One American Family

One American Family: The story of a nation as seen from the branches of one family tree. By Michael Durbin.
Episode Two: Prohibition and the Slovaks of Little Egypt. Part One.
A couple of quick notes before I begin.
First, to help you keep track of who’s who, there's a compact family tree on the show's companion website at oneamericanfamily.com.
Second, I don’t know how often I’ll publish new episodes, but if you’d like to be notified when I do, go my website michaeldurbin.com and then Subscribe. I promise not to spam you or sell your email address.
Now, on to the story of my Kalish, Krokvica, and Walko ancestry. There’s a lot to tell, so I’m spreading it over two parts.
This episode is part one.
In 2002, in downstate Belleville, Illinois, I was having coffee after lunch with my mom’s parents: my Grandpa Jim Kalish and my Grandma Bernice Kalish. Actually, Grandpa was having milk with just a little bit of coffee in it, the way he always did.
I had driven down from Chicago to talk about family history. Mostly I wanted to know about the hotel my grandfather’s parents once owned in East St. Louis in the 1920s. I knew its fancy name, the Savoy Hotel, same as the more famous one in London, but nothing else. What could Grandpa tell me, I asked, about his mom and dad’s hotel? He answered my question with a question: “You know it was a brothel, right?”
All I could do was shake my head. This was news to me.
“It was in the red light district,” Grandpa continued, “a part of town known as The Valley.”
Thus began my discovery of one of the most fascinating stories hidden among the branches of my family tree. It centered on the Savoy Hotel of East St. Louis, which, I would learn, was more than just a brothel.
The Savoy was a Prohibition speakeasy where my Kalish, Krokvica, and Walko ancestors sold bootleg liquor. It was actually the second location of a three-family operation. It’s also where my great-grandfather Louis Kalish drank himself to death. And it was my grandparents’ first home as newlyweds, following the 1933 wedding of Jim Kalish and Bernice Malec, and the first home ever of their oldest child, my mother, Lorraine Kalish.
“We lived above a cathouse,” Bernice would later tell my cousin and fellow family historian Ann Mahoney. The family grew in 1935 with the birth of my aunt Jackie.
The Savoy was also home to one of the most notorious criminal gangs Southern Illinois has ever seen: the Shelton Brothers. Their violence grew out of their liquor and gambling interests and their feud with a rival, Charlie Birger, and his gang.
It belonged to a nationwide era of lawlessness, and that era was the result of one of the greatest mistakes this country has ever made: the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, which banned the manufacture, transportation, and sale of intoxicating liquor.
The folly known as Prohibition was ratified in January 1919, took effect in January 1920, and lasted until December 1933, when the 21st Amendment repealed it.
Prohibition rocked America. And it rocked the life of a young Jimmy Kalish, my grandfather, like nothing else ever would.
In this episode, we’ll have a lot to say about Prohibition, including just how the U.S. government managed to take away a freedom that countless millions of Americans had enjoyed since the nation’s founding.
But first we’ll talk about another nation, one that no longer exists, where my great-grandparents, Jimmy’s mom and dad, were born.
One doesn’t hear much nowadays about the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was the last dominion of the Habsburg Monarchy, a line of inherited royalty that ruled over much of Central Europe for more than six hundred years.
This multiethnic monarchy was massive. It encompassed what is today Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia—and more.
The Habsburg monarch in the late 1800s, when my ancestors lived there, was a man named Franz Joseph.
He had been Emperor of Austria since 1848, and beginning in 1867 he was King of Hungary as well. Today he is little remembered in the U.S. His nephew was Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and that name just might ring a bell.
It was Ferdinand’s assassination in 1914, during a visit to Sarajevo, that sparked World War I. One of the outcomes of that global conflict was the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918.
By that time, my ancestors had already begun leaving the empire. So let’s back up in time and talk about them.
Stefan Kalish, my great-great-grandfather, was born in 1861 in a small village in what is today Slovakia. His wife Katherine was born in 1869. They married in 1886 and had four children (Annie, Louis, Mary, and Mike) before realizing there wasn’t enough work in the area, a mountainous region not unlike West Virginia, to support a family. So they migrated about 400 miles southwest into what is now Croatia, settling in the village of Banova Jaruga.
