V. de Metz, Handbook of Modern Palmistry (New York: Brentano Publishing, 1883), accessed Hathi Trust Digital Library.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the man who called himself Herman Billik (also Billick) was “plying his trade as a charmer, palm reader and hypnotist in Whiting,” according to the Hammond Times. He was well-known among Whiting residents for his involvement in strange incidents involving the occult. By 1906 he was well-known to the entire country as the poisoner of six people in Chicago.
The establishment of the Standard Oil Refinery in Whiting in 1889 brought many recent immigrants to the area in search of employment. According to Archibald McKinley, historian of the Calumet Region, these new arrivals found a “barren, lonely place, devoidof trees, grass, sidewalks, telephone, theaters, streetlights, parks and other amenities of civilization.” While many immigrants found community in their religious organizations, others formed clubs and founded theaters, such as Goebel’s Opera House. Others looked for more sinister entertainment.
One of these new immigrants to Whiting set up shop in an office building on John Street near this new opera house. His name was Herman Vajicek in his country of origin which was referred to in contemporary newspapers as “Bohemia” (likely the Czech Republic). Now going by Herman Billik or “the Great Billik,” he was “doing a rushing business” before the turn of the century. His business was in palm reading, hypnotism, charms . . . and curses.
Billik soon befriended a Standard Oil employee named Joseph Vacha, also described by the Hammond Times as a “bohemian.” Vacha described the story of a curse Billik used when hired to break the engagement of “a young Whiting man and a widow.” According to the Hammond Times:
The mother of the young man objected to the engagement and all of her efforts to break it up being in vain she went to Billik, clairvoyant. He promised to do the deed for the sum of three dollars. To make his charm effective, however, he said that it was necessary for him to have one of the young man’s socks and his handkerchief, and that furthermore permission be given him to enter the home of the young man while everybody in the family was asleep. Anything to break up the engagement was consented to by the mother, although without her son’s knowledge, The sock, handkerchief and permission were readily given and whatever Billik may or may not have done, it is known that the young man and the widow broke up their engagement shortly after Billik’s midnight visit.
Before Whiting residents greeted the new century, Billik “pulled stakes one night and was never seen again.”
He didn’t go far.
According to the Chicago Tribune, around 1900, he had set up his shop in the East Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. The neighborhood was settled by Czech immigrants who worked in the mills, sweatshops, and railroad yards. According to the Encyclopedia of Chicago, these Czech immigrants established their residences along 18th street. According to the Chicago Tribune, on this same street Billik opened his shop and “made a practice of duping women with money.” The article continued:
Billick’s Chicago record is dotted with ‘aliases, victims of his love potions and stories of how he spent his easily gained wealth in automobiles, theaters, wine suppers, and rioutous living . . . Billick had headquarters in a richly furnished flat at 645 West Eighteenth street and was known as ‘Prof. Herman.’ To this flat many women went daily. Billick boasted that he made as much as $100 a day.
Image: Pilsen Neighborhood, postcard, circa 1870s, in Frank S. Magallon, “A Historical Look at Czech Chicagoland,” accessed Czech-American Community Center.
According to this same article, Billik left Chicago for Cleveland sometime in 1901 after one of these women threatened to expose him as a fraud. It is not clear when he returned to Chicago and again began selling potions and telling fortunes.
In 1904, Mary Vrzal, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of a Chicago businessman, found herself in need of a love potion. She visited “the Great Billik” at his Chicago location and sometime during the exchange must have mentioned her father’s thriving milk business. Billik soon visited Martin Vrzal at work where he spoke in tongues and convinced the businessman that he had a vision of an enemy working actively working to destroy him. Martin trusted the “fortune-teller” perhaps because he was also a Czech immigrant or perhaps because he was indeed engaged in intense battle with a rival businessman. Either way, Martin Vrzal invited Herman Billik home to meet his family and cast a spell on his enemy. What followed over the next year was clouded in disparate retelling and testimony. The details were murky, but what was completely clear was that the Vrzal family members began turning up dead.
The family patriarch went first. Martin Vrzal died March 27, 1905, leaving a $2000 life insurance policy to his children. Martin was followed in death by his daughter Mary a few months later and her sister Tilly that December. Their insurance policies totaled $1400. Another two daughters were killed in the first few months of 1906, leaving just a few hundred dollars in life insurance behind. Finally, the police became involved. The only Vrzal family member left were the late Martin’s wife Rosa, their eldest daughter, Emma, and their only son, Jerry.
Grave of Martin Vrzal, Bohemian National Cemetery, Chicago, accessed Find-A-Grave.
The police suspected that Herman and Rosa had been having an affair. They accused Herman of promising Rosa marriage and a life off of the insurance money if they poisoned both his wife and child and Rosa’s husband and children. However, Herman neither poisoned nor left his family. He did somehow end up with the insurance money.
The police then suspected Rosa of poisoning her own family under Herman’s influence. They issued a warrant for the arrest of both suspects. As the law closed in, Rosa committed suicide — by poisoning. Jerry Vrzal accused Herman of her death, claiming that he hypnotized her into taking her own life.
In December 1906, the police took Emma Vrzal to the residence to view her mother’s body, only they did not tell Emma that she was dead. According to Steve Shukis’s well-researched book Poisoned, the detective would sometimes use shock tactics to surprise suspects into confessing. He took emma into the bedroom and an officer yanked the cover off the body. She puportedly fainted and when she regained consciousness stated: “Now you must get that man . . . Billik . . . I want him hung.” She then wrote on a piece of paper, “Billik gave father medicine — and gave some to Mary.” She went on to tell the police that Billik had “special power” over the family.
The police brought Billik into the station and searched his apartment. They found letters from the late matriarch, one signed “with ten thousand kisses — Rosa.”
The Chicago police questioned Billik for five hours, according to the Chicago Tribune. The Chicago Daily News took a bizarre series of photographs of Billick and his family from several of his visits to the Hyde Park Police Department and throughout his trials which available digitally through the Chicago History Museum.
Herman Billick, Sr., at the Hyde Park police station in Chicago, Illinois, Chicago Daily News Photograph, circa 1906, accessed Chicago History Museum.
Mary Billick, wife of Herman Billick, and their daughter Edna Billick, Chicago Daily News Photograph, circa 1907, accessed Chicago History Museum.The coroner opened an inquest and demanded the bodies of the Vrzal family be exhumed and tested for poison. The inquest continued into 1907 with witnesses bringing forward more an more incriminating stories about Billik. By February the coroner was through with testing the bodies. He found arsenic in Martin, Rosa, and Tillie, but also concluded that it had been administered slowly over a period of weeks of months. This evidence was added to the testimony and the jury indicted Herman Billik on six counts of murder.
