- [Announcer] Chronicles was made possible thanks to a community access grant provided by the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority, support by the Department of Education, and the generous support of Thomas B. Hagen.

- [Announcer] This is WQLN.

- [Narrator] What would be a first date without the liquid courage, a social gathering without the conversational lubricant, a long day without a sip of the good stuff?

Our relationship with alcohol is certainly complicated, but there's no escaping our spirited history.

Intertwined with the human experience, we have pursued the drink by any means necessary.

This is the story of what happened when the liquor dried up.

(sassy, jazz music) (timer ticking) (sassy, jazz music) (film reel rattling) (water gurgling) (gentle, quiet music) (water gurgling) Along the shores of the shallowest of the Great Lakes, two cities, both alike in industry, share closer ties than most, though they haven't always gotten along.

Fiery tempers often prevailed, sometimes literally.

The first, Erie, is well situated between larger population centers and is Pennsylvania's only access to the lake of the same name.

The second, Port Dover, is across the water and the boarder in Ontario, nestled in Long Point Bay, prime haven for freshwater fishing.

- Erie and Port Dover have been connected for 200 plus years in one way or another.

From the time when we were viewing each other with suspicion or violence, you know, during the War of 1812 two commerce joining together with when the fishing industry starts getting big, and then, you know, whatever you'd call all the rum-running during prohibition, and of course, the one thing that all those things have in common is the lake.

- We're, in many ways, the same people, the same stock, the same, you know, same sense of values, right and wrong, but our system of laws were such that it didn't take long before prohibition went in when they recognized a benefit in getting along with one another.

- [Narrator] In the 19-teens, the Great War brought so many to their graves, forever changing the landscape of a generation.

When Armistice Day came, the relief was palpable.

Giving up alcohol had been seen as a necessary wartime restriction in support of the boys overseas.

However, post World War I, the 28th president, Woodrow Wilson, disagreed with the restrictions on civil liberties, including the Volstead Act.

Countering the Wets, as they were known, were dry forces, such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union.

- The early 1800s was a period of reform.

It's called the Age of Reform.

It's a period where you get abolition, you get changes in education, you get asylum reform, and so the Temperance Movement kind of grows out of that period because women were in charge of the domestic arena, right?

So the WCTU used a phrase to kind of illustrate what their motives and mission was, and that was agitate, educate, legislate.

And so, society was full of problems, and of course, alcohol consumption was a serious problem for many families.

So women felt that they had an obligation to help improve the morals of not only members of their family and their community, but the nation because if husbands are coming home intoxicated, that's not good for the family.

- Erie was a really growing community.

If you could just picture it, we had almost 500 manufacturing outfits, a lot of immigrant labor on boilers, boiler makers, we had 100 commercial fishing boats, we were considered a fishing capital, and this created a very vibrant downtown.

- [Narrator] One of the industries that defined the city's economy was the much beloved brewing industry.

- For the size of the state and everything that was goin' on, Pennsylvania, by far, had the most breweries in the country.

Going into the turn of the century, there were probably four or five major breweries, if you will, in Erie.

Four of the Breweries went to form the Erie Brewing Company in 1899.

Charles Koehler, who was the first of the Koehlers to have a brewery or be tied into beer, he came over in 1840s from Germany.

There were all kinds of nationalities in Erie, but German was a very big part of it and they seemed to be the ones that brought the beer culture and the history with them, and the knowledge.

(gentle, quiet music) - [Narrator] Down at the docks, fishermen's nets were flush with fish.

- When commercial fishing got started in Erie, Pennsylvania, and what started commercial fishing was first, the invention of the gill net and one of the powerful sub-technologies of gill net fishing is that Crossley net puller, which was invented in Erie, Pennsylvania, a deadly mechanism for catching fish, but what really made gill netting go was boats with engines.

Now what happened, then, in the interim is William Kolbe, he understood how powerful the fishing was, here in Port Dover, got the idea that he would come over and start a second business.

So he had a business in Erie and a business here and he was catching way more fish here.

- Kolbe invented a system for refrigeration and I believe that was a major breakthrough.

Kolbe, the family was here for many, many years.

I mean, they married into the community, that sort of thing, and the relationship between Port Dover, Ontario, Kolbe, and Kolbe in Erie was, you know, something that was very strong and continued many years.

- He and his sons were all in the business and they created some of the first flash-freezing, and between them just making it into a big business, they were really responsible for the fishing industry here to attain the level that it did.

(cheery, carefree music) Port Dover is nestled in the middle of Long Point Bay and if you're looking at a map of Lake Erie, Long Point is big, it comes halfway through the lake.

