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

This is WQLN.

(light music) - Erie was a really growing community.

We were considered a fishing capital.

- There were no rules and regulations and the dilemma is that we were fishing a species to extinction.

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

- [Speaker Suddenly it becomes obvious to everybody, you can't hide this for too long, that what they're unloading as booze.

- Law enforcement was overwhelmed.

There was just so much happening.

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

- When people in Erie got thirsty, there were any number of people who were more than happy to help them.

(piano music) - [Narrator] The melody of prohibition was changing its tune.

From the downbeat of the 18th amendment, the activity across the lake had been anchored by the fishermen.

As the decade wore on, new players entered the scene.

Some were everyday fathers looking to provide for their loved ones, and others held allegiance to a different kind of family, seeking profit above all else.

By the arrival of the Great Depression, the excess of the Roaring 20s shifted to a sparse and somber key.

Nevertheless, as the times changed, a few bright characters made the best of their circumstances.

(piano music) After years of rum running and the increase of raids down by the docks, the fisheries, like Colby's, were no longer safe harbors.

In their place, some found shelter in the cover of night along the shores east of Erie.

- So, the good thing for the lake and for the biomass of all the fish was we took the pressure off the fish for a year by focusing our attention and running booze and the fish started to come back.

Of course, that was a short-termed recovery, and we ended up sort of destroying all those species by overfishing them.

But that meant we needed a new technology for bringing the booze to Erie at least.

And Erie was the hinterlands.

How you would get boozed in Detroit or how you would get booze in Buffalo, those were different animals because they were both on rivers.

So, rivers that at least in the case of Detroit would freeze over.

So, you could take an old car and put bolts in the wheels or run back and forth with alcohol.

And there were the same issues there with the police that were interested, or the police that weren't interested, but how you gonna get booze in Erie and the answer was fast boats.

- And the boats were built, actually, if I pointed across, right over there, many of them.

The boatyard, the Gamble Boatyard constructed them.

The originator, or original builder, was a fellow called George Gamble.

And George Gamble built boats there for many years.

Well, many of them had ended up in Erie.

- My grandfather was a ship builder.

He was a very smart man.

He invented a lot of things.

He was always building something, he was never, always had to do one thing or another.

And he had patents and oh, by the way, he was related to Thomas Edison distant cousin to Thomas Edison also.

My grandfather was a boat builder in Port Dover.

And during the prohibition, he was the one that looked after the rum running boats and put the Liberty airplane engines in the boats.

- The Liberty engine was actually the product of a great bit of cooperation between the three big car manufacturers in the states.

They all got together to produce this 12 cylinder, lightweight engine for a fighter called the SE5.

And because it was light because it was for an airplane, but this also made it ideal for a boat.

- [Narrator] Preserved for decades in waters deep, a Liberty engine prototype was recovered by two enterprising divers in 1985.

- The 15V8 today, there's only three of them left.

One sits at the Air and Space Museum in D.C.. One is at the Wright Patterson Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio.

And one that sets here in Coney Lake on Liberty the Second.

And this is the only one of the three that actually runs.

(engine humming) The Liberty engine, at about 57 mile an hour, the torque of the motor pulls the boat to the left and it turns right.

And we'd been informed that if we have 100 gallons of alcohol on the radiant side of the boat, it counterbalances the torque of the motor and goes true blue down the lake.

It was good for rum running because most things didn't go 78 mile an hour unless you was an airplane.

- Gamble was a airplane mechanic during World War I and he was quite familiar with Liberty Engines.

And then he added a special Gamble technique.

He had a button that you could push and when you got up to high RPMs, you pushed this button and it squirted caster oil inside the engine.

And one of the unknown knowns amongst aficionados of World War I flying aces, they would all end up with diarrhea that you just knew you're gonna go flying and the stress and the castor oil would cause you to come back with diarrhea soaked clothing.

That was one of the ugly parts of that.

Gamble was able to fix it so that that didn't happen in those fast boats.

- One particular boat he liked was called the Patricia.

The Patricia she was had the Liberty engine in it, but also on the stern of the Liberty engine, the house was curved so when the bullets hit the backend, they've deflect off.

That's why she was a distinguished boat.

- It was named after the girlfriend of one of the Semple brothers who from Erie who was living on this side of the lake.

And he had a girlfriend in Dunville named Patricia and so this boat got named after her.

- So, the Semple started out with Jardines.

They supplemented their fleet by adding a couple of Port Dover Gamble machines that were said to be faster.

Gamble said his gray ghosts, as they called those ships, would go 40 full and 50 empty and there was no boat in the world that could catch them.

