The night they "blowed the safe" at Olmitz

Two coal towns, Tipperary and Olmitz, flourished near each other for a time in Lucas County's Pleasant Township during the early 20th century, housing the families of miners.

Of the two, Olmitz --- the larger --- generally was viewed as a family-oriented place. Tipperary gained a reputation for gambling dens and moonshine.

But back in October of 1922, robbers struck the company store in Olmitz --- Olmitz Supply Co. --- proving that both were vulnerable to lawlessness.

A major part of the problem was distance. The two villages were in remote locations reached by hilly dirt roads and had no law enforcement of their own. Although there was a Rock Island rail link to both mines, law enforcement had to be summoned from Chariton when something went wrong and even under the best of conditions, it would be more than an hour before assistance could arrive.

Here's how The Herald-Patriot of Nov. 2, 1922, reported the Olmitz robbery under the headline, "Blowed the Safe: The Burglars Got Away With the Booty."

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The mining town of Olmitz, to the northeast of Chariton, has come in for its share of publicity and would like to know the whereabouts of some yeggmen who blew the safe in the mercantile establishment of the Olmitz Supply Co. on Saturday morning, securing the booty and making their getaway in an automobile. A clock just above the safe registered 12 minutes before 3 o'clock when stopped, probably by the jar from the explosions. 

Something between eleven and twelve hundred dollars in cash was secured by the yeggs, but a roll of thirty-one dollar bills was overlooked. Also some money orders and checks had been cast aside as "trash" and useless for their purposes.

A nearby businessman heard the explosion and by the time he had notified Jay Batten, the manager of the establishment, and they reached the store, it was some 20 minutes after three, so the yeggs did their work  quickly and successfully.

Immediately, the sheriff at Chariton was notified and within a short time, or as quickly as the distance could be covered, Sheriff Lyman, Deputy Knotts, accompanied by County Attorney C. F. Wennerstrum and Roy Hatcher, were on the grounds, but so far as anything they could detect was concerned, the yeggs might have gone straight up or sunk into a fissure of the earth, they having left no footprints on the sands of time, but about as neat a piece of burlarly handiwork as one would expect to see, proving that no novices had ben there.

The had extracted the knob on the safe door, injected the medicine and not a rivet was left that they had failed to pull through the steel. A clue may develop later.

Mr. Hatten is postmaster and the thieves secured some of Uncle Sam's cash. The store was in no way wrecked.

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The robbery obviously had been a professional one and so far as I could find out clues to the perpitators never developed.