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Coast Guard Machine Guns in Narragansett Bay

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During World War I and World War II, army and navy fortifications and artillery pieces surrounded Narragansett Bay. But no shots were ever fired in anger. By contrast, from 1929 to 1933, the latter part of the Prohibition era, Coast Guard vessels in Narragansett Bay and other Rhode Island waters fired thousands of machine gun and one-pound cannon rounds. . . at fellow-Americans. In 1929, Coast Guard machine guns killed three of them.

The victims were crew members on rumrunners who, using speedy powerboats, had picked up illegal liquor from supply ships stationed at “Rum Row” — an area beyond the 12-mile zone off the coast of southern New England.

The rumrunners operated at night or in foggy conditions. On their return voyages, they would cruise up any one of the three channels of Narragansett Bay to coves, inlets or wharves assigned as drop-off points to unload their liquor.  Because buying and selling alcohol was illegal under Prohibition laws then in force, the profits from a successful voyage could be enormous.

Liquor seized by federal forces during Prohibition. Much of the whiskey came from Scotland, the gin from England and the champagne from France (Library of Congress)

Coast Guard Machine Guns

The Coast Guard became the lead federal government agency fighting the “Rum War” at sea. Coast Guard patrol boats insisted on inspecting vessels suspected of carrying illicit liquor. If a vessel did not stop after being signaled, it was targeted with live ammunition from large caliber weapons — Lewis machine guns or Hotchkiss one-pounder cannon.

The Coast Guard was in a difficult position. It had the duty of enforcing federal laws within the waters of the U.S.  It did not want lawbreakers to escape simply because they used speedboats.

If the Coast Guard had dealt primarily with speedboats illegally importing harmful drugs such as heroin, then having its patrol boats fire machine guns at fleeing speedboats would not have caused controversy. But that was not what was happening during the Prohibition years from 1920 to 1933. Drinking alcohol recreationally remained wildly popular among wide swaths of the population in the United States. That was especially true in northeastern states and especially in Rhode Island (perhaps the wettest state in the U.S. on a per capita basis).

Moreover, the crews on the rumrunners typically were not hardened criminals. Many of them were former struggling fishermen or ordinary young laborers, first- and second-generation immigrants and otherwise good people. During the desperate years of the Great Depression, they saw rumrunning as a chance for making serious money for their families.  Furthermore, I have not found a single instance where rumrunners in Rhode Island waters fired at Coast Guardsmen. Thus, having Coast Guard machine guns fire at rumrunners became a controversial practice.

Casualties of the Rum Wars

In the shooting incidents covered in my new book, Machine Guns in Narragansett Bay: The Coast Guard’s War on Rumrunners, three crew members on rumrunners were killed by machine-gun fire. One drowned after his boat was machine gunned, caught fire and the gas tank exploded. Another fell off his boat and drowned in mysterious circumstances after his boat was chased and fired at. Two other shootings resulted in serious, life-threatening bullet wounds. And eight more crew members received minor or moderate bullet wounds.

Sacks of illegal liquor are piled high on the deck of the rumrunner Whispering Winds after its seizure in 1932 off the coast of Watch Hill. Customs agents inspect the vessel at Section Base 4 in New London, Connecticut. It was said that the Whispering Winds may have been even faster than the Black Duck (National Archives)

In several incidents, hundreds of machine gun bullets were fired.  It is a wonder that more men were not killed or wounded.

Federal District Court judges in Providence sometimes lambasted the Coast Guard for shooting at rumrunners. For example, in March 1932, U.S. District Court Judge Ira Lloyd Letts, at the trial of the Rhode Island rumrunner Eaglet, criticized Coast Guard patrol boats firing 470 machine gun bullets in Narragansett Bay at Eaglet. He called it “a rather sad commentary on the administration of law in this country.”

The most sensational shooting incident in Narragansett Bay, and one of the most publicized shootings during all of Prohibition, was the machine-gunning of the crew of the rumrunner Black Duck in the early morning of December 29, 1929.  The machine guns were ordered to be fired by Boatswain Alexander Cornell, in command of the 75-foot patrol boat CG-290, ordered the machine guns fired. Cornell was the most aggressive of the Coast Guard patrol boat commanders operating out of Section Base 4 in New London, the Coast Guard’s main base for patrolling the waters of southeastern New England.

Boatswain Alexander Cornell standing on the deck of the patrol boat he commanded, CG-290, circa 1929. A Hotchkiss one-pounder cannon is at the bow (U.S. Coast Guard).

The Black Duck

In the evening of December 28, Cornell tied up his patrol boat to Buoy #2, several hundred yards south of Bull Point on Conanicut Island (known as Jamestown) in the East Passage, the main channel of Narragansett Bay.  Cornell apparently had information about the notorious rumrunner Black Duck. After meeting up with a supply ship known to have recently arrived at Rum Row, the Black Duck would return up Narragansett Bay with a large load of liquor on board, ready for sale eventually to New Years Eve partygoers.

A buoy today off the coast of Jamestown, Rhode Island, about 200 yards south of where Buoy #2 was located on December 29, 1929 (Christian McBurney)

Cornell knew that Charlie Travers captained the Black Duck.  The two had crossed paths before, but each time Travers was cruising light — with no illegal liquor on board.  Travers taunted Cornell, and the Coast Guard officer itched to seize Travers’s rumrunner.  The Black Duck was said to then be the fastest rumrunner operating in southeastern New England, able to reach a speed of more than 36 miles per hour.

In the early morning of December 29, Cornell heard the sounds of a motor.  As a boat approached through the dark and fog, Cornell could see it was indeed the Black Duck and that it was heading his way.  Cornell pointed his patrol boat’s powerful searchlight on the rumrunner and ordered crewman Lewis Pearson to man the Lewis machine gun on his boat’s port side.

Travers saw the looming Coast Guard patrol boat ahead but kept speeding to the north.  He had been searching for the clanging of the buoy so he could fix his position.  The Black Duck passed the stern of the CG-290, putting itself in between the patrol boat and the Jamestown shoreline. Cornell yelled for the rumrunner as it passed to heave to, but Travers continued.

