by Ron Thompson
As Little Trickster always said, timing is everything. Patriotism was heavy in the air, and Violet’s campaigns gathered momentum. Bars were abolished in Saskatchewan before the end of 1915, and total prohibition came into effect the following year. Also in 1916, the provincial Elections Act was amended. “No woman, idiot, lunatic, or criminal shall vote,” it had read previously, but on February 14—Valentine’s Day—the legislature deleted “woman” from that list of unworthies. With that small change, women in Saskatchewan were enfranchised.
Lamentably, with the success of their own cause, they abandoned that of the Province’s many idiots and lunatics—unless, of course, they were married to them.
(I was pleased to see Genny smile at that.)
Parallel movements for women’s suffrage and prohibition were sweeping the country. One by one, the provinces extended the vote to women. The federal government did it on a limited basis in 1917, the same year it introduced income tax. Both initiatives were viewed favourably, at least at the time.
(This time, Genny cleared her throat. Sometimes she had no sense of humour. And her mood could turn on a dime.)
Province after province went completely dry. Even Quebec eventually enacted prohibition, although its law was quickly repealed after a public outcry that could not be blamed on the federal government.
* * *
The new temperance law was a blow to the Bugelmanns’ hotel trade, but it created lucrative new opportunities for the sale of liquor. A close look at various provinces’ laws revealed a patchwork of exemptions and beggar-thy-neighbour exceptions. Manitoba and Ontario prohibited local sales of liquor, but both allowed it to be imported from outside the province. To exploit these loopholes, Sol dispatched one brother to Toronto where he set up a mail order business to serve Manitoba buyers, and another to Winnipeg to fill Ontario orders from there. Later they consolidated their operation in Montreal from where they could fill orders countrywide—until the feds banned both the production of liquor and its interprovincial trade for the duration of the war. This took prohibition national and wiped out the Bugelmanns’ mail order business overnight.
Thank goodness for loopholes. Federal law still permitted the import and export of alcohol, and Saskatchewan still allowed the sale of liquor for medicinal purposes. Sol applied for the relevant licences and established the Prairie Pure Drug Company, head office, Poplar Lake, Canada. Through the company, he bought thousands of gallons of alcohol in the U.S. and shipped it to Poplar Lake, where he and his brothers converted a warehouse near the rail yard into a processing and bottling operation. Some of their output was sold to doctors and druggists, to be prescribed and sold legally to needy patients. (The definition of “needy” was grey, with many a white coat deciding that a happy patient was a healthy patient.) The rest of the booze, by far the majority of it, was mixed, coloured, flavoured, and bottled for illicit sale in the family’s hotels and in underground gin joints across Canada. For the first time, the Bugelmanns had crossed the line on more than a petty local scale.
* * *
Genny stumbled into me when I stopped abruptly on the sidewalk.
“What’s wrong? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” I waited a moment to catch my breath. I had not brought her down this street before. We had been on all the downtown streets but it. How, I wondered, had I found my way here now?
“A ghost? What do you mean?”
“You’re kind of white.”
“Have you seen my family?”
She laughed. “Yes, they’re very white.” She followed my gaze across the street. “What is this place?”
I pointed to a boxy old three-storey. “The Brownstone Hotel. Looking as seedy as ever, too. We used to wait around back for someone to pull a six-pack for us from the off-sale. We’d give them the money up front and hope they came back out. Then we’d crack the pack right there and pay the commission, one bottle per six-pack.”
“You were underage?”
“Living on the edge, even then.”
“You’re a man of dark adventure.”
“Adventure, all right. Sometimes we’d get stiffed. They’d skip out the front with the beer, or just stay inside and drink our money up.”
“Small towns.”
“Small towns.”
It was Clinton Sturgis with whom I had waited in the Brownstone’s back lot for the return of some obliging drunk. And it was not the Brownstone that had stopped me in my tracks, but the building next to it, where Clinton had worked after school and in summer. I had been inside it many times myself.