The Point is one of the reasons that the village got started here in the first place.

- It's a large, agricultural area, and in fact, the trolley, the LENN Railway, in part, existed to transport tobacco products and agricultural products to larger centers like Hamilton and even Toronto.

That changed when they could see PR bought the LENN Railway, and discovered that transporting freight was a lot more lucrative than transporting people.

And so, as a consequence, tobacco and other agricultural products left this area.

- [Narrator] Port Dover's citizens, like Erie's, turned to the lake.

- The town of Port Dover started out as a, and still is, to some extent, a thriving, fishing community.

And for many years, although there's been some contention about this, it was considered to be the largest, inland, freshwater fishing fleet in the world.

- Lake Erie has 10% of the water, 80% of the fish.

So fishing is a Lake Erie thing, and inside of Lake Erie, the two major pieces of structure that attract fish would be Presque Isle, but to a much larger extent, Long Point because it's three times as big.

So all the wetlands and internal waterways that are now way protected, better than they have been on our side, they're out here.

So this is the epicenter of fish.

- When the schooners finally disappeared, mostly because of trains, what came up to take their place was the commercial fishing 'cause once you've got a train, that means you can harvest a lot more fish out of Lake Erie and send them off to Buffalo or Toronto or even New York City.

- The premier fish, in the old days, white fish, cisco, which is also called Lake Erie Herring, and yellow pike or pickerel.

So the secret of making a lot of money with fish was take it to Erie on a fish tug, stick it in a train and there was a train that came right down to the public dock where the fish processors were.

The train would be on its way to New York or Chicago by 5:00 or 6:00.

(quiet, playful music) ♪ I've got the blues ♪ ♪ I've got the alcoholic blues ♪ ♪ No more beer my heart to cheer ♪ ♪ Goodbye whiskey, you used to make me frisky ♪ ♪ So long highball, so long gin-- ♪ - [Narrator] From Montreal to Memphis, Texas to Toronto, anti-alcohol movements had grown in influence.

Canada allowed communities to vote on their local liquor restrictions and the U.S. was staring down the pipeline into the 18th amendment.

Organizations, like the Anti Saloon League and WCTU pushed for legislation.

- There were chapters in Erie and Gerard and in Union City and the surrounding area.

There are women involved, there are ministers involved, they engage in direct and indirect action.

One of the things that they do is they believe that it's important for them to influence education, but they also tried to, through what's called the, Scientific Temperance Department, argued that there needs to exist a textbook on physiology that examines the impact of alcohol on the human body.

And this actually leads to the passage of legislation in Pennsylvania, led by Mary Hunt who takes this argument, this idea, we need education, we need a textbook, to the state legislature in Pennsylvania.

They are trying, through every means possible, through legitimate means, to influence legislators.

- As prohibition was about to start, Henry Ford, who imagined the drinking and carousing after work hours, that gave people who were working for him the power to cause him trouble, who was using the Temperance Union.

He, himself, continued to drink, but the idea of this was to calm down the agitation inside of his factories.

- Towards the end of the first world war, prohibition started creeping in, both in the United States and Canada.

You know, a lot of cases it was a local option.

The Canadian system was full of a lot more holes and so in Ontario the deal was you could make alcohol, you could sell alcohol, but you couldn't sell it to anybody in Ontario, and if you lived in Ontario, you could buy alcohol, but not from anybody else who was in Ontario.

So in Ontario, all the liquor was supposedly made for export, which meant either to other parts of Canada, Quebec, or Alberta, or something like that, or elsewhere in the world.

And if you wanted to buy liquor in Ontario, you would have to have it shipped in from another Provence, and (laughing) pick it up at the train station and take it home because you couldn't drink it publicly.

- You're allowed to make the whiskey over there, but you can't drink it.

Over here, you know, you can't do any of that, bathtub gin, that sort of thing.

- So the place where prohibition was gonna have the most powerful effect was in the east, up and down the coast, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, it was devastating.

- Erie was almost perfectly situation to be a big player in rum-running and other effects of fighting prohibition.

One of the centers for all of this was Erie because of the lake and our use of the rail.

We had 92 passenger stops, passenger train stops a day at Erie.

The characters in the local prohibition story were not really what you would call hardened criminals.

They were, I don't wanna say that these were folk heroes, but they were befriended by most of the people in the town, many of whom knew what was going on.

- The Volstead Act was not popular with the local community and did not receive the support of law enforcement.

If you think of prohibition like a pebble, it's dropped in the pond, it had a ripple effect on crime in the community.

That one thing led to other criminal activity that extended on for years and years.