Coast Guard Machine Gun Fire

Cornell had to make a decision in seconds.  His boat was tied to a buoy and so he lacked sufficient time to start up his boat’s engine and chase the rumrunner.  He knew it was Coast Guard policy to fire three blank warning shots with his one-pounder before he could order live ammunition to be fired.  But by the time that was done, he figured, the Black Duck would have disappeared in the fog.

Cornell made his decision:  He ordered Pearson to open fire with his boat’s machine gun.  “Let her have it,” Cornell yelled.  This was not the most precise order. Still, Pearson let loose a pan of 27 bullets.  Then his gun jammed.  He worked frantically to unjam it.

On board the Black Duck, three crewmen crouched in the pilothouse. Travers had the wheel in the engine room.  Suddenly machine gun bullets swept the deck.  The three crewmen were killed, two instantly. One died a few seconds later, after he stumbled onto the deck and collapsed.  A bullet injured Travers’s right wrist.  Somehow Travers turned his boat around, headed back to CG-290 and surrendered.

Cornell jumped on board the rumrunner and spotted the three dead crew members.  He had the bodies laid out on the deck.  He then ordered his crew to tow the Black Duck to the nearest medical facility, the army base across the channel at Ford Adams.  Travers was eventually taken to Newport Hospital and placed under guard.

A Lewis machine gun on the aft deck of the patrol boat CG-290, circa 1929 (U.S. Coast Guard).

Huge News

The shootings made headlines in newspapers around the country.  At the Seaman’s Church Institute in Newport, the Reverend Roy W. Magoun called the killings “downright murder.”  In Boston, at Faneuil Hall, a rally of anti-Prohibitionists was held, and afterwards, some men rioted and tore apart Coast Guard recruiting stations.  In New London, Cornell received a letter with a death threat, and local toughs beat up a Coast Guardsman.  Tempers ran high.

In Congress, Representative Fiorella LaGuardia spent 40 minutes complaining how Prohibition had tarnished the Coast Guard.  The New York Herald Tribune editorialized, “It may be that bloodshed is inevitable in the enforcement of a law that large sections of the country treat with contempt.  But does this excuse the raking of an unarmed rum-runner at close range with machine gun fire?”

Some Prohibition supporters applauded the Coast Guard.  An editorial in the Washington Post stated, “The rum-runners got only what was coming to them.  When smugglers are on open water, it is not only the duty of the Coast Guard to pursue and search them, but to kill them if there is no other means of overhauling them.”  (Fortunately for crew members on board rumrunners, the Coast Guard’s policy was not this extreme.)

A small flotilla of 75-foot patrol boats, circa 1927. In the first one, a Hotchkiss one-pounder is on the bow (U.S. Coast Guard)

In Rhode Island, the state attorney general’s office convened a grand jury to decide if Cornell and his crew should be tried for murder or manslaughter.  The jury decided that no charges should be brought.  It was the right decision.  The shooting deaths were not intentional.  And it was the policy of the Treasury Department to have Coast Guard vessels shoot at vessels whose crews refused to stop when warned.

Not the Only Shooting

The shooting was a tragic accident.  But it was an accident bound to happen at some point, when the Coast Guard fired machine guns near rumrunners or even at their sterns, trying to disable them.  Coast Guard records I reviewed showed that Coast Guard gunners sometimes intentionally fired at the sterns of rumrunners, in order, according to one patrol boat commander, “to disable machinery or to explode gas tanks.”

In the Coast Guard’s main investigation, the machine gunner Pearson claimed that he meant to fire warning shots.  But he made two fatal mistakes.  First, he aimed at the stern of the Black Duck and not behind it.  And second, while he testified that he meant to give a warning shot by shooting into the air about the rumrunner, he actually shot the machine gun at deck level.

Cornell claimed that the Black Duck had veered to the left just as the machine gun fire started, thus unknowingly moving into the path of the bullets.  The Coast Guard investigators adopted this explanation. It wasn’t accurate, however.  The Coast Guard’s own drawings showed that the path of the bullets came from the stern of the boat and not on its port side.

This is the incident report Boatswain Alexander Cornell submitted to his Coast Guard superiors regarding his shooting of the Black Duck on December 29, 1929 (National Archives)

A Coast Guard officer later claimed that Travers also made a fatal mistake, in addition to not heaving to.  Most rumrunners piled sacks of liquor high behind the wheelhouse. That functioned as some protection against bullets.  Travers did not do this. Whether this would have worked against the close-range firing in the case of the Black Duck is doubtful.

The Victims

As was often the case, the owners and crew members of the rumrunner were the descendants of recent immigrants and were not hardened criminals.  The Black Duck’s owner was Joe Dressler of West Warwick.  His Jewish parents had fled persecution and poverty in Eastern Europe. They had started a meat rendering business in Pawtucket, which would eventually become successful.   The Dresslers were not wealthy.

One of the crew members was Jake Weisman, the Jewish son-in-law of Joe Dressler. Charlie Travers’s parents had immigrated from the Azores to Fall River, Mass., and did not speak English.  The same held true for a third crew member, John Goulart.  The Goulart and Travers families were neighbors and friends in Fairhaven, Mass.  Goulart and Travers were fishermen by trade.  The fourth crew member, Dudley Brandt, who resided outside Boston, was an excellent boat mechanic and a married man with a family that included young children.  In short, these men were not hardened criminals who deserved to have machine guns fired at them.

The shooting of the Black Duck is the most famous shooting incident mentioned in my new book. But it is just one of 29 total shootings I discovered from 1929 to 1933. During each, the Coast Guard fired machine guns at rumrunners, striking the craft, in or near Rhode Island waters.

