Family Connections

Rum Running Page 5

Bootlegging in York County in the 1930s

This is the point in the series the writer can mention a tribute to her source of information. Before he died, I had the good fortune to come upon a Woodstock gentleman, of the same time period as Wilbur.

A few questions in his direction revealed an entire side to my genealogical chart, of which I had no inkling. Speaking on strict conditions of anonymity, it is he who supplied me with the missing links in my family history. To honour his request I will call him Dennis Lahey, a man whose origins stretch back to the Irish potato famine of the 1840s. Dennis passed away about five years ago, a man already well into his 90s.

I knew little or nothing about my grandfather, Jack Murphy. Dennis threw a light on a subject that many, perhaps out of sensitivity for me, were reluctant to reveal. Through subsequent contact by letter post and telephone, Dennis unfolded a fascinating family saga.

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"Did you know, did y', that Jack Murphy was a bootlegger? Maybe I shouldn't be telling you this, but times were hard and a man made a livin' any way he could. Jack made some of the smoothest tasting bootlegged likker of the times," Dennis said.

Jack Murphy came to Canterbury in 1910, shortly before his second child was born. Times were good in the early part of the 20th century. Jack was a well-known horse doctor who had relocated to New Brunswick from the state of Maine. A good horse doctor was much in demand.

Though Jack lacked the formal education of the degreed veterinarian, nevertheless, he quickly built a clientele. Before long, he was well known throughout New Brunswick and the state of Maine. This statement is supported by the words from his obituary: "Horse lovers from all parts of N.B. and the state of Maine mourned the loss today of Jack Murphy." Fortune eluded Jack through his lifetime if measured in monetary terms. In terms of friends and esteem, he was rich.

The Murphys relocated a house from Hartin Settlement, bringing it in on skids over Liary Hill after first frost. Jack had married the beautiful Gertrude Mary Lenentine of the Southampton Lenentines who bore him two sons, Elmer and Wilbur, both of whom attended Canterbury School.

Theirs was one of carefree boyish youth until the Depression. Wilbur, my father, often accused the Depression of robbing him of a full youth. Life was good for the Murphy family throughout the twenties. Food on the table was readily available, the family had an automobile, and excursions were made to adjoining Woodstock, Kirkland, Monticello and Houlton, where relatives were found in abundance.

The older son, Elmer, was 15 when Jack allowed him to take the family car to the dances. Wilbur said he never forgot the night he was finally permitted to tag along. On dance night Wilbur would hide in the car waiting for an hour ahead of the appointed time his older brother and his friends would leave for the dance. One or the other would always discover Wilbur and order him out of the car. Wilbur would crawl, shame faced and hang dog from the car and watch morosely as his older brother and gang drove off.

Then came the night so different from the others. Jack had tucked "a little something" in the glove compartment for the boys going to the dance. The time came to leave. Elmer eyed his younger brother with a jaundiced eye, then shrugged, "Okay, you can come. Mind you don't get in the way." Wilbur was too young to drink, so they let him drive. Wilbur had come of age, he had entered his rite of passage.

It was a rite of passage into grown up activities. By the time he was 18, Wilbur had stretched into 5'11' and a half, a strapping kid, a good worker and an even better dancer.

The dances opened up a world of adult activity he had been enjoying now for two or three years. The Model T had room for other passengers, particularly if the lads weren't choosy and were willing to ride the running board. The dust rolled up and around and over them, but the lads seemed heedless of it, in their eagerness to get to a dance. It would be inconceivable for this generation to appreciate the length and means of previous generations to get to a dance. No amount of personal hardship and human sacrifice was too much to suffer if it paid off in transportation to a dance.

After the Crash of 1929 nothing was ever really the same for the Murphy family again. Times were hard. The affect of the U.S. event trickled down to every town and city in Canada—every family was making sacrifices, the rich as well as the poor. In some cases, the poor fared better.

Jack was awful good at doctorin' horses, but the hay an' the straw got the better of him.

By 1930 Jack was in frail health. He suffered from asthma, emphysema and other lung related illnesses, caused to a degree by the ever-present pipe. However, just as culpable were Jack's beloved horses and the hay and straw required for their care. Unable to work full time at his veterinarian work, a glorified term for a man who doctored all his life without papers, he sought other means.

The veterinarian work had taken him all over the province and throughout the state of Maine. Involving a lot of travel, it took its toll on his health. Sometimes he was able to get one or the other of his sons to drive him, but with the onset of the Depression both boys were needed at work to pull in a wage. Sometimes he took the train. And gradually he began turning down jobs. As with most terminally ill people, the energy and creativity of a former lifetime slowly escapes as one becomes mired in days of more bad than good.

 About this time Jack hired on with Rache Grant as stable foreman. Rache, a Canterbury entrepreneur, had a sprawling estate in the centre of   Canterbury.  A short distance away, on what is today a street with nothing left on it, except the evergreen for which it was named —Cedar Street—   Rache  Grant had a newly built barn, stabling a bevy of race horses.

 His horses, one in particular, Paint, (posing for camera) rode to the finish in provincial championships and Maritime Sweeps. To care for his beloved race   horses, Rache had hired Jack Murphy. The job suited Jack well: the duties were light, the hours were flexible, the barn was built on the property directly   adjacent to his own, and best of all, Jack could be with his beloved horses.