There, Stefan found work as village notary. By all accounts, the migration was a good move. They had two more children in their new corner of the empire: Joseph and Mildred.
By 1903, things might have been good enough for Stefan and Katherine, but something wasn’t good enough for their eldest daughter. In 1903, 16-year-old Annie fled the family. My mother, Lorraine Durbin, explains:
“The first Kalish came, her name was Annie Kalish. And she came first and landed in New York and then got on a train and ended up in East St. Louis... so she came over because her father... he was treating her like a child. And she was so independent, she said, I am leaving for America. So she was the first one in the Kalish siblings to come to the United States.”
Annie Kalish found work in East St. Louis and began making some decent money.
“So after she was settled, she was pretty well off. She had a job, a place to live, and she wanted her brother to come over and join her. And so the second, who was a son, he said yes.”
In 1904, Annie’s brother Louis Kalish sailed for America and went on to East St. Louis to join his sister. He was 14 years old.
Why did these teenagers leave Europe for the United States? And why East St. Louis, Illinois? That’s where the jobs were. Lots and lots of jobs.
To understand the origins of my mom’s American family history, on both her dad’s side and her mom’s, we need to talk about two of the three leading industries that transformed the economy of Southern Illinois, starting around 1890, from one based on agriculture and river transportation to one based on industry. Those two industries were meatpacking and coal mining.
The third, steel and aluminum production, will come into play when we talk about my dad’s family history in a future episode.
Meatpacking and metal production took place in East St. Louis, Illinois, the booming industrial town on the east bank of the Mississippi, connected to St. Louis, Missouri, by the Eads Bridge, which opened in 1874.
The town’s position across the river from St. Louis gave rise to its nickname, “East Side.” It’s still the nickname of East St. Louis Senior High School, home to a powerhouse football team that has dominated its conference for decades.
Coal mining took place, of course, where the coal was, at thousands of mines across the state. Many of these were located in a giant, crescent-shaped swath stretching southeast from East St. Louis for about a hundred miles.
Traveling beyond that crescent gets you to the southernmost tip of the state and the little town of “kay-ro,” spelled c-a-i-r-o just like the city in Egypt but pronounced like the syrup. Illinois’s Cairo is thought to have been named after the Cairo in Egypt, owing to the delta of land formed by the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and its resemblance to the great delta of Egypt. The legendary connection not only stuck but grew, such that the entire bottom of Illinois, starting at East St. Louis and going south, has been known as Little Egypt to generations of Illinois residents.
All three of the industries that transformed Southern Illinois—meatpacking, metal production, and coal mining—had one thing in common: they all needed lots of workers—armies of human beings with strong backs and four working limbs and the ability to do simple and dangerous jobs that could be taught by pantomime. The ability to speak or understand English was not required.
By the very first years of the 20th century, word had gotten out across Central Europe that jobs were waiting for anyone in East St. Louis. All you had to do was show up. The first to show up on the Kalish branch of my family tree was Annie Kalish in 1903, followed the next year by her brother Louis.
They both went to work at the giant Swift & Company meatpacking operation.
We’ll talk more about meatpacking when we cover the Malec family history of my Grandma Kalish, my mom’s mother, in a later episode. Today we’ll focus on the family history of my Grandpa Kalish, my mom’s father.
And before we do that, we need to talk about more than just Little Egypt at the turn of the 20th century. We need to talk about the history of alcohol in America, and that story goes back much further.
It is hard to overstate the role of alcohol in the history of this nation, starting from its birth. In 1791, Alexander Hamilton devised a tax on whiskey and other distilled spirits to help pay the new federal government’s debts. That tax lapsed in 1802, but President James Madison brought it back to fund the War of 1812, then ended it in 1817. In 1862, Abraham Lincoln brought it back once again, to finance the Civil War. This time, at war’s end, the tax on alcohol did not go away. It’s easy to understand why.
In the early 1800s, Americans drank roughly three times the amount of alcohol they do today. By 1830, consumption had reached seven gallons of pure alcohol per year for every American adult. That’s the equivalent of four cans of beer each day for every man and woman.