 

End Notes to Coast Guard Machine Guns

Christian McBurney, an independent historian, has authored several books on the American Revolutionary War. He publishes and edits The Online Review of Rhode Island History (www.smallstatebighistory.com). His books include Dark Voyage: An American Privateer’s War Against Britain’s African Slave Trade; Spies in Revolutionary Rhode Island, Kidnapping the Enemy: The Special Operations to Capture Generals Charles Lee and Richard Prescott, and The Rhode Island Campaign: The First French and American Operation of the Revolutionary War. He also co-authored World War II Rhode Island and Untold Stories of World War II Rhode Island.

Featured image: Images: Lewis machine gun By Acabashi – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lewis_Gun_at_Easton_Lodge_Gardens,_Wartime_Open_Day,_Essex,_England.jpg, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=135690456. Narragansett Bay Highsmith, Carol M, photographer. Aerial view of Conanicut Island on Narragansett Bay in the U.S. state of Rhode Island. United States Newport Newport County Rhode Island, 2018. -07-29. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2018700534/.

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Prohibition in Rhode Island: A Three-Time Failure

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Prohibition in Rhode Island, always New England’s naughtiest state, failed not once, not twice, but three times. Each time booze was banned, Rhode Islanders made it clear they couldn’t abide Prohibition.

Rhode Island temperance advocates pushed through Prohibition twice before the Eighteenth Amendment forced the entire country to go dry in 1920. During the first two tries, two ardent teetotalers’ lives were threatened. One was murdered.

The third attempt at Prohibition in Rhode Island went even more spectacularly wrong. The Coast Guard started gun battles in Narragansett Bay, ordinary Joes turned into criminals and criminals got organized — and rich. Ray Patriarca, who would ruthlessly control the New England mob from Providence, got his start as a bootlegger.

Even Al Capone was said to have had an illegal drink in Rhode Island.

Prohibition in Rhode Island

The urge to ban booze began inside Protestant churches. Temperance advocates saw alcohol as the cause of urban crime, poverty and violence. They also thought it unhealthy and expensive. They believed prohibition would lower society’s costs for poorhouses and jails, and it would improve everyone’s health and welfare. Immigrants, many of them Catholic, saw temperance as an attack on them. They weren’t wrong.

Maine in 1851 first tried Prohibition in the United States. Other states followed, but people called alcohol bans elsewhere the “Maine Law.” Catholic immigrants in Maine thought it was aimed at them. They rioted in Portland against the city’s teetotaling mayor, Neal Dow.  Maine then repealed the Maine Law after five years.

Rhode Island first tried it in 1852. The experiment lasted 11 years.

Political cartoon depicting the Woman’s Holy War against booze

That first attempt at Prohibition in Rhode Island had many detractors – including whoever murdered Burrill Arnold on May 27, 1859, in West Warwick. His friends thought his temperance activities led to his assassination, the local newspaper reported.

Nor did returning Civil War soldiers have any use for Rhode Island’s dry regime, Russell DeSimone speculated in Small State, Big History. Rhode Island repealed Prohibition in 1863, and DeSimone suggested battle-hardened veterans forced the issue.

Second Time Around

Rhode Island did it again in 1886 with a constitutional amendment. The Providence Journal predicted failure. The newspaper was correct.

The General Assembly left enforcement up to the cities and towns, and most cities and towns did little to discourage drinking. East Greenwich, however, waged a determined battle against the rum traffic. That led to the East Greenwich Outrage – attempts on the lives of two ardent prohibitionists. One found arsenic his well on the same day a small explosion went off in the house of the other.

Rhode Island Gov. John Davis missed that licensing revenue

Gov. John Davis opposed Prohibition in Rhode Island as well. The state lost $100,000 in licensing revenue and ran a deficit of $114,000, he said.  “This is not a cheerful showing from a financial point of view,” he said, according to the local newspaper.

Three years after Rhode islanders approved Prohibition, they repealed it. On June 20, 1889, 75 percent of voters (all adult males)  voted against the law.

Third Time No Charm

Rhode Island learned its lesson. When it came time for the states to ratify the Eighteenth Amendment, Rhode Island refused to go along. Thirty-six other states did, however, and Prohibition took effect for a third time on Jan. 17, 1920.

No town in Rhode Island could claim it didn’t have illicit liquor-related activities. In Providence, bootleggers moved into the Biltmore Hotel, newly built with multiple bars. They set up headquarters, and hotel staff made a little extra cash by filling guests’ flasks with illegal booze from a speakeasy nearby.

A few blocks away, the folks at Camille’s Roman Garden made hooch in the basement and served it upstairs in coffee cups to patrons seated in curtained alcoves.

General Stanton House, once a speakeasy

Illegal hooch flowed freely in Kent County: in West Warwick, Old Warwick, Warwick Neck, Arctic, Apponaug and East Greenwich.

In Charlestown, the General Stanton Inn had to add a room to handle to overflow of bootleggers and rum runners. Guests included Al Capone and Tallulah Bankhead.

The Bootlegging Life

During the Depression, Prohibition offered people a way to make a living. A former bootlegger who called himself “Ron Deaver” described how it happened in an interview with Old Rhode Island magazine in 1991 when he was 97 years old. Small State Big  History picked it up.

Hell, we didn’t have any choice. There weren’t no jobs, and if you did find a place that was hiring, there would be 500 people lined up in front of you . . . all wanting the same job. It was the time of the Depression. I lived with my sister and her husband for a while and I was waiting tables in a restaurant. I made $9.36 the first week. This was during Prohibition, and it didn’t take me long to figure that people were more interested in drinking than eating. I made a connection with old man Giles, and he would let me have five or six half pints on credit. I would then go to work, put one of the bottles in my pocket, and as I waited tables, I would drop a hint that I could get them some liquor if they wanted. I made 35 cents on every half pint at first, but it wasn’t long before I got the price up.

Nearly everybody broke the law. Deaver said he delivered three or four cases of scotch to a congressman when he visited his home in Newport. The politician had voted for Prohibition.

Ships of the Line

At first, said Deaver, most of the liquor came in by speedboat from New York or Canada, but after a while it came in by the shipload.

