Man from Missouri

Twelve years ago in St. Joseph, Mo. one William F. Walpole got a job clerking at $35 per week in a drugstore owned by a widow. Within a few years the clerk owned the store. He launched an expansion program which left him with an established patent medicine, an electrical appliance concern, a string of drugstores in & around St. Joseph and a local reputation as an up-&-coming businessman. A pillar of the Methodist church. Drugman Walpole handled no liquor in his St. Joseph stores because his wife was active in W. C. T. U. work.

As an employer he was rated temperamental, frequently firing and rehiring the help wholesale. A Walpole man did not feel established until he had been fired and hired at least twice, and one veteran boasted seven oustings. There were stories that Drugman Walpole used to mix his patent medicine--a laxative tonic called PuratoanQ+n his bathtub and that he depended on medicine shows for distribution of Puratoan in the South. But Drugman Walpole, a handsome, strapping six-footer of 45 with iron hair, piercing eye and fluent tongue, was a popular St. Joseph figure, especially with the ladies. Few knew that he entered the drug business fresh from a seven-month jail term for violating Federal narcotic laws.

The rest of St. Joseph might never have known about his criminal record had Mr. Walpole stuck to the drug business. But the secret came out last week when he was indicted for having gutted the local Morris Plan Bank of $400,000 by the simple process of discounting forged notes. He was accused of forging not two or three but more than 3,500 notes, all of which the bank gladly took. Noting that the bank officials were "negligent in a high and inexcusable degree," a grand jury handed down an indictment on 42 counts, reporting to the bench: "Despite the extraordinary number [of counts], they represent only a small fraction of the indictments against this man that would be justified by the evidence. We refrain from clogging and choking . . . your honorable court."

At the start Drugman Walpole had established his credit at the Morris Plan Bank with genuine paper. After the first year, according to the grand jury, he began to introduce a few forged notes in each batch of good ones. "With the passing of the months." found the grand jury, "the ratio between forged and genuine notes was changed by degrees until at last there were three or four times as many forged notes as there were genuine notes."

Drugman Walpole's apparently inexhaustible supply of notes was derived from phoney installment sales of electrical appliances. What finally aroused the suspicion of the gullible bank officials was that the number of refrigerators supposedly sold by Walpole in Elwood, across the Missouri River from St. Joseph, exceeded the town's total number of electric consumers. Addresses given for names on the notes turned out to be vacant lots, unoccupied houses or straight fiction. All this had been hidden from the bank because one of Walpole's companies undertook to make the collections. Whenever one batch of spurious notes fell due, Walpole merely slipped the bank some new ones. It was, said the grand jury, just a "game of put & take, the taking exceeding the putting by many hundreds of thousands of dollars." Not only did the taking wipe out the Morris Plan Bank's $300,000 capital and surplus but meant a loss of from 10% to 25% for depositors, mostly wage earners, clerks, housewives.

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