Clinton was my ghost, my failure, but I could not tell Genny that.
“They say the Bugelmanns owned the Brownstone, back in the day. They needed outlets for all the booze they were producing. But pretty soon they had bigger fish to fry.”
* * *
The Great War ended in November 1918, and Jack Abernethy came home six months later, miraculously unwounded, at least in body. He returned to the farm and reunited with Violet whom, having secured the vote for women and the ban of alcohol, was now again organizing farm women’s groups and producer co-ops and agitating for hospitals and health care. There was no limit to her energy or appetite for progressive causes.
Prohibition came to the United States in 1920, shutting down all the distilleries that had been supplying “medical imports” to the Prairie Pure Drug Company. Sol had seen it coming and stockpiled American hooch in massive quantities. He rented warehouses in Poplar Lake, then in neighbouring towns, then in towns and cities across the prairies, filling them to therafters with bulk American booze. When there were no warehouses left to rent, he arranged with accommodating station managers to park rail tankers filled with imported liquor on their sidings until he could receive and process them at his facility.
Sol was now thinking about more than his Canadian customers. He knew that thirsty Americans would respond to prohibition as thirsty Canadians had before them. Demand below the 49th parallel would be insatiable, and he realized he was well placed to satisfy it. All he had to do was smuggle his American “medicinal imports” back into America.
Once again, circumstances and loopholes seemed to oblige Bugelmann interests. At the very moment that prohibition came into effect in the States, it ended in Canada. National prohibition had been a temporary, war-time measure, and when it expired the production and distribution of liquor became legal again under federal law—although the provinces could still ban sales within their own jurisdictions.
“I’m getting confused,” Genny said.
“You need a drink.”
The Bugelmanns immediately relaunched their interprovincial mail order business to serve Canadian demand. They also set up bonded warehouses for export sales, and from them, ran American booze back across the border until they ran through their massive stockpile. Then they began to produce raw hooch themselves.
Once again, Poplar Lake was the epicentre of their operation. Sol established the Aspen Bottling and Distribution Company, placed orders for a dozen giant vats, and bought a bottling line that could fill a thousand bottles an hour. Raw boozewas soon flowing off the line. Any single batch might be labelledGlenlivet, Jack Daniel’s, or Johnnie Walker, but it was all the same: liquid gold. Now the Bugelmanns were into the volume game, and they needed distribution. Sol and the boys looked into partnerships south of the border.
Times were good in Poplar Lake. Not since the days of the Great West Colonization & Settlement Company had there been such a boom. Local farmers found a ready buyer for all their rye and barley, and there were plenty of jobs in bottling and cartage. The Deeside and other hotels were full as pin-striped American “businessmen” came to town with their henchmen and flooziesto talk business with Sol.
Many local folk took a dim view of this type of prosperity, especially when things turned violent, and with so much money sloshing around, so many people in the
know, that was inevitable. There were heists and robberies and beatings never reported to the police. Entire shipments were hijacked, entire warehouses were cleared out in the night. It became necessary to take precautions. Soon there were a lot of people brandishing guns around town and on the roads leading to it.
Inevitably there was bloodshed. Sol’s own brother-in-law Marty, who managed a hotel and a bonded warehouse down near the border, was gunned down—murdered. He had just received payment for a shipment from a buyer. The killers took the money (six thousand dollars, a fortune in those days) along with the booze and left Marty in a pool of blood.
It was one thing to turn a blind eye to bootlegging. Murder in the street was something else. There was an immediate outcry of indignation—led by that tireless crusader, Violet Abernethy. Why, she thundered, could local distillers produce and export liquor, when it was illegal to sell it within the province? She had a point of logic there. It was clearly a loophole, one that had been convenient for the politicians to ignore. But now, the question was out in the open, and with people (albeit bootleggers) dying in the street, the public was angry and concerned. Violet, the persistent suffragette and advocate for change, was a popular figure in the province, and she persisted with her latest campaign. (How she loved campaigns!) She needled and shamed and embarrassed the powers that be in Regina and Ottawa until they had no choice; they finally moved to close the loopholes that the Bugelmanns had exploited to great advantage—thereby stripping away the flimsy legitimacy of their operations in Poplar Lake. Overnight, the town lost its place at the centre of a booming business empire.