The ships would anchor right outside the seven mile limit, and smaller boats would go out and take on loads. Sometimes, if you couldn’t find the brand you needed, you would go shopping out there. You would pull up next to one of the ships, ask them what brands they had and how much it was. Some of the ships would actually fly a pennant showing what they had on board. Everyone’s favorite was the “Johnny” ship. It had a large pennant, must have been 20 or 25 feet long flying from the bridge, with the words “Johnny Walker…Imported” on it.

Got to where there was so many ships out there it looked like we were being invaded.

Prohibition agents examining barrels of liquor seized from a rumrunner. Image courtesy Library of Congress.

Prohibition also made mob kingpins rich. Carl Rettich ran a bootlegging operation out of his crime castle in Warwick. Police believed he killed his rival, Danny Walsh, who also got rich off bootlegging. Walsh’s girlfriend talked too freely, and police believed Rettich disposed of her, too. She may have been the first person to wear cement overshoes.

Raids and Gun Battles

The feds tried to stem the flow of hooch. They raided Twin Oaks in 1933, five years into Bill and Eva DeAngelus’ operation as a speakeasy in their modest Cranston farmhouse. He had been making moonshine in the basement, while she made meatball sandwiches upstairs.

Federal agents destroying barrels of booze

They also raided Rettich’s crime castle. They didn’t find the bodies they sought, but they eventually accumulated evidence implicating Rettich in the disappearance of Danny Walsh, a dozen Massachusetts bank robberies and four murders. Rettich went to prison, and the 11 local police officers he bribed to look the other way left the force.

Carl Rettich’s house, where Danny Walsh may have been killed. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

The Coast Guard battled rumrunners in Narragansett Bay with machine guns and cannon, sometimes within sight of spectators on shore.

An incident in Narragansett Bay on Dec. 29, 1929, helped put an end to Prohibition. Just after 2:00 a.m., a zealous Coast Guard rum chaser, CG-290,  went after the Black Duck, a speedboat carrying illegal liquor.  Boatswain Alexander Cornell opened fire on the Black Duck,   killing three men on board and wounding the fourth.

Many people sided with the Black Duck. The trigger-happy boatswain received a letter addressed to “Mr. Cornell, the Hun.” It warned him not to come ashore because, “Death is waiting for you and your crew.” A few days after the shootings, protesters held a meeting in Boston. The meeting chairman claimed 1,100 people had perished in the so-called “Rum War.”

On December 5, 1933, Prohibition ended with the ratification of the 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Rhode Island would never try that again.


Images: General Stanton Inn By JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ, M.D. – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49470434

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Lois Long, the Flapper Who Roared With the 20s

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Lois Long chronicled the escapades of a flapper let loose in New York’s speakeasies and clubs during the infancy of the New Yorker. Unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald, another writer who documented the Roaring 20s, she lived to old age in rural contentment.

But she put the stamp of an urban sophisticate on the magazine at a time when it struggled to find an identity.

lois-lane

Lois Long in a staged photo.

New Yorker writer Brendan Gill remembers her as ‘the most dashing figure on The New Yorker in the early days.’ Harold Ross, wrote Gill, never doubted that the ideal New Yorker writer ‘would be someone as like Lois Long as possible.’

She admitted, though, that she and her generation suffered the problems that resulted from youthful fast living.

Early Life of Lois Long

She was born in Stamford, Conn., on Dec. 15, 1901, to William Long, a Congregationalist minister who wrote books on wildlife and English literature, and Frances Bancroft.

Her biographer, Joshua Zeitz, wrote,

Long spent her childhood in a quiet neighborhood where fathers caught the seven o’clock train into the city and the six thirty-five back each night and mothers clipped articles from Good Housekeeping.

Her family, however, shunned convention in at least one way: Her father took his children – Lois, Brian and Cesca – to Maine in March for long sojourns in the wilderness. There he observed the behavior of wild animals and wrote about their ability to learn from each other. That provoked Teddy Roosevelt, but that’s another story.

William J. Long

Lois grew into a beautiful young woman, tall, with dark hair and violet gray eyes. After graduating from Vassar, she fled as far from the Maine wilderness as she could possibly go.

New York, New York

She got jobs working for Vanity Fair and Vogue and took a tiny New York apartment with actress Kay Francis. She smoked, she drank and, according to writer Brendan Gill, she “plunged at once, joyously, into a New York that seemed always at play—a city of speakeasies, night clubs, tea dances, football weekends, and steamers sailing at midnight.”

21, formerly a popular speakeasy

Zeitz described her escapades:

She often went to Harlem after 3 a.m. and arrive home after the stock exchange bell sounded. “Incredibly, she stuck to this routine almost every night. And she [like Kay] developed a titanium tolerance for liquor. “If you could make it to the ladies’ room before throwing up,” she chortled, you were “thought to be good at holding your liquor…It was customary to give two dollars to the cab driver if you threw up in his cab. Which happened from time to time.”

New Yorker editor Harold Ross decided she was exactly what his struggling magazine needed, and in 1925  she went to work for him at $50 a week. She signed her columns, “Lipstick.”

As Lipstick, she sometimes staggered into work at 4 a.m., dressed to the nines and drunk, and write her column. She wanted it to be fresh.

In hot weather she wrote in a slip. When the magazine moved to a new office, her desk stood so far from her assistant they brought roller skates and skated back and forth. Management finally caved and moved them closer.

Tables for Two

Her Tables for Two column ran from Sept. 12, 1925 until June 7, 1930. Long’s insouciant comments about the social whirl won her a loyal following.

In the April 17, 1926 edition of the New Yorker, Long wrote, “At the outset of my night club career my escort’s indignant query, “Who killed that squirrel?” cured me of night club chow mein for all time.”

She complained once that nothing ever happened to her. Her escorts were only “reasonably adept at the art of bar-room fighting.”

“I was at The Owl on Saturday and on Tuesday, and what did the nasty gunmen do but hold the place up on Monday night.”

