The Dalton gang was flush from their successful hit on a railroad at Pryor Creek, Oklahoma—seventeen thousand dollars for just ten minutes’ shooting- when they planned the foolhardy robbery they hoped would secure their notoriety. On the morning of October 5 the Daltons arrived in the town of Coffeyville, Kansas, intent on cleaning out two banks simultaneously, which neither their famous cousins the Youngers nor even the James brothers had ever done. If it came off, one member explained, the double robbery would make the Daltons “outshine Jesse James” himself, since even he “never tried this!”

The editor of the Coffeyville Journal, David Stewart Elliott, was among the first to spot the Daltons when they entered the town “about fifteen minutes before ten o’clock, when the most remarkable occurrence that has ever taken place in the history of our country came upon the peaceful city like a flash of lightning from a clear sky.” Elliott and others easily recognized the outlaws, despite the false goatees and mustaches, for the simple reason that the Dalton brothers had grown up in and around Coffeyville. Almost as soon as the gang divided and entered both the First National and Condon & Co. banks, their fellow citizens were arming themselves at the local hardware store.

A clerk in Condon & Co. managed to shout out, “The bank is being robbed!” while someone across the street looking into the First National saw guns drawn there too. The call to arms went around the plaza. “The volunteer defenders of law were not impelled by a sentiment; they were inspired by a high sense of duty to their neighbors and the community,” wrote Elliott. It was also their money in the banks.

Charles T. Gump had been “driving his team on the street at the time,” Elliott wrote, when, at the alarm, he “sprang from his wagon . . . ran into !sham’s [hardware] store, seized a double-barreled shotgun,” and took up his position outside First National. Bob Dalton’s first shot hit Gump’s hand, and his “gun fell in several pieces at his feet.” After the men in Rammel’s drugstore began firing into the front of the First National, Bob and Emmet Dalton left by a back way carrying twenty thousand dollars. In the alley they surprised and killed a young clerk named Lucius M. Baldwin.

At Condon & Co., however, the other three members—Gratton Dalton, Bill Powers, and Dick Broadwell—were stalled by the bank clerk through a series of ingenious evasions. The robbers were still bickering with the clerk when citizens began shooting through the heavy glass windows with borrowed Winchesters and shotguns. There was no back door through which to escape, and when the thieves came out onto the street, reported Elliott with satisfaction, “Grat Dalton and Bill Powers each received mortal wounds before they had retreated twenty steps. The dust was seen to fly from their clothes, and Powers in his desperation attempted to take refuge in the rear doorway of an adjoining store, but the door was locked . . .” He ran toward his horse and “fell dead at the feet of the animal that had carried him.” Grat lived long enough to kill the town marshal, then was dropped a second time by the marksmen inside !sham’s. Emmet was wounded mounting his horse but hung on to the money bag, then rode back for his dying brother Bob. As he leaned down toward his brother, one Carey Seaman—who had shot Broadwell as he tried to ride off—gave Emmet both barrels in the back. The fight lasted just twelve minutes.

Emmet Dalton, surprisingly, was saved by the town surgeon and served fourteen years in the Kansas State Penitentiary and then was pardoned. He married and went into business in California. In 1931 he returned to Coffeyville to reminisce with the shaky old heroes of that long-ago day. He died a few years later in Los Angeles.

Proving perhaps that the wartime soberness had affected truly everyone, collars were shorter and less luxurious on this year’s fur coats, which cost from $185 to $500 at Bergdorf Goodman’s. Esquire magazine—the guardian of male taste—noted that the cuff was disappearing from men’s trousers. More seriously, the magazine explained in its predictions for the coming year just how much the fight against Hitler would cost the average breadwinner: “Speaking very roughly your tax bill for 1942 will be twice what you paid last year.” The single man pulling down $3,000 per year would pay $450 in taxes, up from $225 in 1941. For the married man who made $10,000 and, as the Esquire editors put it, had “not yet been visited by the stork,” his tax share of the war effort might approach $2,100.

In movie houses Bette Davis was starring in Now, Voyager, casting off her spectacles and stern upbringing in the name of hopeless love; as one reviewer put it, she “stirs up trouble for no one but her mother.” The Glass Key, based on the novel by Dashiell Hammett, premiered. It featured an unflappable Alan Ladd exchanging deadpan glances with the equally cool Veronica Lake but in the end proving more loyal to his ward boss.

On Broadway William Saroyan’s Hello Out There opened at the Belasco, while Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit played at the Booth; Life with Father (with Louis Calhern and Dorothy Gish) booked the Empire; My Sister Eileen, based on Ruth McKenney’s New Yorker magazine stories (and later itself the basis for the musical Wonderful Town) was at the Martin Beck; Strip for Action, by Howard Lindsay and R’fcssel Grouse, about a burlesque troupe and an army camp, occupied the National. The Forty-sixth Street Theatre had New Priorities of 1943, which one critic described as “a vaudeville show that must be classed as mediocre, even though it includes Harry Richman, Bert Wheeler, Carol Bruce, and all those wonderful dogs.” At the Ambassador it was Wine, Women and Song, starring the pantomimist Jimmy Savo.

The week of October 12-18 was many things to many people: J. Walter Thompson Company and the Laymen’s National Committee respectively lobbied to have it named National Wine Week and National Bible Week. “Hallelujah! Bottoms up!” saluted The New Yorker.

Dr. Robert Ravich’s Interpersonal Behavior Game-Test—a diagnostic tool for married couples in which they raced a pair of electric trains against a clock, cooperating or not cooperating at their own risk—was the season’s splashiest innovation in psychology. Already, more than one hundred couples had played out their relationship with the toy trains in Dr. Ravich’s New York office. Each spouse operated a train against a time limit for completing the course. Husband and wife were kept from seeing each other’s engine by a dividing wall, but their trains could collide if they did not accommodate each other at crucial points, granting the doctor insight into how they might cooperate outside his office. Women who started the Game-Test submissively were sometimes daring engineers by the end, sending their trains straight through instead of switching tracks in favor of their husbands. Although Ravich claimed many of the couples learned compromise and teamwork from playing his game, the real purpose was to quickly establish patterns for later discussion. Dr. Ravich’s game was a variation on the bargaining theory of Columbia University’s Dr. Morton Deutsch, who had been inspired while watching two Italian bus drivers engage in a loud test of wills at an intersection.