Early One Morning

Early one morning at Sunnyfield Farm in Middletown, Rhode Island, the cows were ready for milking.  Two farm hands were missing.  The other two men milked as many cows as they could.

It was still dark outside and it was autumn cool.  It was many decades ago and one of the farm hands was my step-grandfather, who told my father this story.  Both are gone now, so I am telling you the tale that happened so long ago.

If you tell a person that they cannot do something, they will always find a way.  The era of Prohibition made many men wealthy.  It was all about connections: knowing the able bodies, the empty barns, the source of the liquor, choosing the right boats, time and place for pick-up and delivery.

On an island as Middletown is on, one fellow would call the police, distracting them to the opposite end of the island, while the crime was being committed.  For whatever reason, the ploy did not work out this particular morning.  The delivery was intercepted just before landing at Third Beach boat ramp.

One man evaded the police by jumping out and swimming away in the dark, while the other man, who did not know how to swim, was apprehended and taken away in handcuffs to do time in jail.

The swimmer had not planned on being late for work.  He ran two and a half miles up the road, through the fields,  to Sunnyfield Farms, drenched to the bone, to milk his share of the cows.

It always pays to be able to swim.

RDB

November 17, 2016

Hooch

My father, Rick, has a couple of drinking stories. He was born in 1917 and grew up in Columbia, Missouri. His mother was from Chicago and my father spent vacations there with an older cousin named Bill.

Both these tales took place when my father was twelve or thirteen years old, his cousin Bill 19, during Prohibition. Bill took my father to a popular drinking establishment in Chicago called Ivanhoe’s. My father said it had an extremely clever set-up: the bartender could push a button and the bar would crash down a floor breaking all the bottles, leaving no proper evidence for the police.


My dad’s cousin Bill’s family had a summer cottage on the far tip of a peninsula in Lake Michigan, a place called Ellison Bay. Rick and Bill were alone there in late September. One morning very early the two boys heard a boat being rowed to shore right in front of their cottage. Rick and Bill scrambled into their clothes and went outside to see who was there. There were four hulking big guys hoisting huge burlap bags toward the cottage. They asked if they could leave the bags beneath the porch till they could get back at nightfall. Both boys nodded in assent and one of the men pulled a bottle of liquor from his stash in the burlap bag. They sat in a circle and took turns sampling the hooch and then the men disappeared as quickly as they had appeared. This was my father’s first drink of liquor. He likes to show me the exact place on the map where this action took place.