Emory Buckner

She poked fun at New York’s crusading district attorney, Emory Buckner. “Really and truly, Mr. Buckner is not one bit funny any more, and he is far from considerate.  It is hard enough trying to keep in touch with those static restaurants that often stay in place for a year, but the idea of constantly learning the new names, new passwords, and new locations that will inevitably follow this new padlocking outburst of his, is a little too much.”

She also wrote about fashion, but she refused to suck up to the industry. Her first fashion column, On and Off the Avenue, appeared on Jan. 1, 1927.

“Go ahead and buy an original little Chanel around here if you want to,” she wrote.  “And watch it drop to pieces on your back the second wearing.”

Marriage, For a While

On Aug. 13, 1927, the Rev. William Long married his daughter and cartoonist Peter Arno, her fellow hell-raiser at the New Yorker.

Arno shared his wife’s taste for wild nights in Harlem nightclubs, jazz clubs, after parties and speakeasies. Ross decided to open a little staff drinking club.

arno

Peter Arno

“He thought if the magazine had its own speakeasy it would be safer for us and that the same general decorum could be kept that Mrs. [Katharine Angell] White inspired at the office.  Then [Ralph] Ingersoll came in one morning and found Arno and me stretched out on the sofa nude and Ross closed the place down….  Arno and I may have been married to one another then; I can’t remember.  Maybe we began drinking and forgot that we were married and had an apartment to go to.”

They had a daughter, Patricia, in 1929. She told Vanity Fair writer Ben Schwartz about her parents’ short marriage:

“There were lots of calls to (gossip columnist Walter) Winchell or some other columnist about nightclub fights…with my mother calling and saying, ‘Oh, please don’t print that about us,’ trying to keep their names out of the papers.”

Arno had sold three books of his cartoons and the couple could afford to live in an East Side penthouse. They hung out with New Yorker writers, theater people and the wealthy.

“Once my mother was having trouble with her Plymouth,” said Pat Arno, “and Walter Chrysler took off his evening coat, rolled up his sleeves, and fixed it himself.’”

Divorce, and 30

Lois Long filed for divorce from Peter Arno in 1931. When she turned 30 she quit writing her Tables for Two column. They’d begun to show her weariness of the partying life.

Thousands of young men who own dinner jackets, and I am always drawing someone who makes scenes in public because he once had a little cat that died and he has never got over it.

She continued to contribute fashion columns to the New Yorker, worked for the New York Evening Telegraph and, for a time, had a contract with Paramount Pictures.

 

Lois Long married Donaldson Thorburn, who worked in newspaper advertising, During World War II he served in the Aleutian Islands flying a PBY Catalina amphibious airplane. Together, they wrote a book about his wartime experience called No Tumult, No Shouting.

Thorburn died in 1952. So did her father.

Full Circle

She found her father’s last manuscript, The Spirit of the Wild, in his safe, and edited and published it four years later.

In 1953, Lois Long married a proper Pennsylvanian, Harold Fox, who managed a local branch of an investment brokerage firm.

She wrote to the Vassar Alumni Association in 1960 about her life, which resembled her childhood in Stamford. She described her two grandchildren and her “1807 Pennsylvania-Dutch farmhouse surrounded by woods and other people’s farm land, with skunks and opossums and deer and all manner of wild life, including our guests.”

And then she wrote,

[T]he hectic fifteen years or so after graduation, when I thought I had New York City by the tail and was swinging it around my head, seem very far away.  Thank God. I like things this way.

Hindsight

In hindsight, she wrote, “the calamities that were predicted for us from home and from pulpit came, all right.  There aren’t enough gall bladders among the survivors to go around.”

But, she observed, at least no one had a nervous breakdown from boredom. “We smiled as we danced.”

She died of lung cancer in Saratoga, at 73 on July 29, 1974.

Image of 21 By David Shankbone – English Wikipedia, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3899196

With thanks to Joshua Zeitz, Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, Brendan Gill, Here at the New Yorker, Harrison Kinney, James Thurber: His Life and Times and the Vassar Encyclopedia, Lois Long. This story was updated in 2024.

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How Narragansett Beer Survived Prohibition (But Still Couldn’t Escape the Government)

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Back in the 1950s and 1960s, anyone who walked into a New England tavern and ordered a beer probably got a Narragansett. That wouldn’t have been a surprise, since the sign outside probably said, “Narragansett Lager Beer” along with the name of the tavern.

Narragansett, fondly known as ‘Gansett, ranked for decades as New England’s most popular beer. The Red Sox drank it, Dr. Seuss created its mascot and Captain Quint crushed a can of it in Jaws. You just couldn’t miss its slogan, “Hi, Neighbor! Have a ‘Gansett!”

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Jaws, Narragansett brought back a vintage 1975 can.

Though Narragansett beer survived Prohibition, it couldn’t escape the U.S. Justice Department. Government lawyers actually tried to enforce antitrust laws back in the 1960s . However, they ignored other threats to competition — including a certain St. Louis-based beer maker.

The old Rhode Island beer died in the 1980s, but that isn’t the end of the story.

Birth of Narragansett Beer

In December 1890, the Narragansett Brewing Co. brewed its first commercial beer in its new brewery in Cranston, R.I. Six German-Americans had pooled $150,000 to start the company. You may recognize one of their names: Jacob Wirth. He was the same Jacob Wirth who ran a popular restaurant in Boston’s Theater District that survived until 2018.

Jacob Wirth

Rounding out the original six were John H. Fehlberg, Augustus F. Borchandt, Herman G. Possner, George M. Gerhard and Constand A. Moeller.

narragansett-brewery

The old Narragansett brewery.

People liked the light, sparkling beers that came out of the German breweries cropping up after the Civil War. In New England they really liked Narragansett lager.

By 1914, Narragansett had enough customers to build its own bottling plant on its 42-acre complex. That made it the biggest beer brewery in New England.

