Dayton Stories Project
Story Circle Session #092995
Twin Towers Place
Dayton, Ohio
September 29, 1995
Prohibition and the Great Depression
Interviewer: Marilyn Shannon Recorder: Eliza Wilson Transcriber: Holly Bergman Transcribe Typist: Sue Broadstock
Participants: Betty Hamilton, Rhonald Karns, Martha McCrate, Sister Mary Rose McCrate, Norma Patnode, Norma Sullivan
This session lasts approximately 1 hour and 4 minutes.
Due to its length the interview has been split into two parts.
PART ONE
PART TWO
The following transcription of the session has been edited, with repeated phrases or interruptions deleted to make the text flow more smoothly. It is suggested that visitors who find the text interesting take the time to listen to the audio portion of this session. A more detailed text will eventually be added.
Marilyn Shannon opened the story circle. The topic of Prohibition was agreed upon for storytelling.
Norma Sullivan
I was very young in the latter part of prohibition, so I only know what was told to me. My uncle made wine and home-brew. At one time, he was told that somebody was gonna report him. One of the neighbors told him to beware. So what he did, he made a false attic from behind his closet. And he got his wine keg up there, and they drank up the home brew. And the man that reported him, the revenuers or whatever they were, they went to this man’s house accidentally. And he was a teetotaler, and he was highly insulted they would come and check him, when he was the one that reported it. So they never did go over and check on my uncle. And I never saw that room until I was older, I didn’t even know it was there. I lived with my aunt when she was a widow. It was just a little space under the eaves, and he nailed a couple boards together and put the hinges on the inside so they couldn’t see, and then they had a hook, they hooked it. Then he put a sweater over the hook, so if they did come, that he wouldn’t get caught.
Betty Hamilton
Well, everybody made booze at that time. We made it, big beer. Gosh, put it down in the basement and had it covered down there, especially for beer. Finally I heard a ‘pop, pop, pop’ and I thought, “Well, what in name of sense is that?” I went down to investigate, and oh, gosh, all over the basement, oh, did we have a mess. It was good, thought. It was just as good as regular beer. Gosh, we always made wine. During Prohibition, they never came around and bothered anybody, really. Unless, I imagine, if you get noisy or something. But we were never investigated. We always made beer, and we always made wine. Dandelion wine. Grape wine.
Marilyn Shannon
I was really a baby, probably, during Prohibition. I suspect that my father probably made beer. Because we had some bottles and a caper that were down in the basement. And by the time I was young, we were making root beer. And that also would go off from time to time. I don’t think he bought all that just to make root beer. But we liked the root beer a lot. It has a different taste from the root beer that you buy, but I always thought that was a real treat to have it. And I loved the bottles, too, the bottles were interesting. That kind of clear glass.
Marty McCrate
My mother was so much against drinkin’ beer and wine and stuff, that if my dad did bring anything in, she pitched it out.
Rhonald Karns
My mother and my stepfather were chased different places because they made home brew. They moved all the time so finally, when I was 10 years old, we moved to 517 Bolander Avenue. Great big house and we set up five, ten and twenty gallon crocks. I had a half-brother and a half-sister and they’d send us out. We scoured the neighborhood for any bottle, didn’t make any difference what it looked like as long as it had a lip on that the caps would fit on without leaking. They sold it for 25 cents a bottle, about seven ounces. We scoured the neighborhood and bring the bottles home and Mother would wash them and scald ‘em good, she had a bottle washer. Then we’d set them in the bathtub so they’d drain. Most of the time I got to be the one that got to fill the bottles. We’d do it early in the morning and I’d go to school and have to be sent home because I couldn’t remember what the teacher said. He’d send me to the principal, then the principal would send me home. In those days, 1926, they had the ball games, we had a side yard and it was kind of a way station. They’d go to Ankeney’s out on Salem Pike, was a square dance, a round dance. My mother’d rather square dance than eat. She’d leave me at home. I wasn’t tall enough to reach the table. Now I knew what quarters were and that, and they’d send me down in the basement after a beer, and I’d go down and I’d bring it up and they’d have to help me put the bottle on the table. I’d collect the quarters and I’d put that money in a certain place and they’d give me tips. When mom’d come home, I had more money that she had! The people would come in and they had card tables set up in the regular place, they’d come in and play cards and then they’d all get together and go out to Ankeney’s and dance. And we had, what was his name, Dillinger, he come in there. He was dressed just like anybody else. If it was warm in the evening, they’d take their coats off and lay ‘em upstairs in the bedroom. We had the radio outside, get the ball games, and they’d sit around and drink beer, right out there outside! And listen to the ball games or the fights. Mom would leave me at home, I dunno why.