And on a clear, flat night they would make three runs.

So, if you run the numbers and convert them to 2022 dollars, retail value, this is not accounting for expenses, eight or $900,000.

Now you're thinking, oh my God, but they had enormous expenses.

They had to have these boats, they had to maintain them, they had to fuel them, they had to have infrastructure on both sides of the lake.

So big bucks, all cash, all hidden from the economy.

And if you go out to Six Mile Creek where the marina was, Richard Cowell says that in those days it was the Wild West out there.

(light music) - We are sitting property that I grew up at and it's along six Mile Creek here in Harbor Creek Township, Erie County, Pennsylvania.

And Tom Cowell, the adventurer, Tommy Cowell, is my dad.

And I would say my dad's interest in the prohibition, the whiskey running, was totally for the purpose of the fun of it, the adventure of doing it, to see if you could do it.

And those Jardines were very fast boats.

I think they ended up with this particular spot, not only because it was a little safer and the Revenue Service couldn't get them, but that Six Mile Creek at the mouth, because of the prevailing winds, westerly, and waves, westerly, which has created our peninsula, created at at the mouth of the creek, a subversion of that.

And if you brought a boat in there, particularly if it was fairly high gravel bank on it and the boat was kept low, and of course you emptied it as soon as you got it in, it was pretty hard to spot.

So, anybody going by you, you might not know there was anything in there 'cause the water would go out that the far east end.

It really hard to spot that.

- Tommy was a beloved figure.

He had been recruited from the Detroit area to come down and he knew boats, better than most, and was able to play that key role.

And he and his family had a great role in the community.

- What would happen with the whiskey running itself, they would go over and my dad, I think was the only operator of the boats because you never knew what you were gonna run into by way of weather or possible interdiction.

They'd get the whiskey, they'd get as much of it as they could.

The best stuff.

They would bring it over, they would have fellas there 'cause it wasn't a one-man job to unload it.

It was crucial to take them and get them into town.

So, they would go aboard a truck or more trucks.

But, the problem is you had to be careful because patterns, the police, sheriff's department, I mean, that was a good headline, good political thing if you could catch a bunch of whiskey and break it up, I mean there, that was important.

So yeah, you had to distribute it quickly.

And I think that was crucial to the whole operation.

I don't remember them ever losing any from everything I've been able to recall.

They got into the whiskey running at the right time and they got out at the right time because the organized crime was coming in and they didn't wanna deal with those guys.

And to some extent, they had to deal with those guys.

- [Narrator] The Magaddino's in Buffalo, the Leonardo's in Cleveland, the Siragusa's in Pittsburgh, and other organized crime families expanded their reach.

Erie was caught in the middle.

- There were two crime families fighting with each other.

One of those families ended up stretching into Buffalo.

That was the Magaddino people.

And the other into Pittsburgh.

And at the beginning, neither of those families thought that Erie was interesting.

Then suddenly, when it becomes obvious to them there's a random family of people here that are making in eight or $900,000 in an evening, there's that kinda cash money to be had, they both decided to come here.

So, the Buffalo family sent a fellow by the name of Jimmy Salamone, or Westfield Jimmy, as he was called and he created the most difficulty the fastest.

The Westfield Jimmy money ended up in Cleveland and from Cleveland it ended up, they were gonna take that when prohibition was over and get into gambling in Kentucky.

And then Kentucky became unfriendly politically.

And that's when they made the decision to either go to Cuba or Vegas.

So, there's a direct line from Buffalo, to Westfield Jimmy, to Erie, Pennsylvania, to Cleveland, to Las Vegas.

- [Narrator] Quicker than car and far less perilous since the turn of the century, the most efficient way for the average Joe to travel across the lake was by ferry.

- There were a few ferries that went back and forth from Erie to Port Dover on a regular basis, on a scheduled basis.

There was the Keystone was the big one and there was one called the City of Erie.

And then there was another one called the City of Dover.

Imaginative names.

- They brought a lot of people who came for good times and went home with good times too.

And the shopping, I guess was good.

The Canadian dollar in the U.S. dollar were probably on par about that time.

So, shopping wasn't the reason they were here.

Others in the 1920s came for a variety of reasons.

Rum, principally, it was a good period because the war was over and American vets and Canadian vets wanted something I think positive in their world that would make them happy 'cause they'd been through a heck of a lot of unhappiness.

And coming over here was one of those things.

They were here for fun.

- So, the average car trip from Erie, Pennsylvania to Port Dover was in the 20s, 20, 25 hours.