Prohibition

On Jan. 17, 1920, Prohibition took effect, banning the sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States. Many breweries went under, but Narragansett survived. Fortunately for the company, it already had a business delivering ice, with its own icehouse, ice pond and refrigeration machines. Narragansett continued to deliver ice through Prohibition.

Narragansett also obtained a license to brew and sell porter for medicinal purposes. People then thought its low-alcohol and high-iron content benefited pregnant women.  Only five other U.S. breweries were allowed to do so. The brewery called it Narragansett Dark.

Narragansett also survived by turning its pilsner into a near beer with an alcohol by volume content of less than 0.5 percent. And it made ginger ale, sarsaparilla and root beer, along with a malt tonic for recovering invalids.

Narragansett, Part of the Culture

Shortly after Prohibition ended in 1933, the Haffenreffer family of Boston brewers bought the Narragansett brewery. One of the Haffenreffers attended Dartmouth College with Theodor Geisel, later Dr. Seuss. Narragansett hired Geisel to illustrate advertisements for the beer. Today people collect the company’s metal trays imprinted with Chief Gansett, along with such slogans as “Gangway for Gansett.”

After World War II, the Haffenreffers decided to make Narragansett the dominant beer in New England. The company embarked on an aggressive advertising and promotional campaign.

In 1944, Gansett officially sponsored the Boston Red Sox, thus becoming the first alcohol company to sponsor an American sports team. People still remember Red Sox announcer Curt Gowdy praising the “straight from the barrel taste.” Mike Nichols also called it a “straight from the barrel taste” in a hilarious animated commercial with Elaine May. (You can watch it here.)

 

Then Narragansett beer began its “Hi, Neighbor! Have a Gansett!” ad campaign. The company promoted Gansett beers at ball parks, concert arenas and golf courses with attractive young women called Gansett Girls. Irehne Hennessey, Betty Vickowski and Penny Sojka started off as the female faces of Narragansett, also known as the Hi Neighbor Girls.

Becoming the Biggest

Narragansett grew into New England’s largest brewery. In 1959, it brewed for the first time one million barrels of beer. To celebrate, the brewery gave each employee a gold-plated bottle of Gansett. By the 1960s it had an 80 percent share of the Rhode Island market, and 65 percent throughout New England. At its peak, Narragansett employed 850 people.

During the 1950s and 1960s, J. Joseph Garrahy worked for Narragansett as one of its top salespeople. According to legend, the many, many people he met in his job ended up voting for him, first for the Rhode Island state Senate, then as lieutenant governor and finally for four terms as governor. A popular governor, people viewed him as a friend of the working class.

Joseph Garrahy

Then when the U.S. Navy announced plans to scrap the battleship USS Massachusetts, her former crew campaigned to save her as a museum ship. Narragansett Brewery led the fundraising effort with paid advertisements, which ultimately succeeded in saving “Big Mamie,” now in Battleship Cove in Fall River, Mass.

Falstaff Buys Narragansett — Finally

In 1964, the St. Louis-based Falstaff Brewing Co. offered to buy the Narragansett company for about $20 million. Falstaff, then the fourth largest U.S. brewery, had no market share in the Northeast. It intended to run Narragansett as a wholly owned subsidiary.

Two days before the sale closed, the U.S. Justice Department brought an antitrust suit against Falstaff. It took nine years for the resolution of the case, which finally ended in 1973 when a U.S. district court ruled in favor of Falstaff. But nine years of legal wrangling couldn’t have helped the Rhode Island brewery.

Not everybody…

In hindsight, the case shows how much attitudes have changed about corporate concentration. When the antitrust case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Byron White wrote the decision that acknowledged the consolidation of the New England beer market.

He noted that the number of brewers operating plants in New England fell from 32 in 1935, to 11 in 1957, to six in 1964.

But White suggested Falstaff would have figured out a way to enter the New England market anyway, and sent the case to a lower court. In the end, Falstaff won the case and took over Narragansett in 1974.

Modern Times

While government lawyers tried to prevent Falstaff from entering the New England market by buying a brewery, Anheuser-Busch built a state-of-the-art brewery in Merrimack, N.H. It opened in 1970 and gave stiff competition to Narragansett.

Then in 2008, a multinational brewing company called InBev bought Anheuser-Busch, creating a beery behemoth. The consolidated company, based in Leuven, Belgium, acquired more companies and ultimately grew into a multinational giant called Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV. Meanwhile, Falstaff and its new acquisition, Narragansett, sputtered.

In 1964, Falstaff and Narragansett had combined sales of about $155 million. In fiscal year 2020, Anheuser-Busch InBev reported sales of $46.9 billion, more than 300 times the combined revenue of Falstaff and Narragansett back in the day.

Rebirth of Narragansett Beer

Beset by competition, legal problems and an aging facility, Narragansett shut its doors in 1983. The company sold its equipment to China and tore down buildings in Cranston, leaving a small trolley barn that burned in 2005.

narragansett-beer

Now on your grocer’s shelves.

That year, Rhode Islander Mark Hellendrung, former Nantucket Nectars president, began to restore the Narragansett brand as a heritage beer. According to Bloomberg News, Narragansett beer is cool again as millennials in Brooklyn, N.Y., bars now drink it.

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, Narragansett Beer came up with a novel promotion: Get a vaccine or get a friend vaccinated, and the next round is on us.

With thanks to Ashleigh Bennett and Kristie Martin, “Rhode Island Beer: Ocean State History on Tap” and to David Zax, “The Many Pop-Culture Moments of Narragansett, the “Forrest Gump of Beers”” in Fast Company.

Image: Narragansett logo By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32655382. Narragansett beer ads courtesy NarragansettBeer.com. Jacob Wirth By Biruitorul – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4004137. This story was updated in 2023.

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When Massachusetts Abolished the State Police

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In 1875, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts abolished the state police department. It was only 10 years old, the first state police force in the country, but Massachusetts had had enough.