Sol was neither naïve nor sentimental. He wasted no time lamenting his fruitless investment on fickle politicians; he did not mourn the good old days, or mope over lost opportunities. Rather, he leaped to exploit the present one, which was still considerable. He picked up virtually overnight and relocated to Montreal, where the family had bought a distillery—a legal one—to provide cover for their cross-border activities. He left a man in Poplar Lake to manage their local property and wind it down.
Prohibition had made the Bugelmanns rich. Now they purchased legitimacy on their new home turf with good works, charitable donations, and shrewd investments in political capital. Soon they were known as industrialists, not bootleggers. Sure, they were a bit rough around the edges, but within a generation they were pillars of the eastern establishment.
* * *
We were standing now in front of the Deeside Hotel, or what was left of it, Genny hanging on my word—and my arm, and for a moment I imagined myself in pinstripes and a raccoon coat.
Her eyes swept over the site of the demolished hotel, its lot levelled and overgrown with weeds.
“It burned down a couple years ago,” I said.
A shame, it was felt around town. The venerable old gin joint, smuggler’s emporium, and whorehouse had become run down over the years, as railway travel and the downtown core declined. “It was an Indian bar when I was a kid,” I recalled.
Genny dropped my arm, and I knew why, but I was on a roll and forged ahead. Before the building burned, new owners had purchased it for nothing and announced plans for a complete renovation and makeover. They would retain its architectural features but it would be modernized and expanded, converted into a spa, a convention centre, a five star destination resort with geothermal pools and English high teas in the afternoon.
Luckily, the owners, known only as a numbered company, had insured the building heavily only a week before the blaze. Genny suddenly guffawed. She turned and grabbed me by the shoulders. There was a triumphant look on her face. “How do you know all these details? The recent history? You couldn’t possibly know all this. You were in England with me!”
The intensity of her gaze caused me to blink, and when she saw that she began to laugh manically, repeating, “I knew it! I knew it!” again and again.
“Of course I was with you,” I said after a moment. “Victor told me about it last time I was home. He was the local rep for the investors. He was privy to the whole redevelopment plan. Geez, it’s not like I could make any of this up!”
Genny’s smile faded. She looked uncertainly from me to the site of the former Deeside Hotel.
The rail siding across the street was still in use, but the station and most of the warehouses had been torn down. I showed Genny where a line of grain elevators had stood just a few years before. With their boxy towers, closed belfries, and long angular lines, they were prairie icons, temples to wheat. There had been three left on my last visit. Now there was only one, its paint faded, the Wheat Pool logo barely visible on its four sides. The plan was to demolish it also, but some local crank had petitioned for its designation as an historic site, along with the last remaining warehouse next to it (it had once housed the Prairie Pure Drug Company). Everyone in town was up in arms against this crazy person. They wanted rid of all these old eyesores. Besides, it would cost thousands to conserve the warehouse, and thousands more for the elevator, for which there was no conceivable use now that larger, more efficient grain terminals were being built on cheaper land out in the countryside.
“But isn’t the Wheat Pool farmer-owned?” Genny asked incredulously. “A co-op? Wouldn’t they want to preserve it?”
I smiled at her. Oh Genny, Genny. You can’t stand in the way of progress. Out here, people understand that. They know how the world works.
Wisely, I did not say this out loud.
We turned our backs on the elevator and walked up a street along the edge of the old downtown, past the old co-op creamery (derelict), a Ron Lancaster Donuts outlet (bustling) and the old credit union (torn down).