Betty Hamilton
You know, I wouldn’t have had my second child if it hadn’t been for home brew. I wouldn’t’ve had Jane Ann, my second child. I couldn’t keep anything down. I was sick all the time. I had shots and everything else, and still nothing would stay down. They put me to bed for two weeks in order to try to get my stomach settled. Finally the doctor asked me if we made home brew, and I said, “Well yeah.” He says, “Now, whenever you feel nauseated, you just take a little bit of that home brew.” And that’s what I did, and that’s how I got through my pregnancy with my child.
Norma Sullivan
I wasn’t born yet, my mother was carrying my brother who’s two years older than me. And they got diphtheria; they couldn’t give her antitoxins ‘cause she was pregnant. And my older sister and second sister and brother all had diphtheria. So my daddy was assistant to the electrician at the V.A. And he took off three weeks. And he put my sister, who was almost two, in a crib in the kitchen. And my mother, luckily, had baked a bunch of cookies and so he give her a cookie, then he’d put on his mask and gloves and go in and clean and disinfect everyday. And the doctor came twice a day because of the prgnancy. Well, when my sister go tover this, she was anemic, I guess, and they insisted that she had to have a little glass of wine at meals. And she really didn’t like alcohol, but she had to take it. Well, my uncle made the wine. So my daddy had to get a paper from the governor at the V.A. to transport that wine from one house to another. But at this time, my parents lived on the west side, so they had to bring it from the east side. And they had to pass inspection to bring the wine over so that she could have her wine that saved her life. And she doesn’t like alcohol to this day.
Marilyn suggested the topic of entertainment they’ve enjoyed through the years.
Sister Mary Rose McCrate
When I was a kid, I can remember skating a lot. I think I was maybe 11 years old when I got a pair of skates. And they were of course the kind you had to key on and key off, they weren’t shoe skates like today. You had to wear they key around your neck because they’d loosen up from the vibrations, and they you’d have to sit down on a stoop someplace and tighten ‘em up again. And when we moved over to McReynold’s street, right over there on the other side of the highway, the house still stands, we used to love to go down the block to skate because there was three old ladies that lived in this big, big house and they were maiden women I presume, at least there seemed to be no other family there. And they had what we used to call soapstone sidewalks that was real smooth and it would get rivulets through it because of water but it was very smooth. It was also very silent when you skated on it and it was fast skating. So we would go down there, and we would skate until they would happen to look out the window and see us, and chase us away. We would sometimes get by, we’d skate for the longest time before they knew we were there because you couldn’t hear it. But they would claim that we were disturbing, one of the women was supposedly sick. And so we would skate. We would even do things like if there were little patches of ice on the sidewalk, try to skate through the ice to see if we could do that without spilling ourselves. But we had a great deal of un doing that. Then we would also skate in the street during the day when there wasn’t traffic, because they had repaved it and we’d go out and skate on the street. Not very smart, but we used to do it.
Eliza Wilson
When I was young it was a regular fad, skating. Instead of going to a movie, the girls and fellas would have dates, that was then I was a kid. They would skate on the street instead of going to the movies. That was their date . We used to have a ball, skating at night.
There was general talk about the change in skating and speed and safety.