By 1875, one quarter of federal revenue came from the taxation of beer and whiskey. By 1910 the share would grow to thirty percent. That fact alone is one of the key reasons nobody expected alcohol to ever disappear from American life.
Still, the 19th century saw plenty of efforts to curtail or even prohibit its consumption. In 1840, the so-called Washingtonian Movement began when six heavy drinkers in a bar in Baltimore swore total abstinence and got lots of others across the country to do the same. In 1851, the state of Maine passed the first statewide law against the manufacture and sale of liquor.
In 1874, a group of women formed the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which was led from 1879 by an untiring and beloved Frances Willard and eventually headquartered in Evanston, Illinois. Temperance also drew in early suffrage leaders such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who would become household names for their leadership of the movement that won women the right to vote in this country.
The WCTU had many chapters across the country, including one in Kansas with a member who would herself become a household name: Carrie Nation. Fed up with local officials unwilling to enforce local bans on alcohol, she took matters into her own hands, literally, with a hatchet swinging from one of them, storming into countless saloons and busting them up.
She traveled across the country with that hatchet, leading to a sign that went up in many saloons. It read, “All nations welcome. Except for Carrie.”
Around the 1880s, new terms entered the American lexicon to indicate what side of the prohibition debate one was on: you were either wet, or you were dry. They were easy to whip out and apply to a candidate or neighbor, not unlike the labels Red and Blue today. Like all labels they were overly simplistic. Still, everyone seemed to know who was dry and who was wet. And nobody was wetter than Adolphus Busch.
He had immigrated from Germany in the 1850s and rose like a rocket in America’s booming beer industry, in part by figuring out that pasteurizing beer kept it fresh on long train rides. In 1861 he married Lilly Anheuser, whose surname would eventually be folded into the brand name known worldwide today.
Before the 1850s, Americans’ alcohol consumption came mostly in the form of whiskey and other distilled spirits. Thanks to Busch and his contemporaries—Frederick Pabst, Joseph Schlitz, and the like—Americans had a whole new way to get loaded. And they rather liked it.
Adolphus was a true visionary, and soon a multimillionaire (back in the day that was impressive). He eventually built a brewing plant in St. Louis, Missouri, just across the river from my ancestral homeland of East St. Louis, Illinois.
It was so massive that a local joke went something like this:
“What is St. Louis? It’s a city on the Mississippi River just next to the Anheuser-Busch plant.”
Adolphus Busch sensed a threat from the growing prohibitionist movement before some of his peers did, and led his industry’s fight against it. Unfortunately, he also led in consumption of his own product, dying of cirrhosis of the liver in 1913.
By 1893, the drys had a focus problem. Their best-known advocacy group, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, cared about far more than just temperance. They advocated for women’s suffrage, child welfare, judicial reform, and more. Progressives everywhere cheered those causes.
But to those who cared most about prohibition, such as a minister in Oberlin, Ohio, named Howard Hyde Russell, such dilution of purpose spelled doom. So he founded the Anti-Saloon League, a faith-based advocacy group focused like a laser on exactly one mission: the eradication of alcohol in America.
They reached a dues-paying audience on Sunday mornings by building a massive network of churches and using the Christian religion as the backdrop to their morality tale. Those dues added up fast, fueling a single-issue political organization like this country had never seen.
They were strictly bipartisan, happily supporting Democratic and Republican candidates alike, so long as they vowed to support their cause, and over nearly three decades their political muscle would influence the results of countless elections across the country.
By the early 1900s, the Anti-Saloon League had eclipsed the WCTU as the driving force behind the prohibitionist movement in America. And they were just getting started, thanks in large part to a guy named Wayne B. Wheeler. All but forgotten now, he was described by an associate as
“the most masterful and powerful single individual in the United States.”
It sounds a little over the top, but given all the Anti-Saloon League would accomplish over the next two decades with Wheeler as its master strategist, it’s not an unreasonable description of the guy.
But in 1903, as Wayne Wheeler was rising in the League’s ranks, and despite decades of effort by temperance advocates such as the Washingtonians, the WCTU, and a hatchet-wielding Carrie Nation with fire in her eyes, liquor flowed freely across America.