That was the start of corruption in Erie.

- Erie, Pennsylvania, Erie County was a lot more active in response to prohibition than what many people may know.

- One of the worst of the worst parts with creating prohibition was it drove the sales and movement of alcohol underground and it created a ginormous, gray economy.

That's an economy that we all know is there, but there's no way of measuring it.

And a macro-economist would tell you that once a country's gray economy starts to grow from 18, 19% toward 20, 25, you're done, your economy is done for.

- [Narrator] One thing Lake Erie fishermen understand is supply and demand.

As nets pulled up empty, the fishermen of the lake saw opportunities to help their bottom-line.

- The Canadian government's logic behind prohibition, they were trying to pay lip-service to a large percentage of the population that was anti-booze, but they were damned if they were gonna give up all the revenue from taxes.

So the government was still lining it's pockets with administrative fees and taxes, but still officially, you know, saying that they were against it.

- There were no rules and regulations, and the dilemma is that on this side of the lake, you have Ontario, which is the largest enforcement agency, but they weren't really terribly focused on enforcement, they were mostly focused on not letting Americans steal their fish.

So as a consequence, it woulda been politically unpopular for anybody to limit fishing because fishermen were just having their way.

So we were fishing during spawning season and we were fishing the species to extinction.

So at about the time when all the fishermen here were wondering what are we gonna do with all this equipment, and Capt.

Kolbe was the guy that they all went to because he was their inspirational leader, they came up with the idea of ordering booze, not beer, beer's too big a volume to put in a boat and take a long trip, and take it to Erie, and one of the reasons why it was so easy to get away with that is that, Kolbe, by that time, had regularly been coming back and forth through Erie with shiploads full of fish that he caught.

So now everybody in Erie, including the authorities, at the Coastguard station, watching the boats go in and out, they're used to fish tugs coming in and out, that they say Port Dover on them, well they're just bringing fish here.

- So if you couldn't make a lot of money with freshwater herring, you could make money with midnight herring.

And the difference was that the midnight herring clinked when you took it off of the boat.

The way it was often done was a shipment of booze would come down, on the train, and they'd get a form that'd say, "Yes, "we're exporting this load of fine, scotch whiskey, "made in Montreal, and we're gonna send this to Mexico."

They'd take the booze out of the trains and they'd be in wooden cases, the way it was packed in those days, and transfer them in the burlap bags that would be tied together with a length of sideline from a fishing net and that way, if you had to throw the stuff overboard, it would all be tied together and you could go back a week or two later, when the coast was clear, with a grappling iron, and probably catch it at some point.

And they set off in a rickety, old Port Dover fish tug for Mexico and then they'd be back the next day for another load.

- The tug boats that you see in Port Dover are different then what you might see on the east coast.

So they're fairly unique to the area.

- Eventually, they evolved into what's called a turtle-back or a turtle-deck, where they covered in the deck, over the stern first, then would hang curtains, canvas curtains, and then the canvas curtains turned into wooden sides and then they covered in the front and it was a lot easier on the fishermen who were working on the deck in hot summers and as far into the cold winter as they thought they could get away with as well.

- We were used to three, four, five fish tugs coming to Erie, Pennsylvania almost every day, going through the channel, waving to the Coastguard guys, pulling into Kolbe's plant there and unloading fish.

Suddenly it becomes obvious to everybody, you can't hide this for too long, that the boat they're unloading is booze and that's become a central depot for distributing booze in Erie and to the inter-lands.

- [Narrator] Pennsylvania's reluctance to ratify the 18th amendment was personified by the activity of it's denizens.

It was the roaring 20s and illegal boozed fueled the era's good vibes.

In Erie, the political landscape was populated with good ole boys that had little interest in adhering to the spirit of the federal law.

Meanwhile, the city's kingmaker was in search of his heir apparent.

- Mike Liebel, he was a mayor from the very early 1900s and was considered a boss of bosses.

He built a great following, and years later, right after the Mill Creek flood, which is Erie's greatest natural disaster, 1915, and the Democrats are searching for someone to run for mayor.

And at a lunch, one of Liebel's friends sees, Kitt's over in the other room and says that's the guy you have, he's an up and comer.

He had been a state legislator, former teacher, had read for the bar, sharp guy, he grew up a Republican and then ran as a Democrat, and his opponent had grown up a Democrat and served as a Republican.

So it's like a world upside down, I suppose.

- [Narrator] By his second term, Mayor Miles B. Kitts was seen by many as soft on crime.

His permissive reputation paralleled an increase in illicit activity in the city and region.

- There was a spike in crime in the city of Erie and the county of Erie that was a direct result of the prohibition.