CHAPTER 12
Itossed and turned all night, my mind alight, disturbed by flashes of memory. I dozed but fitfully and was wide awake whenGenny slipped out of bed at dawn. I lay still and watched her dress and just as she was about to leave I startled her by speaking.
“Wait. I’ll come with you.”
Before we ran we stretched on the dewy grass and did warm ups. She was focusing hard on the core. Within minutes, my stomach was a painful knot. I tried not to let on.
At breakfast it was just my mother and us. Dad was golfing, Simon was still in bed. “I heard him come in,” I said. “It was pretty late.”
“It was after three,” Mom said. “He was out with his friend David. At least he didn’t drive home. His car’s not here. He must’ve left it wherever he was.”
“Maybe in a ditch?”
She eyed me severely. “Genny? A poached egg?” “Uh, yes, please, Edie . . . I can do it.” No, no. Mom insisted. Her guest, her kitchen.
A little while later Genny turned to me. “Where are we going today?”
We had four days left and I was running out of town to show her. I had to think for a moment about what was left to see.
“How’s about I show you the site of the Greatest Show on Earth This Side of the Beaver Hills?” Genny looked at me blankly.
“The fairgrounds?” Mom said. “Let me drive you.”
“Naw. We’ll walk.”
* * *
“This fair,” I told Genny, gesturing to encompass its full extent, “is huge. This whole area is packed. People come from miles around. There’s a Ferris wheel that’ll make you puke.”
“What fun that must have been.”
I studied Genny’s face to discern her meaning until she finally smiled and took my arm.
The Poplar Lake Fair and Exhibition was always in early July and now, in mid-August, the barkers were long gone, the rides and booths dismantled, trucked, and reassembled elsewhere many times since. The grounds were abandoned, the grass trampled, browned, and littered with trash.
“You know, I’m beginning to recognize a pattern in everything you show me.”
The fair had been held continuously (save for the year of the Great Influenza, and the diarrhea scare
of 1937) since the early nineteen-aughts. Back before travelling midways arrived on the prairies, it was a rodeo, and there was a powwow on the first day, with a parade through town to the fairgrounds where bonfires were lit and drumming lasted into the night. The greatest fair ever was in 1911, when Violet Abernethy organized a peace and reconciliation ceremony in honour of her neighbour, Chief Pîwiwisakedjak, the great steward of his people who was then in his dotage and in visible decline. Violet had approached Sol Bugelmann to sponsor the event, and he’d agreed. At the time he was courting Violet, and he was known to be thick with the chief anyway.
For three days the fairgrounds resounded with Cree drums and chants, with fiddles, bagpipes, and accordions. Dancers fromthe reserve mingled with Celtic step-dancers from town, with Austrians in lederhosen, and Ukrainian peasants invited for the first time to dance in their adopted country. Some of the local ladies, recent arrivals themselves (and thus residing in temporary quarters at the Deeside), performed an impromptu can-can, which proved a crowd favourite.
On the final day, the doddering guest of honour stood before a polyglot assembly of Britons, Scandinavians, Galicians, and Poles, of Germans, Belgians, Russians, and native-born; as well as Sammy Wong, the town’s lone Chinaman—
“Chinese,” Genny snapped.
. . . Chinese, who had run a laundry since railway work for his kind had ended twenty years before. Little Trickster tottered, shaky on his feet, Violet at his elbow to steady him. One of his eyes roamed wildly above their heads, the other watered freely, leaving tears flowing down one cheek. I can see the day, the old man mumbled, when we will be one. One people. I see it now, as I saw my own vision as a young man. Do not be blinded to it yourselves. Use your heads and play your cards wisely. A flush always beats a full house but a pair of twos is all you need to top a single ace or king. Be that as it may. Everything is within your grasp if you open your hearts, and reach for your destiny without fear, though it is an ember in the fire. You must reach for it and accept what follows, and bide your time until it burns no longer. This I see clearly.