The case went to trial in May 1907. The judge sided with the prosecution’s argument that all six charges of murder should have separate hearings. Billik would have to be found not guilty by six different juries. The trial for the murder of Mary Vrzal began July 3, 1907. The jury heard dozens of testimonies but none more damning than that of Jerry Vzral who described Billik’s witching and eventual poisoning his family. The defense, on the other hand, made a strong case that no one profited more from these deaths than Emma, who inherited the house and business. (Shukis details each day of trial in his book, Poisoned). Hermann admitted to swindling the Vrzal family but not to an affair with Rosa and maintained he was innocent of any of the murders.
On July 18, 1907, Billik was found guilty and sentenced to hang.
There were still many questions about the case and much evidence that pointed to Emma as the murderer. His defense attorney began working to appeal. Several people believed him innocent, including a Catholic nun helping Billik’s family. She brought his case to the attention of an energetic Catholic priest named Father P.J. O’Callaghan.
Digging for information that would help the appeal, O’Callaghan found more evidence pointing to Emma and a former boyfriend of hers. The priest gathered more information from the immigrant community along with donations that would help Billik. He visited Jerry where he was in school at Valparaiso University and encouraged him to change his testimony if he had lied. Meanwhile, Emma began a smear campaign against the priest.
Suddenly, in a twist that some though should have cleared Billik entirely, Emma’s husband William Niemann sickened and died in a matter of days (though Emma claimed he had been sick for some time). Though it didn’t clear him, Billik got his appeal hearing. More importantly, Jerry returned to Chicago to correct his testimony. He stated that Billik never gave the family potions or plotted against them. The appeal was read by the Illinois Supreme Court in January 1908. They decided there was no error in the record to reverse the decision. Billik would hang April 24, 1908.
The defense attorney, the priest, and Jerry continued to work for a new hearing… and continued noticing other patterns in the testimony and evidence that pointed to Emma. On April 18, 1908, just days before the scheduled execution, the Illinois Governor and a pardon board granted a hearing. After long hours of arguments, the governor granted a reprieve for the board to further review the evidence.
O’Callaghan managed to persuade more than 20,000 people from Chicago’s immigrant community to sign a petition on behalf of Billik’s claim of innocence. O’Callaqghan’s efforts combined with a demonstration of prayer by 400 of Ballik’s fellow prisoners at the Cork County Jail, drew thousands of people to the jail on execution day.
The presiding judge granted an appeal based on a flaw in the prosecuter’s case. He was reprieved until January 29, 1909 when as one newspaper put it, “Herman Billik Must Die.”
Alburquerque (NM) Citizen, January 21, 1909, 1, accessed Chronicling America.
However, he was again spared the gallows. Just before his execution date, the Governor of Illinois commuted his sentence to life in prison.
Suspicion remained on the newly widowed Emma Vzral Niemann. Newspapers reported that Billik’s conviction for the murder of William Niemann was based on circumstantial evidence. Father O’Callaghan and others were convinced of Emma’s guilt. However, at her inquest the “many details of circumstantial evidence which had been collected against her were successfully explained by her testimony.” The witness that proved Emma’s innocence was somehow Emma herself.
Topeka Daily State Journal, August 27, 1908, 5, accessed Chronicling America.
Conclusive evidence seemed to be presented showing that Billik had no access to arsenic, the poison found in all of the bodies except William Niemann’s. However, the assistant coroner may have been pressured into reporting the lack of arsenic in William’s body. In his book Poisoned, author Steve Shukis writes that political corruption distorted the facts. He writes, “Clues were brought forward, but only some were investigated.” It seems clear that there were people in positions of power that did not want arsenic to be found in the body of Emma’s husband. “It would have cast an enormous cloud over Billik’s conviction” and suggest that leading Chicago figures from the Police Chief to the State Attorney to the judge “condemned an innocent man,” according to Shukis.
Billik spent the next several years in prison, maintaining his innocence and continuing to lobby for a pardon. Finally, at the end of 1916, he received a hearing. The evidence was examined by new eyes and Jerry returned to remake testimony. Herman Billik was pardoned in January 1917 and died soon after.
After his pardon, Emma, now remarried, told the Chicago Tribune:
If ever a man deserved hanging, Herman Billik did. I am the one who first suspected that he killed my father and my sisters. I exposed him. I had him arrested. I never ceased in my efforts at vengeance until I saw him sent to the penitentiary. I have nothing in my heart but bitterness for Billik now. I could cheerfully stone him to death. It would be a joy to me to pull on the rope that choked his life out.
Though we focused on Herman here because of his Indiana connection, several key players at the time were convinced of Emma’s guilt and Herman’s innocence. For more information see Steve Shukis’s book Poisoned: Chicago 1907, A Corrupt System, an Accused Killer, and the Crusade to Save Him. Shukis’s book gives a much more thorough treatment of what we have only scratched the surface of here. He also presents a myriad of primary sources from the period we had no room to cover here. The more you dig, the stranger it gets; it’s a perfect read for the season. Happy Halloween!
Hoosier State Chronicles has just uploaded several brand new titles into our online search engine.
Historians, genealogists and other curious researchers can now dig into some historic newspapers from Bloomington, Indianapolis, Bedford, Hammond, New Richmond, Sullivan, Smithville, and tiny Orland up in Steuben County. While our available run of Hammond’s Lake County Times currently includes just three years (1920-22), we’ll add issues of that great paper back to its start in 1906 in coming months.
Our newest batch also includes a controversial choice for Hoosier State Chronicles, but one which is of enormous historical value: the Ku Klux Klan’s Fiery Cross. From the early to mid-1920s, the Klan edited and printed its influential Indiana State edition from the Century Building in downtown Indianapolis at a time when the Invisible Empire was largely headquartered in Indy. Although HSC and the Indiana State Library in no way endorse the views of the KKK, we trust you’ll find The Fiery Cross a fascinating read. The paper is an integral part of the history of radical right-wing politics, nativism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, white supremacy, the battle over religion in public schools, and American attitudes toward immigration. Cast a glance at American politics today and what seems like old 1920s news is still hugely relevant.
We expect that some members of the public might be offended by our making The Fiery Cross available on the web, but we stand by its value as a historic document. If you’re looking for a strong anti-Klan perspective, many Hoosier editors took a stand against the group in the 1920s. We recommend several papers available in Hoosier State Chronicles: the African American Indianapolis Recorder, George R. Dale’s ferocious (and humorous) Muncie Post-Democrat, and the great Indianapolis News. The microfilm collections of the Indiana State Library also contain two other notable Indianapolis newspapers that opposed the KKK. These are the Pulitzer Prize-winning Indianapolis Times and the Indiana Catholic & Record, forerunner of the Catholic archdiocese’s current newsletter, The Criterion.
Although the Indiana Klan’s heyday ended in the late 1920s, we would also like to point out that Hoosier State Chronicles makes available the Jewish Post & Opinionfrom the date of its inception in Indianapolis in 1933 all the way up to 2005 — a paper that has fought for many decades to raise awareness of racism in the U.S. and abroad.