Rhonald Karns
Being crippled, I wasn’t allowed that pleasure [skating]. I wasn’t allowed to play ball, nobody would choose me. Couldn’t play football, none of those things. I got started with the Dayton Daily News. I had 125 customers - that’s before I went to Fairview High School. Then I got into the magazines, “Liberty”, “Saturday Evening Post”, “Ladies Home Journal” and all those. They were only a nickel. My mother’s porch, on Thursdays, looked like Wilkie’s News downtown. Then the Daily News offered a contest. And I went out- now whether they did it because I was crippled or what- but if we could get twelve new customers, and six would stay for six months, that was the trip won. The contest was for the World’s Fair in Chicago in ‘34, ‘34 - ‘36, I think. And I won six trips! I tell you, I was delivering papers and magazines up till eight o’clock at night. I won six trips and I sold four and took my mother to Chicago, to the World’s Fair. We went down to the train station and went up the steps to the platform, got on a train and rode all the way to Chicago. My mother liked chop suey. And I think she ate more chop suey on that trip! We stayed in a hotel, I think we got four days, if I can remember rightly. And we really had a great time. That’s when Mae West and the fandancers were there in Chicago. And I was just old enough to enjoy them. Balloon dancers and that.
Norma Sullivan
When we were little, of course, we were like everyone else-being the depression, not much money. But my mother always found something for us to do, to entertain us. We had rainy day games and sunny games and stuff. On a rainy day, we’d get out on the front porch and take this old phonograph and the horn was missing, so we made a horn with cardboard. And we had these records, and we’d wind up the old victrola and play those things for hours. And we had this one record called, “Harrigan,” you know, H-A-double R-I. Well, we sang “Sullivan” to that. We’d say our last name to that and the melody went right along. But that and we’d get into all kinds of costumes in the attic and play dress-up. Or my mother, when she fired up the furnace in the wintertime, she’d let us make applesauce on the register ‘cause when you first fire the furnace, it’s VERY hot. She’d give us a little pan and cut some apples up for us and put some water in and cinnamon and we’d put it on the register and when it got so hot we’d stir it. And put it on our doll dishes and we just thought that was something.
Norma Patnode
Of course, we didn’t ever date. There was a group of us, there was eight fellas and eight girls, and we just ran in a group. And we always stuck together. And I came from a small town of Lima, and nobody had any money, none of us had money. But we were lucky, because the Elks Lodge up there opened up their big dance hall, and we could get in there and dance for a quarter. All night long, we’d dance for a quarter. And this was with live bands, I mean it wasn’t canned music or anything or this honky-tonk stuff. It was Miller’s and all the old bands that we used to listen to. And we’d dance and nobody’d argue, nobody fought, we were just a group of people that always had a lot of fun. They were all Catholic kids. We got into a lot of silly stuff that we weren’t supposed to. And the City Park had a big hall that was just an open place. We could go there and we would dance for two cents a dance. We had to pay two cents a dance there. And we had another place, it was about five miles out in the country. We always walked, nobody ever had cars. There was no such things as cars in those days. They had cars, but I mean, we were all too poor to have ‘em. And we’d walk out to Springbrook. There was a pool out there in the daytime and we’d swim and at suppertime we’d eat sandwiches and stuff and then we’d dance out there. There was a band out there too. I remember some of the kids ushered movies. And we had a little place that we’d go to have ice cream. We’d all go in there and we’d sit and sit and Mr. Diprado, he would get tired of us after while. And our dishes would be sittin’ there with food in ‘em, and he’d come over and take ‘em all off, “All right it’s time for you to leave kids.” He’d get tired of our noise. But we had a lot of fun. Did any of you make balloon wine? Well, to make balloon wine, you got canned grape juice, that purple grape juice, you know. And you’d put it in this jug and you’d put a couple raisins in it, and water. And you put a balloon on the top of it and you’d make holes in the balloon. Then you’d put that up in the attic or someplace out of the way and leave it sit for a couple weeks. And when that thing’d pop, well you knew that wine was ready. The only trouble I got into wasn’t my fault. I got pushed into the pool at the park. I was three years old, I never forgot it, even though I was that young. Some fresh kid came along and I was sitting on the edge of the pool and down I went. I thought I was going to DIE, you know, ‘cause I was young, I didn’t understand how to get out of there. Finally came to my rescue, so I’m alive today.