If they had to get in their car and drive to Port Dover, here's what they had to do.

They had to drive to Niagara Falls and get in line on the two-lane bridge and they'd say to people it could go this way and then stop them and then go the other way.

And then from Niagara Falls, they had to drive to Hamilton, Ontario, and they had to drive down the Hamilton Plank Road which was made out of wood.

They would always get at least two flat tires.

So, if you wonder why the ferry was working, it's because you could either sit in line for two hours, put your car on the ferry, come over here, three hours across, two hours to get your car back on the ferry, three hours back the other way.

But that sure beat 25 hours of driving and taking two tires with you and changing them on the plank road between Hamilton and Port Dover.

- [Narrator] These day trippers from Erie to Port Dover brought back more than fun memories.

Some of them brought back high percentage party favors.

- I mean, where there's a will, there's a way, you know?

That's the secret of making money.

If you've got a market, you're going to find some entrepreneur who's going to find that niche and go to work and do it.

And there were a lot of niches.

- There's one great story.

One of the local bootleggers whose name was Bugeye Smith was that he wanted to get some booze onto the ferry, the Keystone, but he knew that the local revenue or type officer was on the ferry and would recognize him.

And so the story went, well, Bugeye Smith had a small baby and a big buggy.

And so, he sent Mrs. Bugeye onto the boat with the baby and the booze underneath the baby.

- Bugeye Smith, if you made a deal with him, he would take your car and he'd put a false tank under it and fill it with alcohol.

- [Narrator] Bugeye Smith was one of many tales told of the lake's liquor lore.

Another story passed down through the years is the fabled fate of the City of Dresden.

One of the many vessels victim to Lake Erie's ferocious temper.

The City of Dresden had taken shelter in the calmer waters of Long Point Bay off the coast of Port Rowan.

- A late season storm in November caught them.

It wasn't the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, but it was of that magnitude.

The ship was coming apart.

The captain said, "We're gonna die."

Drove it onto the beach, Gravelly Bay, which is just outside of Port Rowan.

- The women of Clear Creek down there came out and they rescued the crew.

And the men of Clear Creek rescued the cargo and there were thousands of bottles worth of booze that washed up on the shore or got brought in in a salvage attempt.

- The town of Port Rowan had a marvelous party that lasted three days.

The lines that, I think there were telegraph lines in those days, or telegraph lines to Simpka were cut.

So, there was no communication.

So, the insurance and revenue people arrive three days later.

In that three days, a lot of that whiskey evaporated.

The weather conditions were pretty heavy.

- This isn't one from the wreck, but this is what it would've looked like.

And so this is Old Crow and it says Old Crow bourbon whiskey distilled and bottled in bond by Consolidated Distilleries, head office, Montreal.

And it says, spiritus fermenti, which is what they called it when they would prescribe it, when a doctor would prescribe booze.

100% proof, U.S. standard, alcoholic stimulant, made from the fermented mash of grain aged in wood.

- I was principal of a school out there called Valley Heights and I remember a parent coming in one day and said, "Gee, the strangest thing just happened."

I said, "What do you mean?"

He said, "We were renovating my grandfather's old house."

I said, "Yeah."

He said, "Well, we tore off all the interior and there we were right down to the studs and guess what we found?"

I said, "Money?"

"No, whiskey.

Bottles of whiskey that were walled up inside the house and had been there for years."

- [Narrator] Innovations in infrastructure meant fewer rum runners required their sea legs as shipments moved to shore.

- And of course, the end of the ferries, in the sounds counterproductive, was the Peace Bridge.

So, the Peace Bridge changed everything.

Suddenly, we didn't have to fool around bringing stuff to Erie, Pennsylvania by driving back and forth in big boats.

We could take it across the Peace Bridge and make a right-hand turn.

So, now with I-90 in the Peace Bridge, I drive to Port Dover in three hours and 15 minutes with a stop for coffee at Tim Hortons.

Why would I take a ferry?

- [Narrator] When civilians found other means to get their booze, the Erie breweries had to adapt to the changing economic landscape.

- The Erie Brewing Company dealt with ice.

They became the Erie Pure Ice, that was a company name.

Imperial Beverages was another offshoot.

They did all kinds of ginger ale and Lithia lime and all kinds of names of different pops.

And I didn't know this for quite a while.

They did make what's called a near beer, cereal beverage type thing that was supposed to be a half of 1%.

And I've heard, I've actually read, where they accidentally made some beer, near beer, that was a little higher than half of 1% and got caught and fined.