Here’s a full list of what’s new on HSC this month:
The Fiery Cross(1922-24, 104 issues) {a pro-Ku Klux Klan paper}
In the wake of one presidential hopeful’s recent call to ban Muslims from entering the U.S., we thought it appropriate to share a humorous anecdote about Muslim immigrants in Hoosier history. This story also evokes a mostly-forgotten episode that saw Chicago’s great film companies use the Indiana Dunes as a stand-in for Mexico and the Sahara Desert.
The story came out in both the Gary Daily Tribune and Chicago Record-Tribune. In the summer of 1910, if we can trust the Chicago reporter, some Muslim steel workers shouted excitedly, and maybe even suffered a bit of homesickness when the following scene played out in the streets of the new town of Gary.
(Chicago Record-Tribune, June 14, 1910.)
The Gary Daily Tribune had a different take:
(Gary Daily Tribune, June 13, 1910.)
In the early days of the silent movie industry, Chicago’s Essanay Studios predominated. Not until the 1920s did the big film producers relocate to Hollywood. Founded in 1907, Essenay’s headquarters were located in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood. While best known for producing a series of fourteen Charlie Chaplin comedies in 1915 (The Tramp is the most famous), the company also turned out a few American movie “firsts” — including the first American Sherlock Holmes movie (1916) and the first American film version of Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol (1908). This producer of silent films also scored hits with actor Francis X. Bushman (1883-1966), once hailed as “the handsomest man in the world.” One website calls him the “Brad Pitt of his day.”
(Bushman played the corrupt Roman tribune Messala in director Fred Niblo’s 1925 adaptation of another Middle Eastern tale with Hoosier connections. Ben-Hur, A Tale of the Christ was based on the 1880 novel by Indiana author Lew Wallace, who served as U.S. Minister to Turkey from 1881-1884.)
Chicago’s own sand dunes had mostly been destroyed by 1910, though just a hundred years earlier, they had been the scene of the dramatic beheading of frontier Hoosier soldier and Indian agent William Wells. (Wells, a white captive from Kentucky after whom Wells County was later named, was killed on the beach during the Battle of Fort Dearborn in 1812.) With the growing city looming up on Lake Michigan’s western shore, historic films set in exotic or far-away places had to be filmed across the lake in Indiana. In spite of its proximity to Chicago, swampy northwest Indiana was the last part of the state to be settled and was still largely undeveloped in 1900.
Some of the films Essenay at least partially shot in the area that became Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore include one called Lost in the Desert. That movie seems to have gotten lost itself, but it was apparently part of a series of films by American actor William V. Mong. (Two of his earlier films are entitled Lost in the Jungle and Lost in the Arctic.)
According to an article in The Times of Northwest Indiana, Mong played a “British officer who escapes from Bedouin bandits and wanders aimlessly in the desert until the cavalry rescues him. . .”
In a strange tale of life imitating art, [Mong] became lost in the Dunes after he fell asleep under a tree and the crew left without him. Mong was made up for his role, his clothing in tatters and a leopard skin covering his shoulders.
When he awoke, Mong couldn’t find his way out of the Dunes and was forced to spend the night, suffering from a lack of water and tormented by mosquitoes.
The next morning a trapper from the village of Crisman, making his way through the marshes, was startled to see a ragged, unkempt, half-naked man with long hair and a beard. The strange figure was stumbling through the sand, carrying a club. At times it paused, tried to shout, then moaned inarticulately, and went on his way. The frightened trapper hurried back to Crisman to tell what he had seen. A sheriff’s posse tracked down and rescued the lost man about sunset.
The trapper might have been even more scared if he’d come across Mong in the costume he wore in a 1921 film adaptation of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Mong appeared as the wizard Merlin.
A similar film was made in the Dunes in June 1910, Lost in the Soudan, by the Selig Polyscope Company. This was definitely the film that brought an unusual camel caravan parading through the streets of Gary, Indiana — to great acclaim from a segment of the town’s Muslim steelworkers. Lost in the Soudan starred the great cowboy actor Tom Mix, an early predecessor of John Wayne.
(Filmmakers on the set of Lost in the Soudan, partly filmed in the dunes near Miller Beach, Indiana, in the summer of 1910. Other films made there include The Fall of Montezuma, set during the Spanish Conquest of Mexico, and The Plum Tree, a tale of the Mexican Revolution. The Plum Tree used a regiment of the Illinois National Guard, who impersonated “Revolutionists” and “Federals” in a pitched battle filmed in an Indiana ravine.)
(Ex-president Theodore Roosevelt, left, riding a camel in Egypt or the Sudan, 1910. The man riding the other camel is the English-Austrian soldier, General Rudolf Carl von Slatin, who publicly converted to Islam to win the support of his soldiers.)
We take the Chicago Record-Herald’s statement on faith that the crowd who encountered a film company’s camel caravan in Gary in 1910 were actually Muslim. While some of the first immigrants ever to come over the Atlantic were Muslim — including an estimated 15-30% of the slaves carried here from Africa — the great wave of voluntary Muslim immigration to the U.S. didn’t really begin until just before World War I.
Yet according to a recent history of Islam in America, Bosnian Muslims had settled in Chicago and Gary, Indiana, by 1906, and they may have been the group that shouted “Allah! R-r-r-uum!” at the movie camels on Broadway in Gary. In the 1910s, Bosnians were also working in the copper mines around Butte, Montana, in and played a role in the labor struggles there. In 1906, Bosnian Muslims established a Dzemijetul Hajrije (Benevolent Society) in Chicago to provide mutual aid and help pay for funerals and healthcare. That society soon had a branch in Gary. By 2007, it was estimated that three-quarters of Bosnian Muslims in the U.S. lived in the Chicago-Milwaukee-Gary area.
As the Ottoman Empire collapsed, Muslim immigration picked up after 1918. It’s an interesting fact that one of the first mosques and Muslim cemeteries in the U.S. was founded by Syrian Muslims in Ross, North Dakota, in 1929. (Ross, a town in North Dakota’s remote Badlands, had a population of just 97 in 2010, though those numbers were much higher a hundred years ago.) Another mosque was soon built in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1934. Contrary to popular images, the Midwest has long been one of the cradles of Islam in America, with large numbers of Muslims, for example, settling around the auto factories of Dearborn, Michigan.
Several hundred thousand Middle Eastern Christians, mostly from Syria and Lebanon, also came to the U.S. in those years. (Famous Syrian Americans include former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, tech wizard Steve Jobs, filmmaker Terrence Malick, and actor F. Murray Abraham, who played composer Antonio Salieri in Miloš Forman’s Amadeus.)
As for camels in the U.S., their history, too, goes back farther than you might think.
