The Heavy Lump of a Pistol
This can happen to family historians: something worth investigating is so obvious, so right in front of our noses, we don’t even notice it. For instance, the houses our subjects lived in. For me it took the sad event of my mom’s death—right there in the living room I had grown up in—and the subsequent sale of our home for me to fully understand how central this place had been to my family’s life.
So I did some research. I read local history and property records and came to learn that the first to live on this land were the Sac and Fox Indians. Then came the white traders, then the developers. The lot that became 2544 East Street in Davenport, Iowa, was first purchased by a bookkeeper and the son of German immigrants; his boss’s son became a jazz legend. Thirty years later a landscaper bought the land and built the house in which I spent my first twenty years. And he died in that house, just like my mom would years later, on November 9, 1951. It was a Friday, at a quarter to nine in the evening. My mom died on a Tuesday, mid-afternoon, in the spring.
Thinking of such things led me down a memory wormhole and I recalled, as a kid, noticing depressions in the living-room wall. I asked my dad about them and he mentioned something about a gunfight having occurred here. I’m sure I both scoffed and believed him at the same time. Recently I began examining old newspapers and sure enough … an extraordinary tale began to take shape.
These are the stories and connections that make family history so rewarding to me.
1.
Mrs. Coletta Denniston Huber stumbled upon an armed man breaking into her home. It was just past eight in the evening on January 13, 1965. With temperatures barely reaching double digits, the sky shimmered like ice. Had she been boiling water for tea? Maybe wrapped up in her warmest, most comfortable robe? And where was Dr. Huber that night? The newspaper reports don’t say. Perhaps she screamed, startling the intruder into retreat. That, too, is unclear. Whatever the case, Mrs. Huber managed to get herself to a phone and breathlessly dial the police.
2.
Don MacGregor had been working this neighborhood for a while now. After a lifetime spent honing his craft, he slipped through doors like a ghost, bagging jewelry mostly and the occasional firearm. On Jersey Ridge Road, beneath a rose bush that—wouldn’t you know it—belonged to the assistant city attorney, he had stashed a newly acquired .32 automatic (for later, just in case), then hiked up the steep hill, slipping once or twice on the ice. He kept to the shadows, seeking out patches of quiet and dark. Houses where people either were out, asleep, or too cold to notice him. As he neared the crest, he felt the heavy lump of a pistol in his jacket pocket.
3.
Patrolman James York Bentley arrived with his partner at 8:28 p.m. He was a clean-cut Navy veteran, married with a son, with not quite ten years on the force. As a rookie he had bested all of his fellow officers in the annual shooting contest and later led the department’s team to victory in the state peace officers’ pistol tournament in Des Moines. Lately, though, he’d been feeling restless. Itching to move up or move out. And it didn’t help that back in October he’d been seriously injured after two police cars crashed. Nothing like a few days in the ICU to give you perspective. And an aching back. He eased his black-and-white up to the curb and left the lamps on. After following footprints in the snow toward the two-story colonial at 2544 East Street, he and his partner encountered a hail of bullets.
4.
His friends called him Scotty. The authorities called him Donald. He came into the world on what was probably the same day his mother, Lucy, had departed it. That was in Des Moines. Don’s father, a Scottish immigrant, lit out for Texas soon after, leaving the boy behind with Lucy’s parents. Before he turned twenty-five that same boy had served juvenile time in Iowa and Missouri and hard time at the state penitentiary in Fort Madison. A string of robberies in Des Moines put him back behind the walls, this time for ten years. He got out in just under five, having quarterbacked the convict football team to the Iowa Semipro Championship. He was invited to try out for the combined Philadelphia Eagles–Pittsburgh Steelers (with a war on, quarterbacks were scarce), but he didn’t make the cut. Eventually he ended up in Muscatine, where he mopped the floor at a glass company. Just before the holidays Don crashed his car, paid a fine for speeding, and stopped showing up for work. On Christmas Eve he married Wilma Foster, who was already beginning to show. He impressed her with gifts of jewelry.
5.
Patrolman Bentley was immediately struck in the leg but still managed to return fire. While his partner shouted at a neighbor to call for backup, he followed the suspect into the house, through the dining room and kitchen, and then out the back door. He fired again, and this time MacGregor fell, only to find his feet again and make his escape east toward the elementary school. He was captured a few blocks away, bleeding from his leg and arm.