The government was forcing a law on people that the people did not believe in.

So they didn't consider it a crime.

Things that they might not have done before, now they're kind of motivated to do, to stick it to the man.

- Erie was known as a wide-open town, under Kitts.

And so it had played well into this.

We had speakeasies.

According to the Layer Act, allegations of scandal.

Erie had 50 houses of prostitution, probably a dozen gambling houses, had a redlight district, and that is really, probably, what prompted the calls for reform.

- Law enforcement seemed to crack down on prostitution, especially.

Prostitution was one of the few ways that women could make money, but you also had young girls involved and the community did not stand for that.

(clicking typewriter keys) (typewriter rattles) - [Narrator] One of the groups enforcing the movement for social hygiene in Erie was the Committee of 16.

It was made up of influential community figures, many of whom, like the committee's executive secretary, Carrel O.

Bond, happened to be political rivals of Mayor Kitts and his administration.

The committee pursued an agenda of cleaning the city of its so-called vices.

- Kitts was an easygoing mayor who allowed that all to take place.

- So I think you had people in Erie who were reporting crimes because, you know, we like to look out the curtain and see what our neighbors are doing that we don't approve of, but as far as enforcement goes, think that law enforcement was overwhelmed.

There was just so much happening.

So how do you pick and choose what the priorities are?

And in the city of Erie, you had beat cops who were walking the beat.

How can they cover their entire area, and at that time in history, you could commit a crime in Erie and just cross over the boarder into Wesleyville or into Harbor Creek and what are you gonna do?

The police are gonna stop at the boarder.

They cannot enforce in someone else's jurisdiction.

You know, if you commit a crime in one place, you just travel right along until you're far enough away that you're in another jurisdiction.

So, and that's where the feds come in, where they have jurisdiction over everything.

They're not bound by the boarder of a municipality.

- What really probably brought this to a head is two of the most high profile investigations, Kitts just pretty much said, well there's nothing here.

We looked into it.

At one point, there were four policemen who were accused of being drunk on the job and suspended.

They were reinstated with five days suspensions.

Then that called for greater reform.

Then the committee, still dissatisfied with the progress of this, they hired special consultants.

It eventually led to what was going to be a trial.

And in the whole litigation of this thing, the ruling was finally made that the paneling of the grand jury was illegal because two women served on the grand jury and women were not allowed to serve on grand juries in this, you know, very antiquated time, and that was suggested by Kitt's lawyer and then taken up by the judge.

And they let 'em off.

- That's a really interesting situation where he probably would've been convicted had there not been women on the jury.

The fact that they threw this out because there were women on the jury is really remarkable and makes one wonder, well, then why did they have them on it in the first place?

- Kitt's didn't miss a beat.

He went right back into finishing his mayoral career, went on to have two terms as a state senator, served nine years as an Erie county judge and then finished his career as the district justice for Gerard.

So he was always very popular.

- [Narrator] In an attempt to keep the confiscated, poison liquor from dripping back onto Erie's streets, local judges ordered diligent officials, like county sheriff, William D. Brown, to destroy alcohol seized in raids and kept in the courthouse basement.

Recognizing the increase of activity down by the docks, the raids by federal treasury agents intensified through the mid 1920s.

The writing was on the wall for the former commercial fishermen, like those at Kolbes, and their supply of midnight herring clinking in the reflection of the moonlight.

With demand still high, the clandestine activity in the Erie harbor and waterways was poised to shift to more independent entrepreneurial endeavors.

What would ensue would lead to inventive solutions to logistical problems, engineering feats not before dreamed of, and the rise of organized crime.

Through it all, the people of Erie continued to find willing partners in crime in their neighbors to the north.

- When people in Erie got thirsty and wondered how they could get some of that booze, either made in Ontario or made somewhere else in Canada, across the lake, there were any number of people who were more than happy to help them.

- [Narrator] Next week on Chronicles.

(nostalgic, cheery music) - I mean, where there's a will, there's a way, you know?

That's the secret of making money.

- How you gonna get booze in Erie, and the answer was fast boats.

- They got into whiskey running at the right time.

- When we talk about speakeasies and places like that, you know, people enjoyed those places.

- The ship was coming apart, the captain said, "We're gonna die."

- It was in Pennsylvania and it was for sale, and it still had booze in it, and I bought it.

- Not everything returned to normal.

(upbeat, jazzy music) - [Announcer] Chronicles was made possible thanks to a community access grant provided by the Erie County Game and Revenue Authority, support by the Department of Education, and the generous support of Thomas B. Hagen.

- [Announcer] We question and learn.