In a 1909 article in Popular Science Monthly, Walter Fleming, who taught at Louisiana State University, claimed that the Spanish had brought camels to Cuba for work in mines and that the English had unsuccessfully tried out the use of dromedaries in Virginia in 1701. Fleming wrote that the English also gave camels a go in Jamaica, but the beasts were rendered useless when their feet got infested by Caribbean “chiggers” — a bug well-known to anybody who has hiked around grassy Hoosier fields in the summer.
In the wake of the Mexican War, the U.S. Army experimented with a short-lived camel corps in the 1850s. During Franklin Pierce’s administration, the War Department — then headed by Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis — tried out the practicability of using camels in the arid Southwest, which prior to exploration Americans still thought of as mostly a barren, useless desert. Under the command of U.S. Admiral David Dixon Porter, who had previously served in the Mexican Navy, the navy vessel USS Supplysailed to the Mediterranean and picked up thirty-three camels in North Africa, Turkey, Malta and Greece.
(An awful drawing from the Report of the U.S. Secretary of War, 1857, showing the transport of Middle Eastern camels on a ship bound for Texas.)
(U.S. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis helped start the Camel Corps. The experiment led to the arrival of a group of Muslim caretakers for the camels.)
Jefferson Davis had seen Texas and the Southwest himself as a colonel in the Mexican War. Fleming wrote:
Davis, late colonel of the Mississippi Rifles, made extensive studies in regard to the different breeds of the animal, its habitat, the proper care of it, and its adaptability to the arid plains of Texas, New Mexico and California. . . In March, 1851, he proposed to insert in the army appropriation bill an amendment providing the sum of $30,000 for the purchase of fifty camels, the hire of ten Arabs, and other expenses. In support of his measure he made a speech reviewing the history of the camel as a servant of man and explaining the need for the animals in the west.
According to a correspondent for the Times-Picayune, “three Arabs and two Turks” landed with the USS Supply in New Orleans in 1856. They traveled with the camels on to Matagorda Bay, Texas, and beyond “to attend to their wants.” Some sources claim these men were actually Greek.
(Raftsman’s Journal, Clearfield, Pennsylvania, July 2, 1856.)
These Middle Eastern dromedaries were used in the Federal government’s war against the Mormons in Utah in the 1850s. While they came to be well-liked by some soldiers, the advent of train transportation made them impractical. The U.S. Army tried using camels to carry the mail between New Mexico Territory and California during the Civil War, though the camels were based primarily out of Camp Verde in the Texas Hill Country.
Lincoln’s war secretary Edwin Stanton ordered the beasts to be auctioned off in September 1863, yet sixty-six of them were still in army possession at war’s end. A few had fallen into the hands of Confederates during a raid on Camp Verde. One camel was said to have been at Vicksburg, Mississippi — in Jeff Davis’ home state — when that town was under siege in 1863.
Walter Fleming also reports that in the 1870s, miners were using some of the ex-army camels to transport salt and cord-wood between California and Nevada silver mines. Others figured into a popular camel race in Sacramento just after the Civil War. Like those who remained in Texas, however, these may have been interbred with commercially-imported animals brought in at a later date by speculators in San Francisco who thought the animals would prove popular in mining, logging, and perhaps even agriculture. By 1910, however, the only industries that found camels especially useful were the Ringling Brothers Circus and Chicago’s film industry.
(Ukiah Daily Journal, Ukiah, California, May 9, 1968.)
Most of the beasts brought over from the Mediterranean aboard the USS Supply — or their descendants — had apparently vanished by the early 1890s, when the last of them was reported to have been seen in Arizona. That one might have been shot. In fact, strange, scary stories had begun to circulate about the creatures.
By 1890, “ghost camels” had entered the folklore of the desert Southwest. At least one of these tales about the feral descendants of Jefferson Davis’ Army Camel Corps followed an old trajectory of Irish and American folklore. The humped creature carried around a headless rider. In another version, the devilish-looking beast carried the full skeleton of a rider who had died atop its back. Still another tale involved a Southwestern camel that was seen eating a bear.
News reports about the survival of these wandering dromedaries, believed to have been the abandoned beasts of the Army Camel Corps, kept on coming in. In April 1934, one alleged survivor who had been taken to the Los Angeles Zoo was crippled by paralysis and had to be put down by zookeepers there. Another siting of a “ghost camel” occurred near the ghost town of Douglas, Texas, in 1941. Newspapers were still syndicating these stories in 1968. Smithsonian Magazine even saw fit to re-tell a bit of the story earlier this year.
(Anderson Herald, Anderson, Indiana, April 18, 1968.)
The legend of the “Red Ghost,” in fact, lives on as an “Arizona oddity.” Likewise, the tomb of Hadji Ali. A Greek-Syrian born in 1828, Hadji Ali converted from Christianity to Islam, performed the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, and was living in Algeria working for the French Army when the USS Supply came looking for camels. Hadji Ali joined the U.S. Army service, coming to California as a camel tender in 1857, later becoming an American citizen in Arizona Territory in 1880. He worked as a scout and mule packer for the army and participated in the campaign against Apache chief Geronimo.
Nicknamed “Hi Jolly” by neighbors who couldn’t pronounce his name, Ali prospected for minerals on the edge of the Mojave Desert near the Colorado River until his death at Quartzsite, Arizona, in 1902. Following his death, the fascinating pyramid that marks his grave site — erected by fond locals — became one of the roadside attractions of the Grand Canyon State.
(Hadji Ali, alias “Hi Jolly,” and his bride Gertrudis Serna in Tucson, Arizona, 1880.)
“In a certain town in Indiana, whose name I don’t wish to recall, there lived a gentleman with a lance in the rack and an old suit of armor . .”
Not exactly the canonical opening of Don Quixote. Cervantes’ classic Spanish novel told of the comic adventures of an old man of La Mancha whose brain had dried up reading books about knights-errant and who went to war on windmills, thinking they were giants. What happened to Mike Inik, “just a U.S. lunatic,” is a little less clear.
On December 4, 1916, while wearing a bizarre homemade suit made out of iron armor and kitchen pans, 49-year-old Inik shot up the Lake County Superior Court in Hammond, Indiana. His grievance? The disputed decimal value of a disability check he’d hung onto for seven years.
Inik’s origins are obscure. A Google search for the last name turns up just a couple of examples, most of them in Turkey. The Lake County Times says he was an immigrant from the Balkans, which used to be part of the Ottoman Empire. Mike, however, had been the town “character” in Whiting, Indiana, as far back as 1889, when he was injured by a piece of pipe that hit him in the back or head while working at a Rockefeller-owned oil refinery. Another account said he fell off a scaffold. At that time, the Whiting Refinery on Lake Michigan, founded the year of Mike’s injury, was the largest in the United States. Today it’s owned by BP.
