The Short Life of Hughie McLoon by Allen Abel

Author:Allen Abel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Sutherland House Inc.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“She Was Cremated”

IT WAS A BOOZY WINTER Saturday night, six years into Prohibition and halfway through what would be the short life of the reverent, ridiculous crusade, when a bunch of frightened flappers, drunk as skunks, raced across a roof at Spruce and Twenty-Fourth. The Quaker City was ground zero for the resistance.

Five carloads of policemen closed in on a residence they described as a “‘Kaffie Klatch’—a ‘wild party’ house for paid guests”:

Girls obviously under the influence of liquor reeled about in the embrace of their escorts to the tune of wild jazz symphonies … The interior of the building was outfitted sumptuously. The front room was reserved for dancing. At the rear, heavy carpets padded the floor and divans almost buried beneath gaudy and fancy cushions on the ‘sidelines’ gave an Oriental effect.

The “motor patrols” pulled up in front, continued the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Silently they surrounded the house and at a signal made a concerted rush on the building … Fifteen girls and youths fled to the roof through a trap door, and led the raiders a chase around chimneys and even neighboring roofs before they were finally captured.

Girls who had brazenly snapped their fingers in the faces of the police sobbed hysterically as they were led into the patrols, followed by their awed and frightened escorts. In the excitement that followed the rush of police and detectives into the establishment the alleged proprietor disappeared.

Hurried telephone calls brought Hugh McLoon, clerk in the office of Magistrate Carney, to the station house a half-hour later. He secured copies of the charges for all the prisoners and shortly after returned with the orders for the release of the captives.

Welcome to the Roaring Twenties.

* * *

“The reign of tears is over,” Billy Sunday had exulted in Norfolk, Virginia, as the Eighteenth Amendment took effect in January 1920. “The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corn-cribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.”

“Drink, consoling friend of a Perturbed World, is shut off,” lamented Franklin Lane, who had been Wilson’s Secretary of the Interior, in contrariety, now that his own interior was legally limited to buttermilk. “And all goes merry as a dance in hell!”

Both were wrong. “N.Y. is some dry town … and the only way a man can get a drink here is to go to a saloon,” wrote Ring Lardner’s Jack Keefe to his friend Al, “and the only differences between old times is what they soak you for it now which is plenty but when a man had got to have it he has got to have like today after the game for inst. my old stomach was fretting mighty bad and I got myself 6 high balls on the way back from the pk. and it set me back $2.40 but as I say what is $2.40 compared to a man’s health.”

Bad as New York was, Philadelphia was worse: the laughingstock of the nation.

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