God’s name in vain.”
Maura Hester,
Love Interminable or Till Death We Shall Not Part: Fifty Great Enduring Love Affairs
(Savannah: Bookmirth Publications, 1975), 47-52.
Her sister Beryl took the pledge as well, but broke nearly every clause on the same day, December 5, 1933—the day Prohibition ended—declaring at a St. Louis speakeasy turned “speakfreely”:
“Make mine a double, wouldja, barkeep? Hoo! Hoo! Drought’s over, boys! Hey, handsome, gimme a Goddamned light.”
Bowie French,
How Dry I Am: an Oral History of Prohibition
(Cicero, Illinois: Luck Be a Lady Press, 1947), Preface.
3. “Will You Marry Me?” Jonathan Blashette to Lucile Moritz, 24 December 1918, carbon copy, JBP.
4. “Yes, oh yes, I will be your wife, my Christmas angel!” Lucile Moritz to JB, 26 December 1918, JBP.
5. When Lucile did not show up, Aunt Evelyn became worried. Evelyn Waldron was very close to the “good niece,” having served as surrogate mother to both Lucile and her scheming sister Beryl. According to Evelyn’s account of the harrowing week that followed, when Lucile failed to arrive at her “Gloucester, Massachusetts retreat” to receive pre-nuptial pampering and trousseau selection assistance from Evelyn, Jonathan was notified and put directly on the case. He immediately alerted law enforcement authorities all the way from New York City to Gloucester of Lucile’s disappearance. In the meantime, Evelyn fell into a morass offear and agitation and eventually had to be sedated. The initial anodyne was administered by a Madame Lourdes, a French holistic whose herbs did little more than make Evelyn “feel a little droopy.” A second physician was brought in and Evelyn was successfully tranquilized and received the horrendous news in a dull stupor. Interview with Paulette Poole (great niece of Lucile and Beryl Moritz), November 22, 2001.
6. “Yes, we have a sticky Jane Doe.” It was Jonathan who correctly identified the molasses-covered body. No one can say why Lucile ventured to Commercial Street in Boston’s North End while awaiting her train connection to Gloucester on that deadly day in January. But there she was, just as the Purity Distilling Company’s huge cast-iron tank burst open and the great swell of raw molasses—more than 2.5 million gallons of it—gushed forth, drowning twenty-one and turning the city of Boston into sickeningly sweet-smelling flypaper for weeks. Patrick Oldeman,
Tears for the Shawmut
(Boston: Old Corner Book Printer, 1995), 223-228.
7. There was a lacuna in the Luna. I discovered the full text of the expurgated material from the January 16, 1919, edition of the
Boston Luna
in the paper’s morgue.
As Promised: Our Annual Boston Beans Recipe
Nobody knows beans like Boston knows beans.
Soak 1 1/2 cups dried beans
Cover the beans with water. Bring them to a boil. Simmer them slowly for thirty minutes or more, until tender.
Prepare your oven.
Drain the beans, setting aside the cooking water.
Add:
1/2 cup chopped onion
2 tablespoons or more of dark molasses (author’s emphasis)
1 tablespoon dry mustard
2 or 3 tablespoons of catsup
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup boiling bean water
Place the ingredients in a greased baker. Attend them with:
1/2 lb. sliced salt pork
and bake them at low heat for 6 to 9 hours. If they become dry, add a little
set aside bean water .
Uncover the beans for the last hour of baking.
Mention of the molasses might have been withdrawn but the recipe would certainly have suffered.
8. Jonathan failed to see the black humor of it. Nor would he permit anyone to speak of the freak accident that took his precious Lucile from him. It was not until Jonathan had reached his seventy-second year that he finally allowed himself to appreciate the cruel yet cosmically humorous irony of it all. Lucile had fought hard for prohibition. Within a year of her death, rum would become illegal. The Purity Distilling Company would no longer be allowed toturn its vats of
Maura Hester,
Love Interminable or Till Death We Shall Not Part: Fifty Great Enduring Love Affairs
(Savannah: Bookmirth Publications, 1975), 47-52.
Her sister Beryl took the pledge as well, but broke nearly every clause on the same day, December 5, 1933—the day Prohibition ended—declaring at a St. Louis speakeasy turned “speakfreely”:
“Make mine a double, wouldja, barkeep? Hoo! Hoo! Drought’s over, boys! Hey, handsome, gimme a Goddamned light.”
Bowie French,
How Dry I Am: an Oral History of Prohibition
(Cicero, Illinois: Luck Be a Lady Press, 1947), Preface.
3. “Will You Marry Me?” Jonathan Blashette to Lucile Moritz, 24 December 1918, carbon copy, JBP.
4. “Yes, oh yes, I will be your wife, my Christmas angel!” Lucile Moritz to JB, 26 December 1918, JBP.
5. When Lucile did not show up, Aunt Evelyn became worried. Evelyn Waldron was very close to the “good niece,” having served as surrogate mother to both Lucile and her scheming sister Beryl. According to Evelyn’s account of the harrowing week that followed, when Lucile failed to arrive at her “Gloucester, Massachusetts retreat” to receive pre-nuptial pampering and trousseau selection assistance from Evelyn, Jonathan was notified and put directly on the case. He immediately alerted law enforcement authorities all the way from New York City to Gloucester of Lucile’s disappearance. In the meantime, Evelyn fell into a morass offear and agitation and eventually had to be sedated. The initial anodyne was administered by a Madame Lourdes, a French holistic whose herbs did little more than make Evelyn “feel a little droopy.” A second physician was brought in and Evelyn was successfully tranquilized and received the horrendous news in a dull stupor. Interview with Paulette Poole (great niece of Lucile and Beryl Moritz), November 22, 2001.
6. “Yes, we have a sticky Jane Doe.” It was Jonathan who correctly identified the molasses-covered body. No one can say why Lucile ventured to Commercial Street in Boston’s North End while awaiting her train connection to Gloucester on that deadly day in January. But there she was, just as the Purity Distilling Company’s huge cast-iron tank burst open and the great swell of raw molasses—more than 2.5 million gallons of it—gushed forth, drowning twenty-one and turning the city of Boston into sickeningly sweet-smelling flypaper for weeks. Patrick Oldeman,
Tears for the Shawmut
(Boston: Old Corner Book Printer, 1995), 223-228.
7. There was a lacuna in the Luna. I discovered the full text of the expurgated material from the January 16, 1919, edition of the
Boston Luna
in the paper’s morgue.
As Promised: Our Annual Boston Beans Recipe
Nobody knows beans like Boston knows beans.
Soak 1 1/2 cups dried beans
Cover the beans with water. Bring them to a boil. Simmer them slowly for thirty minutes or more, until tender.
Prepare your oven.
Drain the beans, setting aside the cooking water.
Add:
1/2 cup chopped onion
2 tablespoons or more of dark molasses (author’s emphasis)
1 tablespoon dry mustard
2 or 3 tablespoons of catsup
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup boiling bean water
Place the ingredients in a greased baker. Attend them with:
1/2 lb. sliced salt pork
and bake them at low heat for 6 to 9 hours. If they become dry, add a little
set aside bean water .
Uncover the beans for the last hour of baking.
Mention of the molasses might have been withdrawn but the recipe would certainly have suffered.
8. Jonathan failed to see the black humor of it. Nor would he permit anyone to speak of the freak accident that took his precious Lucile from him. It was not until Jonathan had reached his seventy-second year that he finally allowed himself to appreciate the cruel yet cosmically humorous irony of it all. Lucile had fought hard for prohibition. Within a year of her death, rum would become illegal. The Purity Distilling Company would no longer be allowed toturn its vats of
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