The number of saloons across the country had grown from 100 thousand in 1870 to 300 thousand in 1890. Annual beer consumption had grown to 855 million gallons that year from a mere 36 million gallons in 1850.
America’s consumption of alcohol was booming. The idea of banning it seemed as preposterous as ever.
In 1904, back in Europe, Stefan and Katherine Kalish were not happy that two of their six children were now gone. Assuming Annie and Louis were gone for good, they decided to reunite the family by following them. So it was that, in 1906, Stefan and Katherine packed up their belongings and emigrated to the United States with their remaining four children.
Unfortunately, they hit a snag at Ellis Island. Immigration officials would not admit their youngest son, five-year-old Joe Kalish, because of his physical condition. He had weak legs, apparently from polio when he was very young. He would have to go back on the boat. After further consideration, or maybe just intense pleading by his distraught mother, officials finally let him through.
Stefan had no trouble finding work in the meatpacking houses of East St. Louis, but the manual labor was a step down from his position of respect as a village notary back in Europe. He swallowed his pride and did his work.
In 1906, soon after her family’s arrival, eldest daughter Annie Kalish married Frank Stengel, a butcher. They would have two children. After her first husband died, Annie would have another child with her second husband, Mike Bukovich.
Four years later, in 1910, Stefan and Katherine saw the marriage of their daughter Mary to Franz Kavalier. He, too, had immigrated from Austria-Hungary. That same year, their son Louis met a young woman, also a Slovak, and things looked serious. More on that relationship shortly.
For the 40-year-old Katherine Kalish, the year 1910 may have been the happiest of her life. Like many mothers of the era, she had suffered a number of miscarriages and stillbirths on her way to having six surviving children. Watching the first two sail away to America had been painful. But now the entire family was together again, and with two children married and a third about to be, the Kalish family was growing.
And theirs was not the only one. America has seen no other period of immigration like the so-called Great Wave at the dawn of the 20th century. Fifteen million immigrants arrived between 1900 and 1915--a million each year.
The Kalishes were not the only family on my tree to immigrate as part of the Great Wave. Let’s meet another.
In 1867, Leonard Krokvica was born in what is today Slovakia. In 1892 he married Marie Nemec. Their first child, Anna Krokvica, was born around 1893 in what is today Croatia. Like the Kalishes, they had migrated there from Slovakia, presumably for better job opportunities. Their second child, Josephine Krokvica, was born around 1895.
Not long after Josephine’s birth, Leonard was drafted into the army. Unhappy with this fate, he looked for any chance to get out. He found one in 1903. That’s when he fled for America, his pockets bulging with family money, promising to find work and send money home to his wife and two children. He then proceeded to break both of those promises.
Years went by with no word from Leonard, and Marie could only wonder what had happened. Did he actually go to America? Was he still alive? Around 1907 she got word from a relative that yes, her husband Leonard was alive, living in East St. Louis, doing quite a lot of drinking and not much else.
Demonstrating a sense of responsibility and resourcefulness for which she would be known her entire life, Marie, in her late thirties, raised the money for passage on her own, in part by selling every family possession they had. She and her daughters, Anna and Josephine, got on a boat and arrived at Ellis Island on February 21, 1908, before continuing to East St. Louis.
Marie Krokvica did indeed find her husband in East St. Louis, living in a flophouse, his pockets empty. Leonard had squandered the family money with nothing to show for it. The Krokvica family was reunited, but broke.
Marie and both daughters went to work full-time at a meatpacking house. School for these girls was out of the question. All three worked for five to ten cents an hour (the equivalent of two to four dollars an hour in today’s money), on their feet ten hours a day, six days a week. For extra money, Marie raised chickens and used the feathers to make pillows.
It’s not clear whether Leonard went to work. But he did live with his family for at least a short while. Leonard and Marie’s next daughter, Mary Krokvica, was born in East St. Louis in 1909.
In 1910, the Slovak Kalish and Krokvica families were joined when Louis Kalish, son of Stefan and Katherine, married Anna Krokvica, daughter of Leonard and Marie.
They presumably met at the Swift meatpacking house. The fact that they both spoke Slovak no doubt helped them find each other.
Later that same year, Anna gave birth to a baby girl. Sadly, she lived for such a brief time that nobody is certain of her name.
