Plains Folk: A bootlegger tale worth telling
By JIM HOY
© Plains Folk
By the time I was old enough to remember Prohibition, that noble but doomed experiment in social engineering was over, even though elements of it lasted here in Kansas until I was well into my adult years. For some reason, however, even though the bootleggers were the ostensible bad guys, I always have found stories about bootlegging entertaining. I suppose it's the social-bandit effect, the appeal of the misunderstood individual taking on the powers that be. Most outlaws, especially 50 years after their exploits, tend to be mythologized into Robin Hoods, no matter how awful their actual deeds may have been.
At any rate Gerry Brazil, a Kansan by birth who ended up in Michigan, recently related a Prohibition story that he often heard his father tell. Brazil was reared in Greenbush in southeast Kansas, near the town of Brazilton, which was named after his great-grandfather who had donated some land for a town and a railroad stockyard. Here, with Brazil's permission, is the letter he sent me:
"When the Volstead Act was passed, the Federal government set up bonded warehouses to impound the existing liquor supplies. One of these was in Springfield, Mo. Next door to the warehouse was an automotive garage. As with most garages, cares were coming and going all day long. What a trained eye would have noticed was that these were not 'regular' cars, but they were the specially adapted cars favored by bootleggers. Someone had dug a tunnel from the garage to the padlocked warehouse and the bootleggers had access to a big supply to draw from.
"The Brazils had a relative who operated a saloon in the oil field boom-town of Drumright, Okla. He had regular deliveries coming to him from the supply in Springfield. The drivers of course didn't always drive the same route, but sometimes they came through Greenbush.
"The cars generally had cutouts on the exhaust systems and the guys (usually including my dad) hanging around the general store could hear them coming for miles. Often the driver would pull into the barn behind Shay's General Store, shut the door, and come in for a bottle of cold pop. He'd sit there with the guys hanging out on the front porch and watch while the sheriff's car went by chasing him and then wait until the sheriff returned after he went as far as the county line. After the sheriff had passed on his way back to Girard, he'd drive his car out of the barn and resume his journey.
"After using this delivery system successfully for some time, somebody had a better idea. A shipment of liquor was loaded in both ends of a boxcar in Springfield and the center, where the doors were, was loaded with bales of hay. The shipment of 'hay' was consigned to my great-grandfather. When it arrived, my dad and his brothers were enlisted to unload the boxcar at night and transfer the liquor to a cistern at his grandfather's place that had been emptied to provide warehouse space.
"This arrangement gave the drivers less exposure to law enforcement, and of course law enforcement of prohibition in Crawford County always was notoriously lax. My dad said that when the warehouse in Springfield was finally opened, it was nearly bare."