Rhonald Karns
We were still there on Bolander Avenue. There was six or eight of them sitting and they had four tables out in the yard. And they were sitting there drinkin’ the home brews and listenin’, the ball game was on, Cincinnati was playin’. All of a sudden a BIG scar come up the alley and stopped. Blocked the alley. And a couple other cars came around the street side and stopped and blocked the alley entirely. And they got out and they come over. It was Walter Beechler that had a fireworks company out on Union Road. Even though he owned the fireworks company, he was on the Dry Squad, as they called it. And he came up and told my stepfather, he said, “I hear you’re makin’ home-brew and that you’re selling it.” I can’t remember what went on, there was a scuffle, but he had a small silver-like hammer, claw-hammer like. And he went down into the basement, and he went around that 20-gallon jug, and he picked a spot, and he just took that hammer and brought it up and hit a certain spot, and there was a pie-shaped piece that come out of that 20-gallon jug and ALL the beer flowed out on the floor. And no way you could fix it because he knew exactly where to hit it. They took my stepfather down, and he hadn’t had a drink-he wasn’t one to drink much. The only thing they could charge him with was drunkenness, and it cost him 10 or 15 dollars. But they couldn’t charge him with anything else.
Norma Sullivan
Well I had [???] until I was 18, so I wasn’t allowed to do TOO much, but when I got to 18 I really had a good time from then on. And I worked a the telephone company before I graduated and I joined the Red Cross and worked in the Dye Kitchen at St. Elizabeth and I made a lot of friends there. And my girlfriend worked for Red cross and she worked on the flight line at the field. And my other girlfriend was in the nurse’s cadet corps. Well, we all had uniforms on and we’d be downtown on Sunday afternoon and go to the shows. And one day, we were in the show and a group of girls from Julienne were all dressed up and they were in the audience and they were leaving and the usher was behind them. And he more-or-less invited ‘em out ‘cause they laughed and giggled so hard. But what happened was, they weren’t used to getting dressed up in a uniform all day in high school. And they were dressed up and the one girl had a veil on. And she forgot she had a veil on an blew her nose right through the veil. And they laughed so hard the usher invited them out. Later on we saw them down at the King Cole and they were still carryin’ on.
Betty Hamilton
When I was a kid, all we could do was sing. So we’d entertain ourselves by singing and playing the piano. Playing the victrola. That’s all the entertainment we ever and when I was a youngster. We used to sit out on the front porch and sing, and all the neighbors would come out and sit on their front porch and listen. We were some good singers, too. My brother-in–law, boy, he had a beautiful voice.
Marty McCrate
[About the depression] My father had a grocery store and five houses. And he gave food away to the people in the neighborhood until he was completely broke. And they came in and they took EVERY stick of furniture out of our house. Every stick. Didn’t leave us beds or anything. I just wonder sometime what ever happened to all that stuff. They must have just put it into barns and stuff someplace. They just walked in and took everything. We weren’t the only ones that lost like that, I mean, the whole town was like that. My father made me a dressing table, and made me different things for in my room. The depression years hit everybody. My brother was about twenty years older than me, I was the youngest. He said, “Ah, don’t worry about it. This was never home.” But it was home to me, because he had left home and been living in California and come back.