Infant mortality is so prevalent in our family history, as it is in many family histories, that it’s hard to keep track of how many mothers endured the anguish of losing an infant. It’s an indescribable grief that, thankfully, is far less common today.
By the time of his marriage, Louis had been working at the Swift meatpacking house for six years. He worked six days a week, ten hours a day, for ten cents an hour. Then, in 1912, he was offered a supervisor’s job that came with a fifty percent raise, to fifteen cents an hour.
But there was a catch: he and Anna, who was then expecting a second child, would have to move to Oklahoma City. They seized the opportunity and boarded a westbound train for Oklahoma.
Their son, James Kalish, was born shortly after their arrival, in August 1912. They called him Jimmy.
The young family presumably looked forward to a long future in Oklahoma, with Louis now earning a supervisor’s pay. But then, when Jimmy was still a newborn, Louis learned something he hadn’t been told before leaving East St. Louis: the man who held the supervisor job before him had been fired, and had vowed to kill anyone who tried to take his place. Somehow, the disgruntled ex-supervisor got word to Louis that he was very serious.
The death threat and the distance from family and their ethnic community were enough to convince Louis and Anna that Oklahoma was not OK.
They left after less than six months, with little Jimmy, and returned to East St. Louis in 1913. Louis got his old job back and was soon working again for ten cents an hour, six days a week.
Unfortunately, by the time Louis and Anna came back from Oklahoma, Jimmy’s Grandma and Grandpa Kalish were no longer there.
Just like immigrants in the United States today, our Slovak ancestors in the early 1900s suffered taunts and derision as a matter of course. After six years in East St. Louis, the proud Stefan Kalish decided he could no longer tolerate the abuse. He especially disliked what coworkers called him.
“I’m no hunkee SOB!” he complained.
The word “hunkee” was an ethnic slur, probably shortened from “Hungarian,” and aimed at laborers from all over Central and Eastern Europe. The SOB part requires no explanation.
The anti-immigrant taunts put Stefan Kalish over the edge. In 1912, he and Katherine returned to Austria-Hungary with ten-year-old Mildred, but not with eleven-year-old Joe. His parents decided, presumably after much anguish, to leave him behind. Why?
Six years earlier, Joe had nearly been turned back at Ellis Island for being “a cripple,” to use the parlance of the day. Katherine did not want to risk taking him out of the country for fear he would never be let back in. So she left the boy in the care of his older siblings.
In 1912, returning to the same village of Banova Jaruga where the family had lived before, Stefan Kalish was apparently unable to get his old job back as notary. He and Katherine turned instead to farming. They grew plum trees and made something with the playful name of slivovitz, a kind of plum brandy, along with other goods for sale.
Back in the U.S. in 1913, the year of Louis and Anna Kalish’s return to East St. Louis, just after his parents’ departure, something came along that would eventually touch the lives of nearly every working American, something that remains part and parcel of life today: the income tax.
As you’ll recall, one of the most daunting obstacles to the prohibitionists, maybe the most, was the revenue problem. If 30% of federal revenue came from taxes on alcohol, how could the government possibly ban it?
It should come as no surprise, then, that the Anti-Saloon League was a major supporter of the Sixteenth Amendment. No longer would the government need revenue from one’s consumption of alcohol, as it could get all it needed from taxing income.
Ratification of the income tax amendment put a hearty burst of wind into the sails of Wayne Wheeler, and helped train his sights on not just a national law banning alcohol, but a ban dictated by the U.S. Constitution. Laws can be overturned, he reasoned. No amendment ever had.
Back in Europe, just as Stefan and Katherine Kalish were establishing their new lives as a farming family and bottlers of slivovitz, it became terribly clear that the timing of their return had been, well, terrible.
In 1914, not two years after their return, following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, World War I erupted. It was then, of course, called simply the Great War. Nobody dared imagine there might be another one.
World War I would last for more than four bloody years. The United States sat out nearly all of the first three. President Woodrow Wilson declared American neutrality, in keeping with this nation’s longstanding foreign policy of staying out of European affairs. In 1914, many Americans thought a war an entire ocean away would never affect them.
