Medicinal Spirits During Prohibition

[pappymac]

I think the sheriffs sold most of the alcohol, back in those days. That's how it was around here anyway.

The first "moonshine" I tasted was actually made from rice by one of the local sheriff's deputies in SE Texas. When my dad was off the boat and home (he was a towboat captain/pilot), he would visit this one guy who happened to be a deputy. The time I went with him after I turned 18, we sat at a picnic table with the Sheriff and two other deputies and drank a couple of glasses. The legal age in Texas was 18 back then. (As opposed to Louisiana where the legal age was being able to see over the bar.)

 

[Briar Lee]

J. W. Ray was a shirtail cousin of mine on my father’s mother’s side, and he died from one sip of moonshine when he was 15 years old going to a Christian Church pie supper.

Being a true Christian boy to his last breath, he refused to play Judas and name the moonshiner. He died blind, bleeding from both eyes, in agony after three days of suffering.

His preacher Guy Howard reached the moonshiner before the night riders.

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And only because the moonshiner crossed over into Benton County, was why he died of old age. In Hickory, Polk, St Clair or Cedar counties he’d have wandered off in the woods one day and never been found.

It made me never, touch one drop of moonshine.

 

[SBC]

I try to take my family each summer to Washington Island -- a community of about 700 people in Lake Michigan off the tip of Wisconsin's Door Peninsula. It was settled by Icelanders in the 1830s (and in many ways still evidences its Icelandic patrimony).

A Danish immigrant by the name of Tom Nelson founded a dancing hall in the late 19th century. Following the 18th amendment, Tom got himself a pharmaceutical license in order to sell Angostura bitters by the shot glass as "a stomach tonic for medicinal purposes."

It became their schtick so thoroughly that even after Repeal in 1933, "Nelson's Bitters Hall" continued to market a shot of Angostura as a rite of passage for visitors to the island.

It's not bad. I keep in my wallet my Nelson's Hall Bitters Club Certificate, just so that I can establish (as one occasionally must) that I am "a full-fledged Islander and entitled to mingle, dance, etc. with all the other Islanders."