Betty Hamilton
It was the same way with Union Trust, it was a big bank that had a big building down there right next to the courthouse. And that went under. And nobody knew anything about it. And I had a girlfriend that worked at that bank, and she thought everything was okay too, you know. She went in that morning, they said the bank’s closed, went under, you’re out of a job. My dad lost quite a bit of money in that bank, and I had an uncle that lost quite a bit of money. They got some back, but not near what they had in. Ten cents on the dollar, I think. People’d raid the alleys in back of the grocery stores, see if they could get anything to eat back in there. We was never in the food line. I was married at the time. My husband was working at Frigidaire, he was a plumber on the outside. And when the depression came in, course they were the first ones out. The carpenters and the electricians and the plumbers, they’re the first hit, that worked on the outside. Well my husband happened to get into Frigidaire as a plumber. But he wasn’t even working a full week. He’d work two, three days a week and all he brought home was $38. But we didn’t have to go in the food lines or anything. Managed to get along with what we had. People next door to use was put out on the street. She had a baby but she had four children and the baby was just two months old when they were put out. It was in October, it was snowin’ and cold as all get out. And they were put out on the street. They lived with us for a month. We had beds all over the place. We couldn’t leave them stranded like that. I told them to bring their beds into our place and we brought the cribs for the babies. We had beds everyplace. He was an electrician, see, on the outside, and my husband finally got him in at Frigidaire as an electrician and they finally got on their feet then. There was some good people too, as far as that’s concerned. On Virginia Avenue there was a double house for rent, part of it was for rent. So the lady said, “Oh, Betty, we’ve been here for so long now. We’ve got enough money, I think we can pay rent for this coming month.” So that’s how they got the place then, finally got on their feet then. Imagine putting a family out with four kids, on the street like that.
Norma Sullivan
My father carried mail five days and only got paid for three during the depression.
Marty McCrate
I took care of some woman’s child. I’d go to work at seven in the morning and work until seven o”clock, did their housework and everything else, for a dollar a day. And was glad to get it.
Norma Sullivan
I remember when I was working for the telephone company, I wasn’t quite 21 yet, and you had to have a food stamp, you know, for alcohol. And I was just popping off, you know, we were walking down the street, and I said, “The first thing I’d do when I get to be 21, I’m going to stand in line at the liquor store.” And some voice from behind me, some man said, “Get me a fifth when you’re there, honey.” I was really embarassed.
Sister Mary Rose McCrate
I was teaching school in my second year of teaching before I was old enough to vote. I don’t even remember who was running back then. That was about ‘56, it would’ve been. It was Eisenhower, maybe. Truman was earlier because Truman was the one responsible for dropping the bomb. Dad was always a staunch democrat and I always thought Mom was too, she kept that part of her life hidden. She seemed to agree with Dad. I said that I was going to vote-for I think it might have been Eisenhower. I don’t know why I though he should be good, don’t remember who I was voting against. But anyway, Dad was very convince that we would have another depression if we elected a Republican. Turned out to be not so. Because at the time I was under a religious name, but we were told, and I don’t know how true that was, but we were warned that if we went in and we signed our name when we registered as “Sister whatever”, that w would be risking having the precinct’s votes run out because of using an assumed name. And so I always voted under my legal name, which was my birth name, “Mary Rose McCrate”. Even thought, when we went back to our birthdates, we had to legally have it changed back and had to have the papers notarized. But they warned us against using “Sister” when we voted because they said somebody looking for an excuse to have a recount would throw your vote out. And they would just throw the whole precinct out, I guess. “Cause they’d never know which one’s yours.
Marilyn Shannon
The first president that was elected after women got the right to vote was Harding. And people say, well, one reason he got is because he was handsome, and the women-that was their first election-and so they, maybe voted it in because he was handsome. Women not knowing anything else. I don’t know if that’s true or not.
Norma Sullivan
I remember when Roosevelt came and he was going to be in a parade down Springfield Street. So I went over to my girlfriend’s house and she fiddled and fiddled and fiddled, and didn’t get ready and didn’t get ready, and by the time we got down to Springfield Street, he’d passed. And we were going to ask for autographs when the limo slowed down. Some kids got autographs but we missed him totally. I didn’t even get to see ‘im because of her. I was really aggravated with her for a long time. Eleanor Roosevelt had a cousin, and she lived in a house on Findlay Street by Fourth, which later on my sister and brother-on-law bought. And when she came to town, she didn’t visit her there, but the cousin went down to the hotel and they had a visit. It was in the paper. But this lady owned the house which my brother-in-law bought. I think it might’ve been Bertha Kemp, ‘cause she lived there; her daddy built that house for her, she was a maiden lady and taught at Franklin School for 40 years.
