The years were 1930 – 1935

• Gandhi protests British rule in India in 1930
• Famed aviatrix Amelia Earhart lost flying the Pacific in 1935

Meanwhile . . .

The years 1930 through 1935 in the United States were a time of running boards and tommy-guns. Clanging bank alarms and wailing police sirens. High-speed chases and running gun battles. Sensational front page headlines and a horror-struck citizenry.

It’s often called one of the most colorful ages in American history. Certainly it was among the most lawless and chaotic. It was the Gangland Era.

And no one man so personified the times as did a dapper-dressed, gun-toting, bank-robbing, wise-cracking ladies man from Indianapolis, Ind. He was John Dillinger, the notorious leader of the murderous Dillinger Gang and the first man ever labeled by federal law enforcement as “Public Enemy No. 1.” In a career that lasted barely 13 months, his gang had killed 10 men, wounded seven others, robbed numerous banks, raided police arsenals and staged three jailbreaks.

Diebold knew Dillinger’s reputation well. Our salespeople would actually mention him by name, cite his exploits and detail the threat he and his ilk posed to the nation’s financial security.

His was a curious story. Dillinger was seemingly as reviled by the cops who chased him as he was admired by those who saw him as a latter-day Robin Hood. Here was a man who stole from financial institutions whose reputations were severely tarnished by Depression-era times due to bank failures and property foreclosures.

Dillinger had been a tough kid with a long record of trouble. He formed his approach and his gang from the men he met in prison. A fellow inmate, a former German army officer, taught Dillinger the fine art of bank robbery. He schooled him in how to size up the score, how to case the place, learn the alarm systems, even how to place cans of gasoline in haystacks along the escape route to avoid public stops.

Dillinger added his own embellishments. His athletic leaps over tellers’ counters to confront bank managers and demand entry into vaults and safety deposit boxes. His schemes to win bankers’ confidence before he robbed them. His blazing, bullet-riddled exits and his last-second escapes from pursuers.

One time his gang pretended to be part of a film company scouting locations for a bank robbery scene. As bystanders stood and smiled, the real robbery ensued and Dillinger and his boys took off with the loot. Another time, in the city of East Chicago, a policeman named O’Malley blocked Dillinger’s path. Dillinger gunned him down, then later offered something of a public apology. “I feel sorry about O’Malley, him having a wife and child and all. But he stood in my way and just kept throwing slugs at me. What was I supposed to do?”

In all, the Dillinger Gang is believed to have robbed dozens of banks throughout the Midwest, making off with more than $300,000, a huge sum in the Depression era which in today’s inflation-adjusted dollars would total more than $5 million.

Bankers were understandably fearful and perplexed. What could they do to safeguard their institutions and their customers? Diebold had an answer.

In partnership with the Lake Erie Chemical Company, Diebold devised a system whereby strategically placed teargas canisters could be set off, enveloping bank lobbies in clouds of the disabling agent. The downside? Employees, customers, and, presumably responding police officers would feel the effects of the gas, too. Some threatened lawsuits.

Nonetheless, we reported brisk sales of the teargas system throughout five Midwestern states in the early 1930s. More than 50 installations were made throughout Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska. And there is no record that any of those institutions were ever robbed by the Dillinger Gang. Maybe their expertise at casing banks told them these institutions were better left alone.

Dillinger died in Chicago on July 22, 1934 after emerging from a movie theater to find a squad of federal agents and specially chosen local policemen waiting for him. When Dillinger went for his gun, they fired. Around the same time, the law closed in on many other famous gangland bigs of the day, bringing to an end the careers of people such as Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Machinegun Kelly, Ma Barker and Bonnie & Clyde. As the era closed, bankers became less interested in exotic defenses. Diebold’s teargas orders simply evaporated.