Attitudes toward a centralized police force were very different in the 19th century than they are now. Americans generally preferred a vigilant citizenry rather than a standing army to control disorder and crime. They distrusted powerful authorities, especially in rural areas.

And in Massachusetts, they didn’t like the state police seizing their booze.

state-police

Some of Massachusetts’ first state police officers: John Gilman, Charles Hair and William King.

The Constabulary

On May 16, 1865, Gov. John Andrew signed a bill into law creating the Massachusetts State Constabulary. By then the temperance movement had taken hold in Massachusetts, but people brazenly flouted the laws governing alcohol. And so that first state police force had as its mission the enforcement of the alcohol laws, as well as suppressing gambling and houses of prostitution.

Up until then, cities and towns left crime control up to local constabularies and police. The state had little to do with the local police and the local courts.

But local constables tended to be part-time, unsalaried officials who served for a year. They didn’t get paid much, but did get rewarded for making arrests, serving warrants and producing witnesses. Constables often had to collect taxes, which made the officeholder unpopular and the office undesirable. As a result, inexperienced men who wanted to avoid trouble got the job, but they tended not to keep it for long.

Private crime-fighting associations filled the gaps left open by the amateur constables. Property owners formed such associations to prevent theft and pursue horse thieves.  Banks formed them to go after counterfeiters and temperance organizations formed them to rampage against rum.

During the 19th century, New England had at least 72 protective societies — like the Worcester Association for the Protection of Fruit or the Pownal Association to Counteract and Detect Horse Thieves and Robbers — in more than 100 towns.

state-police-society-for-the-mutual-aid-against-thieves

The Worcester society for the mutual aid against thieves at work.

The State Police

But times were changing. In 1855, Massachusetts passed a version of Maine’s dry law, which banned alcohol — except for medicinal, mechanical or manufacturing purposes. It was honored more in the breach than in the observance.

So shortly after the Civil War, Massachusetts established the state constabulary to crack down on purveyors of alcohol. Andrew appointed Gen. William Sterling King, shot 21 times at the Battle of Antietam, to head the first state police force in the United States.

Over the next 10 years, about 360 state police constables served an average of 2-1/2 years. Most had fought in the Civil War. They came from all walks of life and from all over the globe.

Booze Busters

The state constabulary got off to a fairly good start. They had to protect attendees at the Methodists’ annual meeting in Wesleyan Grove on the Martha’s Vineyard Camp Ground in August 1865. Five constables received the assignment and won praise for their performance.

Martha’s Vineyard Campground Tabernacle in the Wesleyan Grove, Oak Bluffs

But they also began to shut grog shops, saloons and rum mills. During the first six months of their existence, they won convictions for 1,404 liquor sellers. Many more liquor dealers agreed to cease operations, but they anticipated (correctly) the Legislature would repeal prohibition.

They also started to seize large quantities of alcohol. In December, 1869, for example, Deputy Constable Amasa H. Tolman was involved in the seizure of 80 gallons of ale and three-and-a-half gallons of spirits in Boston.

They didn’t win many friends, though, for grabbing people’s booze.

Someone shot at Constable William McKay from a wooded area in North Adams because he seized so much liquor. McKay once confiscated 60 barrels of beer and stored them in his barn, butthen  someone tried to blow up the building with nitroglycerin.

Adding to the unpopularity of the state police was the shooting death of a brick-thrower in Westfield, Mass., in 1867. The constables had raided a gambling den, which started a riot, and a constable shot a rioter about to throw a brick at him. When the rioter died, the sheriff arrested the constable, but he was not prosecuted.

In 1870, the Legislature cut the state police budget, and 72 constables were suspended from duty. Many of the laid-off constables agreed to work for half pay.

Local Sovereignty

For the first decade of its existence, in fact, the Massachusetts General Court repeatedly tried and failed to abolish the state police. It wasn’t just the controversy over liquor seizures and prosecutions, though. People did not want a police force controlled by a powerful centralized government.

On May 18, 1874, the Boston Post wrote an editorial against the state police.

The whole system of a State Police is extraneous to the spirit of true local sovereignty. That a power from without should be imposed upon the people … is fatal to the soundness of the theory from which such a police force draws its life.

Ten years after the state police force began, the Legislature abolished it. They replaced the booze-busting constables with a small detective force and charged it with quelling riots and helping prosecutors find evidence. Then in 1879 lawmakers abolished the detectives and replaced them with ‘district police.’ Two men in each district had only limited duties.

It wasn’t until 1921 that the Massachusetts state police force began to take its current shape. That year, the Legislature enlarged the agency to 50 officers stationed in barracks across the state. Their job: to enforce the law in rural areas that didn’t have adequate police forces.


With thanks to State Police in the United States: A Socio-historical Analysis by H. Kenneth Bechtel; Stop, Thief! Private Protective Societies in Nineteenth-Century New England, by Ann-Marie Szymanski in The New England Quarterly; and The First To Serve by  Ronald J. Guilmette. Images: Wesleyan Grove By LisaHendricks – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2847459.7. This story was updated in 2023.

 

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A Haunted Murder Scene in Each New England State

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If you’re looking for a haunted murder scene, New England has plenty of them. The region is awash in old taverns where the ghosts of murder victims move furniture at night or cemeteries where they float above gravestones.

New England has always embraced tales of the supernatural. New England ghosts, witches, devils and monsters in human shape populate the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson and Stephen King. There’s even a name for the region’s special brand of horror: Gothic New England.

Here then is a haunted murder scene in each New England state.

The Murder Scene at Union Cemetery

murder-scene-union-cemetery

The White Lady’s murder scene? Union Cemetery at night.

One autumn night a man knelt by his wife’s grave in 400-year-old Union Cemetery in Easton, Conn. He missed her, and it comforted him to talk to her.

After a short while he looked up from the grave and saw a ghostly figure watching him. She had long dark hair and wore a diaphanous white veil and an old-fashioned white dress or nightgown.

“I wish my husband would have loved me as much as you love your wife,” she said, and then she vanished.

