Booze Under The Rumble Seat

Hello everyone.  Praise the Lord!

The great things about visiting relatives is that you can ask them questions about your family history. And you can hear the stories that your parents didn't want to tell you!  That's the good stuff!

My Uncle Jerry is at the kitchen table where he tells the stories. He told me about my grandfather, and now he ran moonshine for Al Capone crime family in Chicago during the wild thirties.

My grandfather had a Pontiac coupe with rumble seats in the back. Underneath the rumble seats was a large empty area. You couldn't see what was under the rumble seat when the rumble seat was closed. That made a great hiding place for booze!

So my grandfather would drive from South Chicago, to a coffee shop somewhere in North Chicago, where he would park across the street, and park his car in the direction that he was wanting to go, which would be south. That told the mobsters that they needed to load full bottles of booze to go south

My grandfather would sip coffee coffee shop until the manager would come out and nod his head. That meant that he was ready to go. So my grandfather would leave the coffee shop, get into his car, and head south to South Chicago where he would stop at another coffee shop.

At this coffee shop he would park across the street pointing north, telling them that he had full booze to be unloaded, and needed to be reloaded with empty bottles. After he was done for the night he grabbed two or three hours sleep and go to his daytime job shoveling loose asbestos! No mask, no breathing air, no nothing back in those days.

My grandfather was paid five dollars a trip by the Capone crime family. That made ten dollars a night total. Making ten dollars a night during the Great Depression in the thirties was a lot of money! That was back in the days when people would try to sell an apple for a nickel! So if you were making ten dollars a night, you are making good money!

When Al Capone was convicted of tax evasion by the Untouchables, and put in prison, my grandfather decided it was time to get out of town. So my grandparents bought a dairy farm in Central Wisconsin, and settled down as a country farmers. He farmed  for the rest of his life, and we were sitting in the kitchen table in the old family farmhouse.

William James Roop

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