Doctors judged that Inik suffered from “monomania.” No longer used as a psychiatric term, in the 1800s it denoted a form of pathological obsession with one thing — yet an otherwise sound mind. On the 1880 U.S. Census, monomania was listed as one of just seven recognized categories of mental illness. Monomaniacs ranged from misers like Ebenezer Scrooge in his counting-house, to Poe’s madman fixated on an old man’s “vulture eye,” to the criminal in a Sherlock Holmes story hell-bent on smashing busts of Napoleon. Maybe the gold-obsessed Spanish conquistadors could be thrown in there, too.
Inik, who dressed like a conquistador, directed his “monomania” at John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil.
In 1913, Inik even allegedly traveled to Washington, D.C., to take up his case with the President.
Escanaba Morning Press, Escanaba, Michigan, February 13, 1913.
The Lake County Times account gives the impression that this “lunatic” touted his suit of armor around town for a long time — perhaps to protect himself from falling pipes?
Lake County Superior Court, Hammond, Indiana.
When he came to court on December 4 to hear another trial about the status of his disability settlement, Inik was wearing his protective covering and arsenal. Oddly, it seems nobody noticed the weapons. He even spoke with a county prosecutor in his office beforehand while wearing full battle regalia under his clothes. The gear Inik carried consisted of four .38-caliber revolvers, clubs, and “hatchets galore” — including a saber, hammer, butcher knife, and blackjack, plus 165 rounds of ammunition. Somehow concealed from view, Inik’s bizarre get-up was put together out of bits of galvanized iron, dishpans and washboilers.
As Judge C.E. Greenwald berated the injured man and told him to go home and take a bath, Inik became irate and suddenly opened fire. He managed to get off seven rounds, injuring a bailiff and a juror, before a group subdued him.
Thrown in jail in Crown Point, Inik quickly went on trial again for his mental health. This time, Judge Walter Hardy consigned him to the “booby hatch,” the psychiatric ward or “colony for the criminally insane” at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City.
“Eine der beliebtesten und bekanntesten Schauspielerinnen des deutschen Stummfilms… One of the most beloved and best-known actresses of the German silent movie industry.”
That’s the verdict of Die freie Enzyklopädie, Germany’s homegrown Wikipedia. Yet this actress who skyrocketed to about a decade of European fame wasn’t German.
In the days when German Expressionism was pushing cinema forward — Fritz Lang’s Metropoliswas probably the greatest film of the 1920s, alongside the silent horror classics Nosferatu by F.W. Murnau and Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari — Fern Andra was almost a household name in Germany. Yet her roots were deep in the American Midwest. In addition to acting in bloody horror flicks, Fern worked as an American spy, married a German baron and a boxing champion, fell from the sky almost to her death with one of Germany’s great fighter pilots, and even tangled with one of the most evil men in history.
(Weimar-era German cinema was known for its revolutionary costume artistry, stage design, and the creative genius of its women. One of the great characters of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis was a “gynoid” robot called Maschinenmensch. C-3PO’s cinematic grandmother was played by actress Brigitte Helm, who died in 1996. Lang’s movie was based on a novel by his wife, Thea von Harbou.)
Fern Andra was born Vernal Edna Andrews in 1894 in Watseka, Illinois, a small Kankakee Valley farm town about fifteen miles west of Kentland, Indiana. Her parents were William P. Andrews and Sarah Emily Evett, also known as Sadie. When Fern’s father died in 1898, Sadie remarried Frank St. Clair, a vaudeville actor, circus performer, and tight-rope walker.
Learning stunts from her stepfather, Fern began her stage career at the Stephens Brothers Opera House in Watseka. Aged ten or eleven, she headed to Chicago with a theatrical troupe, performing at the Globe Theatre. Between about 1905 and 1913, Fern went to school in Hammond, Indiana, where her mother and stepfather had relocated. Sadie St. Clair owned or rented a house at 184 State Street and later lived in Gary. Her daughter was remembered as a “Hammond girl” and would often come back and visit her family in northwest Indiana.
It’s not clear how she evaded her classes in Hammond, but by age fifteen she was part of the Millman Trio. Headed by the famous high-wire walker Bird Millman, the trio performed for President Taft at the White House in 1909. (Born Jennadean Engleman, Bird later became a dancer in the great “theatrical juggernaut,” the Ziegfeld Follies.)
By 1914, when World War I broke out, 20-year-old Fern had gone to Europe, where she was a popular stunt performer and minor stage actress. That year, she found herself trapped in Germany. But since the U.S. didn’t go to war against the Kaiser’s armies until 1917, she wasn’t considered an enemy alien and was even offered movie contracts. As “Fern Andrée,” she had already appeared in silent short films called Das Ave Maria (1913) and Mondfischerin (“The Fisher of the Moon,” 1914). During World War I, the midwestern actress starred in over twenty German films. She had probably become fluent in the language by then, but since these movies were all silent, her nationality wasn’t important. . . until she was accused of being an American spy.
Ogden Standard-Examiner, Ogden, Utah, November 27, 1927.
The details are sketchy, but sources agree that Fern — who now went under the sultrier stage name “Andra” or even “The Andra” — was at least detained by German police. In the 1950s, she claimed that her personal acquaintance with Kaiser Wilhelm himself saved her. “I was accused of spying for the Allies,” she remarked:
It was true, but not for the reasons they thought. Actually, I was a courier, memorizing coded messages and repeating them to American contacts in Copenhagen… I was lucky. I was a movie star at the time, living in Berlin and a friend of the royal family. To save me, it was arranged for me to marry Baron Frederick von und zu Weichs, a member of the Hohenzollern family.
The rumor in America, however, was that Fern had been condemned to death by a firing squad. Gossip about her death came out in the Hammond paper just three days before the war ended.
Ogden Standard-Examiner, Ogden, Utah, November 27, 1927.
Bavarian Baron Friedrich von und zu Weichs was said to be a nephew of Zita, the last Empress of Austria. Fern and Friedrich were married September 28, 1918, and the “Hammond girl” immediately became Baroness Weichs. About a month later, just a few weeks before the war ended, her husband was killed on the Western Front.
Fortunately, she’d come into some money. By 1919, when the former Hoosier girl made the front page of the Lake County Times, Baroness Fern, who had briefly been detained as a P.O.W., was running her own film company in Berlin.
Though its military was banned and its economy was in shambles, as the Jazz Age dawned, Germany entered a period of cultural brilliance known as the “Weimar Era.” Berlin in the 1920s was chaotic but saw the rise of iconic German geniuses like the Bauhaus architects, Expressionist filmmakers and painters, and some of the best-known German philosophers and writers. Fern Andra was part of this incredible, if often bizarre, cultural cocktail.
