Since moving to Joplin many years ago, I've occasionally read or heard reference to a bombing that took place in the 1950s at Wilder's Restaurant on Main Street, but I'd never actually read a detailed account of the incident until yesterday, when I started researching it for this blog.
On Thursday night, September 3, 1959, a dynamite explosion ripped through the upstairs office, apartment, and lounge above the restaurant, injuring six people, one of them critically. Apparently, five sticks of dynamite had been placed on the roof of the two-story building, directly above the office of the restaurant owner, Vern Wilder. Police theorized that the explosion was an attempt on the life of Wilder or his associate, Harry Hunt.
But Wilder was downstairs in the restaurant at the time and was not injured, and Hunt was also not injured. All six of the injured people were in the upstairs part of the building, including 70-year-old Charles Greenwood, who was critically injured. The blast showered bricks and glass onto Main Street street outside the restaurant and shattered the windows of several neighboring businesses. "It shook the hell out of everything," said a man who happened to be passing by on the sidewalk and barely missed being killed or seriously injured. Greenwood, an employee of a cigar store next door to the restaurant, died on the morning of September 5.
Police immediately undertook an investigation of the explosion. It was suspected that either someone with a personal grudge against Wilder and/or Hunt or underworld figures involved in illegal gambling were responsible for the bombing, because it was an open secret that Wilder's was one of the main "casinos" in Joplin. In fact, one report said that Wilder's was among the three largest gambling establishments in the entire state of Missouri. Wilder had even admitted during a civil action in 1950 that Hunt operated a gambling room above his restaurant, and the two men had both been indicted in 1951 for setting up gambling devices, although the indictments were later quashed. At the time of the explosion, Wilder was suing an insurance company, claiming a safe containing $10,000 ($7,000 of which belonged to Hunt) had been stolen from the restaurant property and that the insurance company had refused to pay for the loss. This was cited as another possible motive for the crime.
According the the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the upstairs part of Wilder's was Joplin's "only big-time gambling casino." The previous year (1958), Missouri governor James Blair had named Joplin as one of the "worst spots in Missouri for gambling." Although he had not identified Wilder's specifically in his formal statement, he had reportedly mentioned the restaurant in private remarks. Informed of the governor's remarks, Wilder denied that he ran the biggest gambling operation in Jasper County. He just "ran a friendly game," Wilder said. "I just try to run a good restaurant."
The Post-Dispatch went on the assert that there had recently been "considerable jealousy among gamblers" in the Tri-State area of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri, as some of the gamblers not associated with Wilder's resented the fact that the restaurant had apparently been granted an exclusive right to operate in Joplin with police turning a blind eye to Wilder's activities while clamping down on others.
In addition, after Blair's 1958 report, some of the big-time gamblers in Kansas City had felt the heat because of the governor's vow to crack down on gambling in KC and had allegedly invaded Joplin as a more lucrative and wide-open field for their gambling operations. Several months before the restaurant bombing, the Kansas City high-rollers had begun demanding a cut of Wilder's gambling proceeds. Despite these allegations, little proof was offered, and no one was indicted for the explosion or the murder of Greenwood.
In early 1960, a Jasper County grand jury launched an investigation not only into the explosion but also into gambling activities in the county. The investigation uncovered evidence of gambling not only at Wilder's but also in Carthage and at one or two other locations in the county. Wilder and several associates, including Hunt, were indicted for gambling, but the grand jury report, issued in February, failed to uncover a definite motive or to name a suspect in the September explosion.
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