MOUNT VERNON — Furiously puffing cigarette after cigarette as he paced back and forth in his jail cell, the young man said it was all a mistake. The checks shouldn’t have bounced. His family had money. His father was the Coshocton County recorder, C. M. Bible.
Then C. M. Bible denounced the young man as an imposter.
Edwin Bible was just 20 years old when he came to town in late September of 1912. When he wanted to write checks to pay for goods in downtown Mount Vernon, no one knew who he was. But they knew who C. M. Bible was. Such a name carried some weight, so the young man’s checks, drawn on the Buckeye City Bank, were graciously accepted.
But something odd happened. Edwin Bible’s checks bounced higher than rubber balls. When he was contacted about the checks, he admitted that he himself had no funds to pay for the bounced checks he had written. To his shock, Edwin was arrested.
Furiously puffing away in his cell at the Knox County Jail, Bible claimed a relationship to the county official in Coshocton. This information was published in the newspapers throughout the region in late September.
In the next newspaper issue, a stern denunciation from C. M. Bible was published, denying any relationship to, nor knowledge of this Edwin Bible. But the publicity shook out the truth. The name the young man gave was indeed his true name, but his actual father was a humble Roscoe Village carpenter named Milton Bible, no known relation to the county recorder.
Roscoe Village sits on the edge of the town of Coshocton, along the canal, and is today a popular historical tourism attraction.
When reporters reached the real Bible family, Milton promised to make good on his son’s reckless debts, though he must have paled when he heard that his son’s bad checks amounted to $176, not a minor sum in those days.
Edwin’s mother, Laura, was quoted as saying that the boy had shown signs of recent instability. She said that he smoked incessantly, which “may have affected his mind.” She said that the previous week, her son had complained of a sore throat, for which they called a doctor to the house. That night and the following morning, he refused to eat.
The next time they went to check on Edwin’s status, he was gone. He had disappeared without saying anything to any of his family about where he was going, and they heard nothing more until the newspaper stories of his arrest in Mount Vernon hit the front pages the following week.
Jail and the threat of worse must have been a shock to the young man. When he came up before Knox County’s Judge Seward in November, he was found guilty and sentenced to the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield.
However, as this was a first offense and the family affirmed the youth’s troubled mental state, the judge showed leniency and said that this sentence would be suspended, reflecting time served.
Judge Seward warned the young man that the suspended sentence was contingent upon Edwin abstaining from drink, avoiding bad company, “and other such vices.”
Whether this specifically included his smoking or not wasn’t recorded by reporters. But it meant he wasn’t going to the reformatory after all. Edwin Bible walked out of the Knox County Jail a free, but shaken, young man.
He seems to have pulled himself together, marrying in Coshocton a year later. Perhaps his misadventures still dogged his reputation, though, for not too long after that, he and his young wife relocated to Pittsburgh, where he lived the rest of his life without getting into any further trouble.
That smoking may have got him in the long run, though. He passed away in Pittsburgh at the age of 50 in 1942 after what was described in his obituary as a long illness.
But it was a better life than it must have looked like it was going to be during the moments Judge Seward was passing judgement that November day in the Knox County Courthouse. So, let’s hear it for new starts and second chances. It saved Edwin Bible.