In 1920, she played a leading role in a new Stummfilm (silent film) called Genuine: A Tale of a Vampire. Made by filmmaker Robert Wiene, Genuine was filmed in the same vein, part-horror/part-fantasy, of Murnau’s vampiric Nosferatu. Fern plays a high priestess, named “Genuine,” who steps out of a painting and comes to life, then turns to bloodsucking. In one scene, Andra caused a sensation by appearing in an outfit that had merely been painted onto her body. Though it starred the actress hailed by many as “the most beautiful girl in Europe,” Wiene’s film wasn’t well-liked and critics called it a failure. Twenty-first-century moviegoers would like it even less, but its stage design and outrageous costumes are still interesting — if only for the background, which evokes the kind of graffiti you could see sprayed on the side of a Burlington Northern freight car.
Fern Andra played a painting come to life in the 1920 film Genuine.Genuine played at the Marmorhaus on the Kurfürstendamm in 1920.Fern in a characteristic Weimar-era outfit.
When Genuine hit the silver screen, World War I was over. But in 1921, Fern Andra was involved in a famous accident that cost the life of one of Germany’s greatest fighter pilots.
Lothar von Richthofen was the younger brother of Manfred van Richthofen, best-known to Americans as the “Red Baron,” Germany’s ace warrior of the sky. Manfred was shot down and killed over France in April 1918, but Lothar was almost as famous. After the war, he worked as an airmail pilot and taxied passengers between Hamburg and Berlin.
On July 4, 1922, while flying Fern Andra and her director Georg Bluen into Hamburg’s Fuhlsbüttel Airport, Richthofen’s engine gave out and the plane crashed. The great pilot was killed, but Andra and Bluen, though injured, survived.
Lothar von Richthofen died while flying Fern Andra to Hamburg in 1922.
In 1923, the Hoosier beauty married German middleweight boxing champion Kurt Prenzel, who had been interned as a POW at Knockaloe on the Isle of Man. In 1925, Prenzel saved his wife from being bitten by a supposedly rabid dog and suffered a bite that kept him from boxing for about a year, a fact that reportedly figured into their divorce around the time he emigrated to New York City in 1928.
Fern and her second husband, German boxing champion Kurt Prenzel, circa 1925. He had fought African American boxer Jimmy Lyggett, Sr., around 1920.Ogden Standard-Examiner, Ogden, Utah, November 27, 1927.
In addition to acting, Fern wrote or directed about twenty German films, but called her German film career quits in 1927. Her last movie made there was Funkzauber (Radio Magic). Until about 1930, she remained active in the Hollywood film business, and even married actor Ian Keith in Tijuana, Mexico, in 1934. Keith would star as Octavian in Cecil B. DeMille’s Cleopatra and as Bill Thorpe, a Louisiana gambler, in the John Wayne film The Big Trail. Andra and Keith divorced in Chicago a year after their wedding.
Meanwhile, she was paying visits to her mother, Sadie St. Clair. In the 1930s, Sadie was living at 636 Washington Street in Gary, Indiana, in “a crowded flat over a furniture store.” The address is right across the street from one of Gary’s most iconic and photographed ruins, the abandoned City United Methodist Church. Though it has sat empty and gutted since the late 1970s, plans are on the table to transform the old church into a European-style “ruin garden.” The German Expressionists would have been the first to use this gloomy Rust Belt ruin in their films. One can easily imagine the specters of F.W. Murnau and Robert Wiene creeping out of the choir stalls, and Fritz Lang would have been fascinated by the fiery steel mills and modernist clamor of Gary before the city slipped into decline.
Lincoln Evening Journal, Lincoln, Nebraska, December 22, 1923.Fern with her mother on board a steamship, circa 1930. Sadie St. Clair, daughter of Midwestern pioneers, died in Hessen, Germany, in 1955. Her ashes were scattered in the Iroquois River in northern Illinois.Springfield Republican, Springfield, MO, February 28, 1924.Andra’s emergency passport application, 1921.
Though she was spending most of her time in California by this time, Fern’s involvement with Germany wasn’t over. In the early 1930’s, she challenged the rise of Nazism. The militaristic party of thugs opposed almost everything Weimar culture stood for, to the point of burning its books and destroying its art.
There had once been unconfirmed rumors that Fern had had a love affair with Adolf Hitler’s “Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.” Andra apparently knew the despised propagandist Joseph Goebbels before his rise to power, and she remembered him later as a “mousy tutor.” (Goebbels had studied philosophy at the University of Heidelberg and was the perfect example of a good education gone awry.) In 1937, Andra and Goebbels clashed over the freedom of foreign artists to be active in Nazi Germany. She had even testified before the U.S. Congress about the Third Reich’s discrimination against non-Aryan artists.
Engaging in a “verbal fusillade,” according to one account, Goebbels and Andra got into a fight during which the Propaganda Minister threatened to imprison her. He then systematically went about trashing her reputation, even claiming that she was a Hungarian impostor, not an American. If sources are correct (and there’s a chance they’re exaggerated) Fern escaped by plane into Romania, then headed back to the United States. Since she spoke fluent German, she aided the Allies during World War II by broadcasting radio messages into Germany. Her enemy Goebbels, Hitler’s master of lies, committed suicide in 1945 — after murdering his own children.
Fern Andra continued to visit and live in Germany after the war. In November 1954, she was photographed talking to Baroness Kunigunde von Richthofen, mother of Manfred and Lothar. They met up at the American Civilian Club in Wiesbaden.
Fern Andra, right, with “The Red Baron’s” mother, Wiesbaden, Germany, 1954.
Fern and her fourth husband, a playwright and soldier from Connecticut named General Samuel Edge Dockrell, seem to have lived in Wiesbaden and New England until the early 1970s, but often visited the Midwest. They eventually moved to South Carolina, where Dockrell died two days after they got there.
Baroness Fern Andra, Hammond girl, succumbed to cancer at Azalea Woods Nursing Home in Aiken, South Carolina, at age 80 on February 8, 1974.
Her fame vanished in the 1940s, and few Americans would know her name today. But Hoosier State Chronicles would like to put her back out there as one of the most interesting women who has ever lived within the borders of our state.
In 1873, Mark Twain coined the term “The Gilded Age” to describe a superficially prosperous America undergirded with massive social problems, corruption, even deep wells of horror. One of the more literal terror tales launched onto the front lawns of American newspaper readers in the 1890s was the story of mass murderer H.H. Holmes.
Erik Larson reintroduced us to Holmes in his non-fiction thriller TheDevil in the White City in 2003. Larson’s gripping book is a dual history, partly the story of Chicago architect Daniel Burnham, designer of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, and partly the story of Holmes’ “murder castle,” a kind of dark mirror of the expo. At this specially-designed hotel, the “doctor” may have killed up to two-hundred victims, mostly women. Replete with hidden soundproof vaults, a gas chamber, an iron-plated room where Holmes torched people to death, a crematorium, a suffocation room, and other gruesome architectural twists, the World’s Fair Hotel on West 63rd Street in Chicago was a demented perversion of the vaunted celebration of “progress.”
