It was tonight—right now, 10:30pm—but 104 years ago, 1922, on the corner of Mulberry and Gilbert in Muncie, Indiana. It was late, well dark by then, and George and his son George Jr, 18 at the time, were making their way back home after a night in the billiard room at the Delaware Hotel, just a few blocks further south on Mulberry.

They were steps away from home when it happened.

It was dark and quiet, early spring, still cold but you could tell it would change soon.

Everything would change soon.

The quiet was pierced by two cars—Buicks, solid and black and loud—which stopped suddenly. That in and of itself was surprising. Sure, you saw cars in Muncie now that the roads had started to be bricked, but two stopping short like this and both full of men—six by some count, a dozen by others—men who were yelling from the moment the breaks shrieked? George had to have known from that very moment that there was going to be trouble.

There was trouble.

Men piled out of one of the Buicks, every one of them wearing black hoods over their faces, yelling at George and his son: "Stick up your hands!"

George Dale didn’t think. Some people say he never thinks. But tonight he didn’t have to. He was nearly home, with his son. How dare they? He grabbed at the gun shoved in his gut and wrestled it away from one of the masked bastards. He fired. Someone went down.

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