One final post regarding the mill schools (with an odd twist!)…….The superintendent when the original school building first opened in 1901 was Gaston B. Means from Concord. He had recently attended the University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill and was working in Concord as the local editor of the Concord Standard newspaper. Even though he was very young and had not graduated from UNC he was hired as the superintendent due to the fact that his father was a lawyer for J.W. Cannon. In 1903 Means became a salesman with Cannon Mills in the New York and later Chicago sales offices. At some point over the next few years his life made a dramatic change. In 1911 he became a private detective and very quickly it was evident that he was quite shady. Before World War I he worked with the German government and ended up defrauding them out of a lot of money. He also became an advisor to a rich widow and invested her money in his own accounts. The widow mysteriously died while she and Means were visiting a gun range. Even with his reputation, Means was hired by the F.B.I. in 1921. They soon realized he was a “loose cannon”. In 1922 Means began working with bootleggers in the Washington D.C. area. He claimed he could help with their legal problems due to his political connections but many of the bootleggers still fell into trouble. Gaston Means most ambitious con job involved the recovery attempts of Charles Lindbergh’s baby in 1932. Means was contacted by Evalyn Walsh McLean (owner of the Hope Diamond) to see if he could use his underworld connections to assist in the recovery of the baby. Means claimed he would deliver ransom money provided by McLean but of course he had a story how the money disappeared. This was Means final con job and it landed him in jail. He died at Leavenworth prison in 1938. The stories about Gaston Means seem to be endless. He was an educator, salesman, private detective, bootlegger, forger, swindler, murder suspect, blackmailer and con artist. J.Edgar Hoover, the head of the F.B.I. once said that means was “the most amazing figure in contemporary criminal history.” Information from the Stanly Enterprise, Spectacular Rogue by Edwin Hoyt and wikipedia.org
Posted on: Wed, 10 Dec 2014 10:43:43 +0000
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