Some people believe the White Lady was murdered. Her body, they think, was dumped behind the Easton Baptist Church next to the cemetery. Others believe she murdered her husband. Whatever the case, the White Lady is one of Connecticut’s most famous ghosts. People have seen her walking among the gravestones and floating above them. She also appears to motorists on Route 59.

Whether it’s because it abuts a murder scene or because it’s so old, Union Cemetery has been called the most haunted cemetery in Connecticut. The cemetery attracts so many ghost hunters the Easton police have closed it off to traffic at night.

Johnny Winter and Harry Reasoner are also buried in Union Cemetery, but so far as we know they do not haunt the place.

Easton, Conn.

Wood Island Lighthouse

murder-scene-wood-island-light

A lighthouse and a haunted murder scene: Wood Island Light.

In 1896, local sheriff Fred Milliken rented his chicken coop on Wood Island to Howard Hobbs, a drifter, to sleep in. The two men argued, and Hobbs shot the sheriff. He then went to the lighthouse keeper’s house and shot himself there.

Hobbs’ spirit haunts the murder scene at the Wood Island lighthouse, located off Biddeford Pool in Maine. People have heard moans and strange voices, seen dark shadows and found locked doors mysteriously opened.

The story doesn’t end there. One lighthouse keeper was so spooked by the haunting that he left the lamp unlit and rowed to the mainland. He found a room in a boardinghouse and jumped to his death the next morning.

20 Yates St., Biddeford, ME

The Lizzie Borden House

murder-scene-lizzie-borden-house

The Fall River hatchet murder scene is now a popular bed and breakfast.

Lizzie Borden, a 31-year-old single woman, famously took an axe and killed her father and stepmother at their home in Fall River, Mass. Or did she? The debate continues since the couple was found murdered on Aug. 4, 1891.

A jury acquitted Lizzie of murder nearly a year later. Many thought she got away with the crime. Others think the maid did it, or perhaps Lizzie’s uncle, who provided an absurdly overdetailed alibi.

Whatever the case, Lizzie continued to live in Fall River, ostracized by the community, until her death at age 66. The murder scene was turned into a popular bed and breakfast in 1996. Guests most often request the room where Lizzie’s stepmother met her end.

Ghost hunters sometimes stay in the house to investigate paranormal activity. A floor will creak in an empty room, or doors will open and close mysteriously. Sometimes the proprietor smells a faint flowery scent, and once the hallway chandelier suddenly turned off and a shadow climbed the stairs.

Today, a popular rhyme persists about the murders:

Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.

92 Second St., Fall River, Mass.

The Country Tavern

murder-scene-country-tavern

The Country Tavern in Nashua, a murder scene long ago.

In 1741, a sea captain named Ford built a house in what is now Nashua, N.H. He brought his much younger wife Elizabeth to live there while he went to sea.

Once, after a 10-month absence at sea, he returned to find Elizabeth and her new baby. In a fit of rage he locked Elizabeth in a closet and killed the infant. When Elizabeth emerged to find out what he’d done, she attacked her husband. Capt. Ford then stabbed her with a knife and threw her body down a well.

In the 1980s, Elizabeth Ford’s farmhouse became a popular eatery, the Country Tavern. Her ghost supposedly haunts the murder scene, but in a playful way. She moves salt and pepper shakers, tosses dishes off shelves and runs her fingers through patrons’ hair. Sometimes she makes an appearance in a window on the second floor, gazing out over the property.

452 Amherst St., Nashua, N.H.

The Biltmore Hotel Murder Scene

murder-scene-biltmore

The lobby of the Biltmore Hotel, scene of murders and suicides during Prohibition.

In 1918, a rumored Satanist named Johan Leisse Weisskopf financed construction of the Biltmore Hotel (now known as Graduate Providence). He supposedly installed chicken coops on the roof to supply birds for ritual sacrifices and dug hot springs in the basement for purification rites.

During Prohibition, the Biltmore became a speakeasy frequented by Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. The hotel hosted raucous parties that supposedly resulted in the murders of several guests. Today, Biltmore guests say they hear laughing and dancing from an empty room, once, perhaps, a murder scene.

The most famous ghost, though, belongs to a wealthy guest who threw himself off the 14th floor of the Biltmore when the stock market crashed in 1929. Hotel guests say they’ve seen a man plummet past their windows, only to look down and see no body on the sidewalk.

11 Dorrance St., Providence, R.I.

College Hall, Vermont College of Fine Arts

murder-scene-college-hall-vermont

The ghost of Anna Wheeler haunts College Hall.

College Hall at the Vermont College of Fine Arts was built near an 1897 murder scene involving a jealous lover.

On a Saturday morning, 17-year-old Anna planned to meet her fiance, Jack Wheeler, a handsome 22-year-old stonecutter. They would take the train to Barre that day to watch the Decoration Day celebration. She lived on East Liberty Street where her cousins, the Bugbees, had hired her to do domestic work.

Mildred Brewster, 20, went to the Bugbee house and waited on the porch for 20 minutes before knocking on the door. The two women talked inside for 45 minutes, and a witness later testified to overhearing the conversation. Mildred said, “Jack Wheeler can’t be engaged to us both; we will have to let him decide.”

Mildred and Anna then walked past the Montpelier Seminary, now College Hall, toward Jack Wheeler’s house. Then Mildred took out a .32 caliber revolver and shot Anna, then herself. Anna died that afternoon, but Mildred lived to be charged with murder. A jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity, and she spent the rest of her life in and out of sanitariums.

Anna’s ghost now haunts College Hall near the murder scene, closing doors, moving objects, breaking glass and throwing pictures off walls. Once she supposedly moved furniture to block the door of a locked office.

36 College St., Montpelier, Vt.

If you enjoyed this story about haunted murder scenes, you may want to read our story about haunted houses in New England here.

Haunted murder scene images: Union Cemetery By Karl Thomas Moore – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46789828; Biltmore Lobby By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21843548. This story last updated in 2021.

 

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