BLUFFTON, OH (WLIO) - The Village of Bluffton took a trip back in time on Saturday, to when a famous gangster visited their town in the middle of a crime spree. During Bluffton History Day, the 90th anniversary of John Dillinger and his gang holding up the Citizens National Bank was being remembered.
The streets were lined with cars from the 1930s and relatives of eyewitnesses to that robbery were on hand to help historian and author Fred Steiner retell what happened on August 14th, 1933. The robbery took a total of 5 minutes as John Dillinger and his gang fired off 20 to 30 shots. They also got away with around $2,100 but could not get any more because the vault was locked. The event gave people a glimpse of Bluffton’s historic past.
“It’s not our most popular moment, but certainly our most memorable moment,” says Fred Steiner, Bluffton’s Dillinger Historian. “Fortunately, the Bluffton News Editor was an eyewitness and he put together a 2000-word story that was superb on a manual typewriter in one day. So, that is kind of the bottom line of what we know. And the eyewitnesses, I have interviewed many of them and heard their stories too.”
Steiner gathered stories from that bank robbery and put them into a book titled, "Four Guys Walk into a Bluffton Bank."