Holmes had been trained at the University of Michigan’s renowned but infamous medical school. Like Indiana medical colleges, Ann Arbor’s was under fire in the late 1800s for supporting the ring of grave-robbers who fed its dissection rooms with corpses ransacked from midwestern cemeteries. Allegedly fascinated with death ever since his childhood friends stuck him in a closet with a skeleton in a New England doctor’s office, Holmes continued to dissect the dead in his gory Windy City hotel — though not for the anatomical instruction of future medical professionals.
Born Herman Webster Mudgett in New Hampshire in 1861, H.H. Holmes, graduated from med school in Ann Arbor in 1884. This is his graduation photo. His third wife, Georgiana Yoke, was from Franklin, Indiana.
Chicago’s worst serial killer had several Indiana connections. One of his better-known victims, Emeline Cigrand, was a beautiful 20-something stenographer from Lafayette whose skeleton Holmes may have sold to Rush Medical College. Nineteenth-century Americans are sometimes called “buttoned up” and guilty of “leaving things in the closet,” but newspapers published details about the doctor’s victims in stories like this one that would probably not be printable in 2015 due to privacy laws. And the cross-over with medical history is disturbing, to say the least.
What might have been Holmes’ last murder — the dismemberment and burning of young Howard Pitezel, son of his main accomplice, Benjamin Pitezel — occurred in Irvington, the Indianapolis neighborhood now famous for its “paranormal activity.” As the Indianapolis Star reported last week in a gossipy news piece, there’s a small chance that actor Leonardo DiCaprio will visit Indiana while filming Martin Scorsese’s new film adaption of The Devil in the White City. The cottage that Holmes briefly rented in the fall of 1894, and where he killed Howard Pitezel before mutilating and burning his body, then sticking part of up it a chimney, sat at the corner of Julian and Bolton Avenues in Irvington. The original house on that site supposedly burned down in the 1930’s, but the cottage there today looks similar.
The scene of the Pitezel murder in Irvington, where Holmes masqueraded under the name “A.E. Cook.”
Philadelphia police detective Frank Geyer and Detective David Richards of the IPD were hot on Holmes’ trail in Indy even before he murdered Pitezel in Irvington a couple of weeks before Halloween. Yet it was three Iocal boys who discovered Howard’s charred bones in the chimney, a find recalled a year later in a long article printed in the Indianapolis Journal called “The Pietzel Bones” (August 22, 1895). After Holmes was finally apprehended, Howard Pitezel’s mother testified before Marion County Coroner Hiram C. Castor. Shown some of the “trinkets” found in the flue, Mrs. Pitezel “went into hysterics” in the Indianapolis courtroom.
H.H. Holmes had tried to start up another “death trap” in Fort Worth, Texas, but he was arrested in Boston in November, 1894, just a month after leaving Irvington. Though put on trial in Philadelphia for killing the Pitezels, he confessed to thirty murders in Chicago, Indianapolis, and Toronto. Like many criminals with huge, almost unbelievable records, Holmes might have been an accomplished liar — he claimed to have been possessed — but his confession was definitely shocking.
While he sat in jail, a fire consumed the macabre World’s Fair Hotel in August 1895, possibly started by a former accomplice. On May 7, 1896, the “arch-fiend,” aged 34, was hanged at Philadelphia’s Moyamensing Prison, a place where another master of spectral gloom, Edgar Allan Poe, had once been imprisoned for public drunkenness.
A few decades after his crimes made it into the press, Chicago’s own Jack the Ripper was slipping out of popular memory. Yet in 1919, a discovery in Lake County, Indiana, brought him back into the news.
In court twenty-four years earlier, Holmes had mentioned killing two people near Schneider, a tiny town on the outskirts of the old Kankakee Marsh in southern Lake County, Indiana’s doomed “Everglades.” The remote spot forty miles south of Gary almost exactly straddled the Indiana-Illinois state line. Back then, it was close to a place called Lineville.
Lineville is obscure, but the papers located it twelve miles east of Momence, Illinois. It must have been a tiny station or railroad switch right on the state line. This was probably the kind of place where trains took on duck meat and frog legs hunted in the swamp to be cooked up for breakfast in the dining cars or sold at the Water Street Market in Chicago. Lineville, Indiana, isn’t on the map today and was apparently “ghosted” more than a century ago.
The identity of Holmes’ alleged victims is a more interesting mystery than Lineville’s disappearance. In October 1919, two skeletons turned up on Ira G. Mansfield’s farm. This clip, published on October 22 in Hammond’s Lake County Times (currently being digitized by Hoosier State Chronicles) must have reminded many readers of the grisly string of murders that rocked the dark underbelly of the heartland back in the 1890s.
Digitized newspapers provide a rich boon to researchers about American medical history. From quack medicine ads to stories about diseases, from under-appreciated tales of wartime doctors to a gory list of “1000 Ways to Die,” old papers are gold mines.
Alcohol, of course, is part of medical history. Prohibition-era journalists were divided on whether America should turn off the tap. Indiana was one of several states to preempt the Federal ban on booze. the Volstead Act of January 1920, which officially ushered in Prohibition nationwide. As early as 1855, the Hoosier State tried out a liquor-ban. That law was repealed in 1858. Yet agitators kept on fighting against the bottle and the bier stein. In 1918, Indiana officially went “dry” again.
Nineteenth-century Americans were far heavier drinkers than today, and alcohol percentages tended to be higher. On-the-job drinking was allowed, sometimes even encouraged. Prohibitionists might seem prim today, but attempts to abolish beer and liquor were often tied to some real public health concerns. “Liberal” and “conservative” politics have changed over the last century. Many, perhaps most, anti-alcohol crusaders were progressives who also spearheaded the movement for women’s rights and child labor reform — and whose public health campaigns were frequently inspired by religious belief. Patriot Phalanx, a Prohibition Party newspaper started by Quaker Sylvester Johnson in Indianapolis, was a prominent mouthpiece.
Singer and comedian Ernie Hare wasn’t happy about beer’s demise.
Unfortunately, shutting down saloons, often had as much to do with racial, ethnic, and religious tension as it did with health concerns, and the whole law was primarily directed at the poor. Indiana’s powerful Ku Klux Klan was, at least officially, anti-liquor — partly because of booze’s association with German and Irish Catholics, whose leader at the Vatican the Hoosier KKK was virtually at war with during the 1920s, over issues like public schools. And the urban poor were very often Catholic.
One of the real perils of Prohibition was this: heavy drinkers and alcoholics still had a huge thirst to quench. Chronic tipplers had a few legal sources, like medicinal alcohol — and communion wine. Yet they often had fatal recourse to intoxicating liquids that nobody, of course, would normally drink. A fascinating if sober aspect of Prohibition lies in the story of the “beverages” they sometimes resorted to.
“Rotgut,” cheap, low-quality, potentially toxic liquor, was a common news headline even before 1920.
