Champion of the World
Page 45
Shorty Young’s Havre gang eventually grew into nationwide suppliers. At one point they bragged that they’d ferried liquor to every state except Maine—where there were too many toll roads. They imported alcohol from Canada as well as illegal merchants all over the American west and stockpiled it in perhaps dozens of locations around northern Montana. Their stash spots included abandoned coal mines, remote cabins, dilapidated barns, the basements of schoolhouses and secret rooms in businesses they owned in town. They commandeered ranchlands and hid their vehicles inside hollowed-out haystacks, and Havre’s daily newspaper reported they even used the airplane of a local war veteran to fly the stuff in and out of state. Young himself owned both a hotel and a secret brewery, which produced beer he adorned with phony Canadian labels.
In 1923, federal Prohibition agent Addison K. Lusk wrote Montana governor Joseph Dixon about the problems he faced enforcing the alcohol ban in the state. Lusk commanded a force of around a dozen men, and the 550-mile border between Montana and Canada featured only two customs stations. Two major rail lines ran into Canada, and Lusk wrote that railroad workers showed little interest in trying to sniff out alcohol shipments. The same may have been true of many city police forces, where officers sometimes sympathized with local bootleggers over federal interlopers. Corruption and payoffs were common among both state and federal officers, and newspapers reported that bootleggers serving time in the Silver Bow county jail paid off jailers to let them run the place like a social club, complete with liquor, food service and jazz records.
By the mid-1920s the previously powerful state chapters of the WCTU and Anti-Saloon League began to lose steam. Membership declined, along with fund-raising efforts and lobbying power. In 1926, voters repealed the statewide prohibition law—in Butte, seventy-three percent voted for repeal—and in 1928 voted down an effort to reinstate it. By the early 1930s, federal prohibition enjoyed next to no support in Montana. A poll by the Literary Digest reported that eighty percent of state residents favored repeal. When Congress passed the Twenty-first Amendment to undo the Eighteenth in December of 1933, most Montanans likely responded with sighs of relief.
Concerning Montana history during the 1920s and the Butte/Silver Bow area specifically, Montana State University professor Mary Murphy and University of Montana professor emeritus David Emmons remain the authoritative sources. Murphy’s book Mining Cultures: Men, Women, and Leisure in Butte, 1914–41 is indispensable and provided many of the details for this note. Emmons’s books The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875–1925 and Beyond the Pale: The Irish in the West, 1845–1910 both provide fascinating expanded reading. In addition, Gary A. Wilson’s book Honky-Tonk Town: Havre’s Bootlegging Days gives rollicking insight into the wild, lawless times of Prohibition in northern Montana.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
So many people worked minor miracles to see Champion of the World into print. From the start, Nat Sobel and Judith Weber showed the book tremendous care and support. Their notes were invaluable. They were right about everything. The rest of the staff at Sobel Weber Associates were equally wonderful at shepherding a nervous first-time author through the chute and into the performance ring.
Any writer who lands with Sara Minnich at G. P. Putnam’s Sons has already hit the jackpot. She’s everything you want in an editor—smart, perceptive, kind, patient. I need a lot of help in all those departments. I’m indebted to her and Ivan Held for giving a quirky little book about wrestling a chance. The Putnam copyeditors saved me from a scatter-gun blast of mistakes. Any bullet holes still visible in the walls are mine alone.
Todd Robinson and his fine noir journal, Thuglit, published my short story “The Rightful King of Wrestling,” which first caught the attention of Nat and Judith. Todd published the story when he said he would and paid me right on time. He’d probably bristle at the notion, but he’s all class. Support his work.
There’s no better crew of writers, readers and critics in Missoula, Montana (or anywhere else, I’d wager), than Sarah Aswell, Dan Brooks, Erika Fredrickson, Ben Fowlkes and Jason McMackin. They all suffered through early drafts of the manuscript and the finished novel wouldn’t exist without their input. You’ll be hearing more from each of them, I promise you.
Kate Gadbow read an early version of the book and her critique made it instantly better. Her positivity gave me the courage to start querying agents.
Courtney Ellis read and read and read. She talked me off the ledge about a hundred times. She was brilliant, insightful, and she believed.
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