One of the big moments in our life was the day that Kennedy, Jack was killed. Do any of you remember what you were doing at that precise moment?
Norma Sullivan
Oh, yes. That was a horrible day. I was on the switchboard at McDonald’s, and we had automatic ringing cords. If you didn’t get ‘em down fast enough, they would ring back in. And at that time, we had this new board with long cords, and they were interlaced so that you could hardly find ’em. And the people, please tell your family, don’t call in. They would call out, but don’t have ‘em call back in, ‘cause they were calling home and saying, “Listen to the news broadcast and call me back.” Well, it was a mess. We couldn’t get the cords down fast enough, and sometimes they’d be so interlaced we’d pull the wrong one down. And we were so exhausted at the end of that afternoon. It was just one line after another, one cord after another. It was the most horrible day I ever spent in the place.
Marty McCrate
We were in Toledo, at a Hybernion convention. And Sandy was at a business meeting, and I had gone back tot he hotel and I was asleep and when I woke up, all was flashing, the radio, TV. Boy, that was a chock. I mean, that’s all you heard. It’s terrible to think that in our day and age, something like that could happen.
Norma Sullivan
You know the day he was buried, when they had the mass, a black lady called in, and she said, “Honey, I’ve been watching that mass and it is so beautiful.. Where can I go to take instructions for the Catholic church?” And I told her to go to Sacred Heart. And she thanked me. And she was SO impressed with that funeral.
Sister Mary Rose McCrate
I was teaching school in Cloverdale, Ohio, when President Kennedy was killed. And one of the children had been excused early to go to the doctor. And she went out to the car to meet her mother, and within minutes, she was back and she burst back into the room and she shouted. And it was horrible, because I had third, fourth and fifth grade, all in one room, it was a little country school and it had 54 children in those ages in that room. And she came in she just shouted out, “President Kennedy was just shot.” Not only did I have to deal with my own shock, but I had all these children to deal with. It was just a really horrible kind of thing, ‘cause they were just almost panic-stricken, you know, and so on. So I had to keep them calm and also deal with my own shock at the same time. And then I remember we did not have school, until after the funeral. They just called off school. Everything shut down for three days. Everything, I think, except the radio and TV, I think, shut down. And we didn’t have a TV set over in the convent, ‘cause back in those days we didn’t have TV sets. But we had a TV set up in the school that we used for educational television. And I remember that we sat up there for most of those three days, camped out in front of that TV set. The whole nation seemed to be in a state of shock for three days, you know, until after the funeral. But I remember sitting up in that big, open room that we had on the top floor of the school, just mesmerized by everything that was going on around the death and the funeral and all that stuff. It’s one of those events you just don’t forget in your life.
Marty McCrate
I can remember one time I saw Al Capone. I was up in my bedroom, a’laying on the bed, and the window was right there, but I was layin’ on the bed readin’, and heard all this commotion goin’ down the alleyway. About a half a dozen fellas went down, and they had sawed-off shotguns, just like you hear about. And the police right in back of ‘em. Lima is a town that is in a square like this, and it has railroads on all sides. So we called ‘Little Chicago.’ It was noted for carrying on in there. Then in the south end of Lima, just down the street from us, there was an Irish lady and she had a tolerance hotel, and that’s where they all hung out. And she was very religious herself. And she had a big statue of the blessed mother on the end of her bar. And every Sunday morning, thought, she’d rout out everybody and make ‘em go to church. And this gang went down to alley and I was upstairs there watchin’ it. And my brother was out in the hayloft in the barn, and he was watchin’ it too. A wonder we didn’t get shot.
