Who knew? The stealthy business of making hooch

Susan Doak

Southwest Nebraska Genealogy Society

Lawrence Wasia was a heck of a broom maker. He grew his own broom straw and then made the brooms by hand in the basement of Louie Glick's Farm and Ranch Store. He sold a lot of brooms because the women found them to be excellently made.

The brooms went out the front door, but Lawrence was selling his other specialty out the back. He had a pretty good hooch business going...some men say it was the best in Red Willow County. Heck of a deal, the women loved his brooms, the men loved his hooch and the revenuers never caught on to where his still was hidden. By the way, he had the happiest pigs on any farm for miles around, that left over mash was delicious! Leonard never married and his broom making talent and secret hooch recipe died with him, along with the location of the still.....chickens don't talk much, you know.

When we bought the big apartment house on East Second and C Streets, we found a bunch of match boxes filled with metal bottle caps in a basement room that had at one time been used to store coal. A gentleman who served as the city inspector back in the day filled me in on the story. The family who had inherited the huge old house was turning it into apartments. Before they could rent rooms out, they had to have a license issued by the city which meant the inspector had to inspect every room in the whole house.

Everything was going pretty well until they went into the basement and the owner refused to open the door to the coal room. The conversation was related to me as such:

Inspector: "I don't care what you have in that room, you're not getting your license until I see inside!"

Owner: "So you're not going to tell anyone what is in there?"

Inspector: "No, I will never tell as long as it doesn't affect your having a rooming house!" The door was promptly opened revealing a still and bottling operation behind it and the owner got his license. (Everyone else was long dead when the gentleman who was the inspector revealed this to me and since he's gone now too, I can tell the story, sans names of course.)

I grew up listening to stories of stills in the banks of the hills south of Indianola. Never saw one, but the telling was fun to hear. I also grew up with a concoction of raisons brewing into beer, grapes turned into wine and chokecherry juice put up every year. If you have enough sugar, good cheesecloth, a 10 gallon crock and a corking contraption (sugar is the most important part with some of those berries) you can turn just about anything into wine or jelly depending on the recipients.

Craft beers and wines are the "thing," but they're nothing new in this area, just legal now. I'll bet Lawrence is having a bit of a laugh about it all!

Southwest Nebraska Genealogy Society's monthly meeting will be on July 11 due to the holiday. We will not meet in August, plus third Saturday open library and Thursday research nights are suspended until September, because of the heat.