The “detox” problem — how to help out alcoholics — must have crossed the minds of Prohibitionists. But where alcohol was banned, death began to follow in its wake. And toxic liquor had become a global problem.
In 1914, Tsarist Russia banned the sale of alcohol except in restaurants, partly as a war measure to keep soldiers from getting drunk. Throughout the Russian Revolution, until 1924, in fact, the ban survived. But Russians’ sudden inability to get their famous national drink, vodka, led to many deaths. The Jasper Weekly Courier reprinted a litany of shocking tales about the lengths to which Russians would go to get a stiff drink during World War I. Forlorn men turned to guzzling perfume, cologne, khanza (red pepper mixed with spices and wood alcohol), and kvasok (a concoction of cider, yeast, wild hops, and snuff). Kvasok, incidentally, is the Czech word for “sourdough.”
American newspapers had been advertising the dangers of wood alcohol for years. Called methanol by chemists (not to be confused with methamphetamine), wood alcohol traditionally was produced like other spirits, through distillation. Ancient Egyptians had figured out the process and often used the resulting spirit — called the “simplest alcohol” — in embalming the dead. In the West, methanol was employed in a variety of industrial and other trades as a cleaner, in photography studios, and in tin and brass works. Around 1914, barbers were using it in a lotion called bay rum. Baltimore physician Dr. Leonard K. Hirshberg warned Americans that year about the danger of their barber causing them to lose their eyesight, since imbibing or inhaling wood alcohol could lead to blindness, even death.
Industrially, methanol is used as a feedstock in making other chemicals. Changed into formaldehyde, it is converted for products as diverse as paints, plastics, explosives, deicing fluid for airplanes, and copy-machine fluid. As the automobile age dawned, methanol came to be a component of antifreeze. Doctors as well as newspaper reporters were keen on reminding drivers and mechanics that too much exposure to the chemical, whether through breathing or touching, could cause blindness or worse. At the time Dr. Hirshberg was writing, there was probably a lot of wood alcohol around Indianapolis and South Bend, pioneer towns of the auto industry. Today, methanol is used as fuel in dirt trucks and monster trucks. It’s also the required fuel of all race cars at the Indianapolis 500, adopted as a safety feature after a deadly crash and explosion at the Hoosier track in 1964.
You can imagine the perils of chugging the stuff. Yet back in 1903, a couple in Columbus, Indiana, drank a deadly wood alcohol toddy, either by accident or through fatal ignorance of its effects. A year later, three artillerymen, thinking wood alcohol was a joke, died at Fort Terry in New London, Connecticut. In Philadelphia, the proprietor of a hat-cleaning shop who used the liquid in his trade had to mix red dye in it to try to deter his employees from stealing and drinking the stuff out back. The trick didn’t work, and he claimed “they’re used to it” now. It proved an effective means of suicide, as in the case of an 18-year-old girl in South Bend who fell in love with a high school teacher.
Indianapolis Star, November 12, 1910.
Some people said that refined wood alcohol smelled like old Kentucky rye. The toxic effects usually took a few hours to kick in, so group deaths often occurred after bottles of it were passed around among chums having a “drink orgy.”
After Congress passed the Volstead Act on January 17, 1920, the news was soon full of stories about desperate attempts to quench the literally killing thirst — and of unscrupulous efforts to profit off drinkers’ desperation.
A Brooklyn undertaker, John Romanelli, and four other men were indicted in 1920 on charges on selling wood alcohol mixed with “water, burned sugar and flavoring extracts.” They had sold the batch for $23,000 and the resultant “whiskey” caused “scores of deaths” in New England around Christmas-time and New Years’. In St. Paul, Minnesota, in March 1920, nine imbibers died in a 24-hour period.
Just two weeks before the new law went into effect, a Gary, Indiana, woman, Ella Curza, got a 60-day prison sentence and a $50 fine for possession of eighteen bottles of wood alcohol that she was allegedly peddling as an intoxicant. Hammond’s Lake County Times was already covering glimmers of the story — including the sale of methanol cocktails to unwitting men and U.S. soldiers stationed in Gary during the 1919 national steel strike.
By 1922, with the crackdown on hootch in full swing, the editors of the South Bend News-Times — a liberal-minded paper — issued figures on the estimated toll of wood spirits. “Wood alcohol is now killing 260 and blinding 44 Americans a year . . . In Pennsylvania the known deaths due to wood alcohol poisoning last year totaled 61 . . . Including unreported cases, wood alcohol’s death toll probably exceeds 1,500 a year.”
In New York, in the first six months of 1922 alone, 130 deaths and 22 cases of blindness were reported, a figure some officials thought “incomplete.”
Future Hollywood comedic actor Charles Butterworth, who was a reporter in his hometown of South Bend in 1922, penned a story about a certain medical claim: that alcohol-related deaths were actually higher after the Volstead Act came into effect than before. The St. Joseph County Coroner, Dr. C.L. Crumpacker, and other local medical men thought this statement was preposterous, however:
Prohibition clearly failed and would be lifted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in December 1933. Yet as one latter-day journalist, Pulitzer Prize-winner Deborah Blum, has discovered, the U.S. government — faced with the continuing thirst that led some Americans to crime and the more ignorant to varnish and perfume — decided to try out a different tactic.
Just before Christmas 1926, federal agents deliberately began poisoning alcohols typically utilized by bootleggers. In an attempt to deter the public — even scare them into staying dry — the agents essentially turned almost all alcohol into undrinkable “industrial” alcohol. Bootleggers tried to re-distill what the government had actively poisoned, which led to the deaths of (by some estimates) 10,000 people, deaths indirectly caused by the government’s “poisoning program.”
Blum, who has taught journalism at MIT and the University of Wisconsin and is a columnist for the New York Times, is no conspiracy theorist. In 2010, Blum authored The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York — a book made into a PBS/American Experience documentary in 2014.
Hoosier State Chronicles is about to fix one big gap in our online newspaper archives — the absence of northwestern Indiana, that colorful region of steel mills and dunes beaches and the pulse of Chicago throbbing out there in the distance. In the next few months, we’ll bring you a long run of Hammond’s Lake County Times from 1906 into the early days of Prohibition.
Hammond’s proximity to the Windy City means that its reporters covered plenty of stories from America’s Jazz Age — the heady days of flappers, gangsters, speakeasies, marriage mills, divorce courts, and the rise and fall of Indiana’s powerful Ku Klux Klan. You’ll see how the Roaring Twenties played out in towns like Hammond, Gary, Crown Point, East Chicago, Hobart and Munster. But until we’re done digitizing, we’ll just tantalize you with a story here and there.
Here’s a funny clip about the history of impatience… on both ends of the line. Published in the Lake County Times on February 10, 1923, this story is from Whiting, a Lake Michigan town right on the Illinois state line.
Irish eyes might be smiling. But you’ve been forewarned: never swear at an Irish “hello girl.”