6.
Mrs. Huber had been raised a faithful Catholic. Her namesake, Saint Colette, was born north of Paris on January 13, 1380. The sky shimmered like ice that day, too. As early as age seven she began to retreat into a life of the mind and spirit, fully cloistering herself at age twenty-two. She remained completely silent for three years, opening a window only to receive the Holy Sacrament. Then she had a dream, followed by a vision, of fruitless vines and a golden-fruited tree, respectively. She interpreted these to mean that she was called to a life outside her cell. Leaving only with the greatest regret, according to the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, in his The Lives of the Saints, she paused on the threshold and spoke these words: “Oh, dear little home, farewell! farewell my joy and repose! Oh, if men knew how much happiness I have enjoyed in thee, they would desert palaces to inhabit thy narrow walls.”
7.
The next year, Patrolman Bentley resigned the force and became an investigator with the county sheriff’s department. A few months after that, while serving two consecutive thirty-year sentences for robbery and attempted murder, Don MacGregor abruptly died of an undisclosed illness. He was fifty-one. And another year after that, the Hubers sold the house on East Street, content to leave behind the site of that midwinter gunfight. And then early the next year, two young teachers, Tom and Fran Wolfe, my parents, took over the mortgage. They had one child already and another on the way. Me.
8.
Okay, Patrolman Jim Bentley discharged his service revolver at white-haired “Scotty” MacGregor and (which was rare for him) missed—with a single shell lodging just beneath the front window, where a forensics team later collected it for evidence—on January 14, the day after Saint Colette’s birthday. But it was close.
Image: My mom’s Chicago Cubs “W” flag flaps in front of 2544 East Street (Google Street View).
NOTES
stumbled upon an armed man: the basic facts of that night’s incident in “Set $55,000 Bond for Muscatine Man; Under Heavy Guard at Hospital,” Times-Democrat (Davenport, Iowa), January 16, 1965, 2.
not quite ten years: “New Policewoman to Begin Duties July 16; Yet to Be Named,” The Morning Democrat (Davenport, Iowa), June 17, 1955, 19.
As a rookie: “Rookie Tops in Shooting Department,” The Daily Times (Davenport, Iowa), January 18, 1956, 25.
pistol tournament: “State Pistol Champs” [caption], The Daily Times (Davenport, Iowa), May 27, 1957, 2.
two police cars crashed: “Police Car Crash Leaves 2 in Hospital,” Times-Democrat (Davenport, Iowa), October 14, 1964, 13.
called him Scotty: “Gets Trial” [caption], Des Moines Tribune, August 2, 1943, 10. The nickname likely came from his Scottish ancestry.
probably the same day: No record of his mother’s death could be found, but he was raised by his maternal grandparents. His father died in Dallas, Texas, in 1973.
Before he turned twenty-five: “Former Convict Is Jailed—13 Des Moines Robberies ‘Solved,’” Des Moines Register, July 21, 1938, 18.
the convict football team: Matthew Algeo, Last Team Standing: How the Steelers and the Eagles—“The Steagles”—Saved Pro Football during World War II (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2006), 83. MacGregor told the Eagles-Steelers he had gone to prison after stealing a friend’s car as a “prank,” rather than the truth, which was that he had been convicted on thirteen counts of breaking and entering.
payed a fine: “Daily Report,” Muscatine Journal (Iowa), September 17, 1964, 5.
married Wilma Foster: “Marriage Licenses,” The Dispatch (Moline, Illinois), December 24, 1964, 3.
already beginning to show: “Daily Report,” Muscatine Journal (Iowa), July 28, 1965, 12. Their son was born on July 27.
He impressed her: “MacGregor’s Home Yields Rings Taken at Bettendorf,” Muscatine Journal (Iowa), January 19, 1965, 2.
resigned the force: “Sheriff Staff Adds 3 Deputies; Scott Supervisors OK Request,” Times-Democrat (Davenport, Iowa), December 13, 1966, 3.
abruptly died: Keith Prescott, “Man Nabbed in ’65 Gun Battle Is Dead,” Times-Democrat (Davenport, Iowa), 34.
“Oh, dear little home”: Sabine Baring-Gould, The Lives of the Saints, 16 vols. (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1914), 3:98.