Spoiler alert: they were wrong.
Unlike their family back in America, Stefan and Katherine Kalish, with young Mildred and nearly everyone else in much of Europe, were deeply affected by the war. Meat became scarce after the army confiscated all the livestock. The Kalish horses were confiscated, as was their stock of slivovitz and other goods, and they lost much of their family money when their bank failed. Spies and police kept watch over citizens and refused them permits to move.
Males of fighting age were forced to fight. Stefan, in his fifties, narrowly escaped the draft, and Mildred found herself with only other girls to play with. The boys were all sent off to fight. Those who did return were missing limbs, or could not stop coughing from exposure to one of various gases used in an era before chemical warfare was banned.
If the timing of this family’s return to Europe was bad, the timing for someone else was even worse.
Just a few months before the start of World War I in July 1914, Stefan and Katherine’s daughter Mary and her husband, Franz Kavalier, decided to leave East St. Louis and travel back to Austria-Hungary with their baby, Frank. They planned to visit Franz’s family farm in the village of Daruvar, and Mary’s parents in the village of Banova Jaruga, both in what is now Croatia.
We don’t know how long Mary and Franz intended to stay, but with the outbreak of the war it didn’t matter. They were going nowhere any time soon. So much for a pleasant family visit.
Worse, because Franz was an Austro-Hungarian citizen, he was drafted into the empire’s army to fight alongside the Germans. His protestations that he was only visiting from America fell on deaf ears. They gave him a gun and hauled him away. Mary was left alone with little Frank.
In time, the young mother got the worst news possible for the wife of a soldier off at war: her husband had been killed in combat, she was told. Mary adjusted to her new reality as a war widow, doing what she could to make ends meet. Whenever she could, Mary took the train to visit her parents, Stefan and Katherine, with their grandson Frank.
War is hell. It’s an old saying, usually credited to the Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman. It certainly was hell over in Europe starting in 1914, for the Kalishes, the Kavaliers, and countless other families.
Over here, Americans had the relative luxury of debating domestic issues, such as what to do about alcohol.
The Anti-Saloon League, leading the charge for the nation’s drys, was churning out reams of literature from its printing operation in Ohio, funded by a seemingly endless stream of dues, mostly from churchgoers across rural America. Its chief strategist, Wayne Wheeler, relocated to Washington, D.C., to be closer to lawmakers.
The wets had two trade associations, one for whiskey distillers and one for brewers, who unfortunately couldn’t get along. They tended to blame each other for the growing peril facing each of their industries. And the leading brewers of America had something going against them they could not change: they were German.
In May 1915, a German submarine sank the British ocean liner Lusitania, killing nearly 1,200 men, women, and children, including 128 Americans. Not wanting to draw the U.S. into the war, Germany eventually agreed to Woodrow Wilson’s demands, including that German submarines, known as U-boats, stop targeting non-military vessels.
Another luxury Americans could enjoy, well distanced from the expanding trench warfare in Europe and the U-boat patrols on the North Atlantic, was the simple luxury of getting married. Americans were still exchanging vows as a matter of course, including two Americans on my family tree.
In 1916, Josephine Krokvica married Steve Walko. Josephine was the second child of Leonard and Marie Krokvica, the grandparents of three-year-old Jimmy Kalish. His aunt Josephine married Slovak Steve Walko, who had immigrated from the same region of Austria-Hungary as the Kalishes and Krokvicas, working his way to East St. Louis just as they had, and finding a job, just as they had, at a meatpacking house. But, as we’ll see, he wouldn’t need to keep that job for very long.
In early 1917, Germany broke its promise and resumed unrestricted attacks from its submarines. Woodrow Wilson had no choice but to go to Congress and seek its consent to go to war. Congress gave it.
With the nation now at war against Germany, the Anti-Saloon League and other drys flipped on their turbochargers, making outrageous claims, such as that using wheat for brewing beer was making American soldiers go hungry, in their drive for a constitutional amendment banning alcohol.
And they reminded Americans at every opportunity of who was to blame for, well, everything: the Germans. Nobody in the United States of German ancestry, whether in the business of brewing beer or not, was safe.
