Postcards: Prohibition Tales

The Fallon newspapers, during the 1920s, are full of prohibition stories. Most of them involve the arrests of bootleggers for illegally manufacturing whiskey for sale, an activity that kept federal law enforcement very busy between 1919, when the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, and 1933, when the Amendment was repealed. 

Looking back, an interested reader can spot an abundance of hypocrisy in the drafting and enforcement of the law. With Prohibition, the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages were prohibited across the land. Consumption was not. Before prohibition was legally in place, those who knew it was coming and had the means to do so stockpiled vast quantities of wine and liquor for personal use. “President Woodrow Wilson moved his own supply of alcoholic beverages to his Washington residence after his term of office ended. His successor, Warren G. Harding, relocated his own large supply into the White House”(“Prohibition.” En.wikipedia.org).

During Prohibition, wine and cider, up to 200 gallons a year, could be made from fruit and stored at home, but beer could not. Thus, historians can now document the fact that the law, as written, favored those with money: “A rich family could have a cellar full of liquor and get by, it seemed, but if a poor family had a bottle of home-brew, there would be trouble” (“Prohibition.” Wikipedia.org).

Loopholes in the law abounded. Religious use of wine was permitted. Many physicians in the country lobbied for the repeal of Prohibition as it applied to medicinal liquors and continued to legally prescribe them. Between 1921 and 1930, about $40 million worth of whiskey prescriptions were written. 

It is against this backdrop that I will relate a Prohibition tale from the memoirs of Kelly Engle, who lived in Fallon between 1919 and 1926.

Engle: “A likable salesman showed up in Fallon. He was selling Gusasti Grape Jelly, put out by a Los Angeles firm. It was supplied in gallon cans. On the label the buyer was warned not to mix the contents with five gallons of water, add yeast and let it stand at room temperature, because it would ferment and turn into wine…. There were several types of jelly to choose from. The salesman did a good business and promised to service the wine making at periodic intervals and advise the customers when the process of fermentation was complete and the product ready to bottle. He kept his promise and did a thriving business. The wine was good and the customers well satisfied.” 

Technically, I think, the salesman was breaking the law in that selling jelly with wine-making instructions was not the same as legally selling fresh fruit… without instructions. However, Engle noted that “The Federal Agents were reasonable men who didn’t harass we little violators of the Volstead Act. They were after the big illicit operators.”

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