I'm sure they were doing whatever they could do to stay in business.

- [Narrator] In 1929, stocks reached a precipice and dropped off.

From Wall Street to Wichita, from the city soup kitchens to the rural dust bowl, The Great Depression, as it became known, broke family's hearts, bank accounts, and bottom lines.

- The Great Depression made a big difference.

I mean, here, just the way it was everywhere else, it was tough.

There wasn't a lot of cash, but the same with the fishing.

And then the fishing went on.

And in those days it wasn't a big capital industry.

It was, you know, it was a family with a boat and mending nets by hand.

And I think any of us would consider it pretty darn tough.

- We would guess that maybe 22, 23% of the economy was gray here, which made it really difficult.

How you're gonna live on the tax revenues, for example, when we're not taxing things.

So, the depression hit here hard, and it took a long time for us to get all that stuff in order.

Not that we've probably completely gotten it in order, but the thing that makes it unlikely that that could ever happen again is the preponderance of franchises in the world of everything from selling cars to painting cars, to repairing cars, to restaurants, to theaters, that ended the quiet money - [Narrator] With constant financial woes and persistent rising crime, the calls to repeal the 18th amendment garnered greater support, even amongst those who once petitioned for a dry America.

- The passage of that legislation, the 18th amendment really kind of demonstrated that temperance was maybe not the best solution because of everything that stemmed from that with the rise of gangsterism, and corruption, organized crime.

Although, when we talk about speakeasies and places like that, people enjoyed those places.

There were people who made hooch in their bathtubs, right?

- I think there was some effort to clean up downtown Erie, but prohibition really didn't work.

And it didn't work before kits and it didn't work after kits.

It was just an unpopular thing.

It became more unpopular as it went on.

- [Narrator] During the end of his campaign for president in 1933, the governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ran on a platform promising assistance to the struggling country.

One of the more popular agendas was his assurance that he would repeal prohibition.

- That there can be no possible misunderstanding.

Let me read the provisions of the Democratic platform on this point, and let me add that it's in plain English.

It begins, we advocate the repeal of the 18th Amendment.

(crowd cheering) - [Narrator] On December 5th, 1933, President FDR ratified the 21st Amendment, repealing prohibition.

- [Narrator] Things were looking up.

Legal beer was back, true only 3.2, but there were parts and pallets eagerly waiting and the sidles kept sliding along.

Beer was back after 13 years, a long time between drinks.

More than one bank that had gone bust found itself housing a business with more liquid assets.

The erstwhile temple of finance lost moral tone, but over the counter transactions picked up marvelously.

With legal beer back, could prosperity be far behind?

Undreamt of social upheavals were in store.

Who knew then what would come of women in bars and sack dresses?

Tomorrow is tomorrow.

This was 1933.

- You know, not everything returned to normal.

It takes people a long time, people that suffered and/or went off into other businesses to figure out what to do next.

- When prohibition ended in 1933, Erie Brewing was ready at midnight, April 6th, to start distributing beer, which they did.

Wayne Brewing didn't have their first beer come out until 1934.

And they never recovered from Prohibition.

They lasted until September of '51.

But they just, they never had the momentum that they had before Prohibition.

- [Narrator] While some things faded away after repeal, other institutions continued on, even some you might not expect.

- So, I think that one might assume that it meant the death of the WCTU and the Temperance Movement, but it did not.

It might have, one could argue, that it lost some of its oomph at the time, but it still exists.

In almost every state there is a chapter of the WCTU and in 36 countries around the world that organization still exists.

It campaigns against the consumption of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs and it publishes literature.

- [Narrator] And what of the former foes turned allies on each side of the lake?

- These days we're more connected than we ever have been.

The rum running was, it was a small group of people in Port Dover.

You know, it wasn't a sizeable percentage of the population.

I think, you know, the folklore of it expands the importance of it because the people who are just going to work the way they always did, don't have stories told about them and songs written about them.

The romance of the whole thing I think may sometimes give the impression that it was a bigger part of everybody's lives than maybe it really was.

- I see Lake Erie fundamentally as a connective between Port Dover, Canada, and the United States.

We've made many, many, many good friends there.

And I know many Americans who come back here annually.

When they can't boat anymore, they drive over in their cars and stay in a local hotel because they enjoy being here and our people do the same.

So, it's definitely a close relationship that's existed for half a century or more as far as I'm concerned.

- My dad, I would say it's the end of the road, the end of the trip was never the goal.

The journey, so to speak, was everything with my father.

And that's the way he lived his life.

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

- [Narrator] We question and learn.