Soon after the United States entered World War I, both 28-year-old Louis Kalish and his 24-year-old brother Mike registered for the draft. They signed their cards on the same day in June 1917. Both listed the same occupation, saloon keeper, and both listed the same home address.
Louis had hated returning to a meatpacking job after being chased out of Oklahoma City four years earlier. He had dabbled in the hotel business (not at the Savoy), but that hadn’t worked out.
Now the two Kalish brothers, their wives, and their young children shared a house on 3rd Street in the Goose Hill neighborhood, about a mile north of downtown East St. Louis. The saloon may have been on the first floor, which was not an uncommon arrangement.
Their 16-year-old brother Joe, meanwhile, was doing something rather more interesting than running a saloon.
After being left in East St. Louis at the age of eleven when his parents returned to Europe, Joe Kalish had an understandably rough time growing up. Everyone else in the family, once they reached working age, found work in one of the East St. Louis meatpacking houses. Not Joe. With his bad legs, he had little chance of finding work that required standing all day doing manual labor. He had to find another way to earn a living.
As a teenager, Joe became known as a lively and resourceful guy who played the accordion and piano, rode a motorcycle, ran a filling station, liked to play checkers, and liked to drink.
At some point, still a teenager, Joe acquired a Model T Ford and used it to start a taxi service. But this was a highly specialized service with only one destination, two and a half hours away on mostly unpaved roads: a small Illinois town called Zeigler, in the heart of Little Egypt, about a hundred miles southeast of East St. Louis. It has an odd history.
In the early 1900s, huge coal deposits were discovered in this otherwise random spot of Franklin County farm country, and mining operations soon followed.
The town was founded in 1903 by Joseph Leiter, son of Levi Leiter, a Chicago multimillionaire and former business partner of Marshall Field. Levi’s middle name was Zeigler, and Joseph named the town to honor his dad. It was incorporated in 1914.
The story goes that the fabulously wealthy Leiter family had some connection to President Teddy Roosevelt (fabulous wealth tends to enable such connections), and Joseph got the idea of using that influence to move the nation’s capital from Washington, D.C., to Zeigler.
He even laid out the streets of Zeigler like a wagon wheel, modeled after Washington. Needless to say, the fanciful idea went nowhere. But the circular street at the town center remains to this day.
The coal mines of Zeigler did produce coal, just as planned, and quite a lot of it. Coal mines require coal miners, and at its peak Zeigler employed nearly four thousand. Plenty of those miners enjoyed liquor and the company of women.
Some were willing to pay for both.
Enter the Joe Kalish taxi service. East St. Louis had plenty of liquor and plenty of prostitutes, ready for loading into Joe’s car for the long, bumpy ride to Zeigler. He charged the prostitutes $5 each way, roughly $125 today.
Eventually Joe expanded his taxi operation and opened a small brothel in Zeigler. The money was apparently quite good, so good that his big brother Louis took notice and decided to pay a visit to Zeigler himself.
In December 1917, around the time Louis was checking out Zeigler, Congress took the penultimate step toward banning alcohol nationally by passing a resolution authorizing a constitutional amendment. It would make it illegal to manufacture, sell, or transport intoxicating liquors. Like all constitutional amendments, this one would require ratification by three-fourths of the states, or 36 of the then 48.
Three months later, in March 1918, Louis decided that the little town of Zeigler was the place for him. He placed a substantial bet on his instinct, taking out a $1,300 mortgage (roughly $28,000 today) to buy a boardinghouse at the corner of Coxspur and Oak Streets, a short walk from the entrance of Zeigler’s main coal mine, Mine Number 1.
Did Louis consider at this time the prospect of states ratifying a constitutional amendment banning the sale of alcohol? We don’t know.
He may have assumed, as many did, that ratification by so many states within the allotted time (Congress had set a seven-year deadline) was a long shot. Or maybe he figured that, legal or not, there would always be a source of alcohol and plenty of people willing to buy it. If so, he was not alone in such thinking.
In 1918, the Zeigler boardinghouse became the new home of Louis, his wife Anna, and their five-year-old son Jimmy. It was also a home for coal miners, though their stays may have been rather brief. Presumably, Joe moved his brothel into the boardinghouse as well.
