to kill Beecher and Wertz. Stranded in the country without a car and with two men coming to kill them, Wertz and Beecher fled on foot through the mountainous countryside under the cover of dark and in the rain.
Finally finding a car for hire, they made their way to a nearby town where they spent the night and requested police protection. Finding their way back to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, they contacted police to advise of their ordeal and the alleged murder of the unnamed “negro.” Unfortunately, police were unable to investigate the story or obtain contact or cooperation from the Ashe County Sheriff who was reportedly “out on an emergency call.”
This tale, reported on October 6, 1932 by “The Gettysburg Times” is almost like something out of the 1972 film “The Deliverance”, illustrates the dangers of repossessing during the Great Depression. The mysterious alleged ambush and alleged killing of an unnamed “negro” hint at a possible set up by Shoemaker, the debtor Bare and even possibly the Sheriff’s office. Public intervention in foreclosures and repossessions were not a rarity during this decade, nor after. The dismissiveness of the alleged killing of an unnamed black man during the process further reminds us of the press and public’s complacency to the openly racist “Jim Crow” society which was commonplace during this era.
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