 Shortly after Jack began working for Rache, Rache offered him a small building attached to the Grant estate, a complex of sizeable proportion in the   centre of the village. Jack needed a place to concoct his potions in attending sick animals. In the pharmaceutical world, this was called "a mixer." Using   a mortar and pestle, Jack would grind together the ingredients for a potion, a poultice or a liquid application. By this time, Jack was ordering a lot of his   medicinal elements from Guelph University in Ontario.

Rache recognized Jack needed a place to work, to mix, to measure, to dole out the medication so necessary to keep the horses functioning. A race horse is a flighty creature to begin with. It has long defied man's imagination to reconcile a thousand-pound animal pounding down the back stretch on legs meant to carry an animal half that weight. Consequently, Jack was kept busy at light work to accommodate his increasing ill health.

About this time, Rache gave Jack that little building of his, and it was out of that building that Jack made his bootlegged likker.

For awhile things were good. Until 1932. Several things happened simultaneously. Elmer lost his job as telegrapher at the CPR station. Wilbur, a strapping kid of 160 pounds of solid muscle gratefully accepted a job with the CPR at the princely sum of five cents an hour. He worked 10 hours a day slinging a sledge hammer on the rails and took home 50 cents, and, as he told it, "was damned lucky" they took him.

"They wouldn't take Elmer," Wilbur said with a mixture of scorn and pity. "He was too puny."

Jack's health is dwindling. His asthma driven coughing attacks leave him weaker as time goes on. Jack realizes his days of working with his beloved horses are over. Just entering a straw-filled stable leaves him gasping and choking for air. It is time to get into another industry, one that fills the demand and supply of the times—moonshining.

He had the building—although Rache may not have been informed of its change of purpose—and obtained the paraphernalia necessary to distill booze. To distill booze in the ‘30s required a good recipe and the best in distilling equipment—a boiler, several yards of copper tubing and bottles. A moderate output of product would be from eight to 10 gallons a day. Bottles were recycled where possible. Sometimes twice over—as the following story tells. Scott Mountain in Canterbury lay just behind Jack's place. Every afternoon in the early ‘30s two children, Ralphie and Charlie, cut through Jack's to get to Old Scott on their way home from school.

Ralphie relates: "One afternoon we spied some beer bottles settin' out on Jack's stoop. We snuk over, swiped the bottles and ran all the way to the Watering Tub, laughin' to kill ourselves. We rinsed them out, ran back to Jack's and knocked on the door. Jack had a poker game goin' with a bunch of other ole lads – there wasn't much else he could do any more – Jack was used up pretty bad by now. I'm talking early fall of 1932, maybe. Anyway, we showed Jack our bottles, named our price. He paid us and we laughed all the way home."
They didn't scam old Jack often, but often enough that Ralphie remembered it seven decades later.

Jack embraced bootlegging, adding it to his list of skills. His clientele of customers ranged from politicians, public figures, wealthy business men to the lowly "rubby," a derogatory term for a person who drinks rubbing alcohol. Jack's booze, unlike the rot gut of the era, must have been superb if the business he did was any indication. When the raw alcohol came in—in two half-gallon cans—the cut usually cheated the buyer. Not so in Jack's product. It wasn't called Jack Murphy's Finest for nothin'. Dennis Lahey hesitated, "Per'aps, I shouldn't be tellin this …" He paused. "So long ago now." After a few minutes consideration, during which there wasn't a sound, he reconsidered, "Don't use my name and I'll tell you."

The deal was struck and the story unfolded:

Jack musta made an enemy with some. Jealousy maybe, dunno. Anyhow, ‘twas way down in the fall, November, maybe. They come for him. Big black car, come in the dead of the night. ‘Twas poundin' rain that night. Pulled up, they did, in front of Jack's shack. Jack was in there, an' they drug ‘im out to the car, loaded him in and away they took him.'

On this dark and stormy night in November of 1932, just after he had celebrated six decades on this planet, Jack Murphy became the reluctant guest of the Provincials. It must have been a good tip—for them to have driven in torrential down pour from Fredericton to Canterbury to capture one sick, old, half-dead moonshiner.

His sons were thrown into a frenzy of apprehension and worry. They knew that if they did not get their father out of custody he was as good as dead.

They took him down to Fred'icton, to the hoosegow they had there.

To come to the aid of anybody under arrest one would have to arrange a number of items: transportation, gasoline, not easy in a restricted era, money for bail, and food and water for the trip ahead. The boys hastily assembled the necessities and set out for the capital city, a considerable trip in the ‘30s.

When the boys got there, Jack was in bad shape, near dead. They got ‘im outa there and brought him home, but he was never any good after that.

He had six months left on this planet. The Fredericton excursion had taken the life-blood from him. Torrential rain, the lengthy trip, a damp jail cell, incarceration – all had contributed to a spiraling decline. Jack spent his remaining days bed ridden. He died on May 18 of 1933.

Unknown to Jack—but long suspected by the rumours that abounded—Franklin Roosevelt would proclaim the end of Prohibition on Dec. 5, 1933, a half year after Jack's passing. Roosevelt recognized the changing times. On the one hand, the people were increasing their demand to buy booze legally; the other, an impressive increase in the people no longer opposed to the sale of booze. The Temperance Movement had broken ranks and the Teetotalers failed to sway a generation that had cut their teeth on Jazz and Bath tub gin. The Great Experiment was a Dismal Failure.

But, for awhile, it sure put money in the pocket of New Brunswickers.

 

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