In addition to the brothel, there may or may not have been a restaurant at the boardinghouse, but there certainly was a saloon. The sale of liquor was still legal at this time, and apparently, as we’ll see, they sold quite a lot.
We can’t be certain of all the services offered in Zeigler, but whatever they were, we know the Kalish brothers needed some help.
Also in 1918, anti-German sentiment in America turned from hysterical to tragic. One such tragedy took place in April in Collinsville, Illinois, a town not far northeast of the Goose Hill neighborhood where some of my family lived.
Robert Prager was a 30-year-old immigrant from Germany, a coal miner whose application to join the local union was denied. The rejection stirred up false rumors, including one that he intended to blow up a coal mine as a spy for Germany. One night he was pulled from his home, wrapped in an American flag, and made to march barefoot down Main Street.
The police intervened and put him in a jail cell for his safety. The angry mob broke in, took him to Bluff Hill just outside town, overlooking East St. Louis, and lynched him. A jury took ten minutes to find the twelve men charged with his death innocent. Their defense attorney argued that what they had done was, quote, “a patriotic act.”
We don’t know if America’s prohibitionists paid much attention to the tragic consequences of xenophobic hysteria that played in their favor. We do know they watched carefully as one state after another ratified the 18th amendment, cheering as each legislative gavel fell in their favor.
On January 16, 1919, their cheering was no doubt accompanied by wild celebration (free of alcoholic beverages, of course) when Nebraska became the 36th state to ratify. As stipulated, the ban would go into effect exactly twelve months later.
Drys across America had every reason to be elated. The wets were dumbfounded, perhaps realizing only then how impressively organized their opponents were, especially the Anti-Saloon League and its strategist, Wayne B. Wheeler.
In later years, one writer would summarize it this way: “The Non-Drinkers had been organizing for fifty years and the Drinkers had no organization whatever. They had been too busy drinking.”
Louis Kalish certainly knew about the ratification of the 18th amendment, and the imminence of the national ban, as he convinced other family members to help him and Joe run the boardinghouse in Zeigler.
His in-laws, my great-great-grandparents Leonard and Marie Krokvica, moved there. Leonard still drank to excess in Zeigler, once downing an entire bottle of alcohol laced with wood alcohol and living to boast about it for years.
Anna’s little sister Mary moved there. So did Anna’s other sister Josephine and her husband Steve Walko, along with their two little boys, Steve Junior and Ed.
Joe’s taxi was presumably filled with family members and belongings on many bumpy rides from East St. Louis to Zeigler. No room for prostitutes on those trips.
By 1919, a good number of my Kalish, Krokvica, and Walko ancestors were in Zeigler, catering to the... hospitality needs of its coal miners. Mike Kalish and his young family remained in East St. Louis, as did Mike and Louis’s sister Annie Stengel and her family.
It appears Joe continued his special taxi service between East St. Louis and Zeigler all this time. Prostitution was of course illegal, and Joe may have been stopped more than once by law enforcement. This might explain his 1919 marriage to 16-year-old Leah Brown of Benton, Illinois, not far from Zeigler.
There is no record of them ever living together (in 1920 she was living with her parents), and there is speculation that he got married just to have a marriage certificate in the car, to convince police that he and whatever prostitute was beside him were husband and wife.
At one minute past midnight on January 17, 1920, the United States went dry. The Kalish, Krokvica, and Walko boardinghouse in Zeigler, a business that depended on the sale of alcohol, had been open for less than two years.
You might think the new national ban on alcohol was a problem for the family business, but you’d be wrong.
It was a jackpot.
In the next episode we'll learn how Jimmy Kalish liked living in Zeigler, what his parents did with all the money they earned there, and what came of the Kalish family members stranded in Europe during World War I.
We'll also learn about three brothers who grew up not far from Zeigler--Carl Shelton, Earl Shelton, and Bernie Shelton--who with the help of Prohibition became the Shelton Brothers, one of the region's most infamous gangs. My family would see a lot of those guys as their paths crossed with ours back in East St. Louis.
And we'll learn what came of little Jimmy Kalish as he grew into an adult, raised a family with his wife Bernice, and left an impression as our Grandpa Kalish that none of us who knew him will ever forget.
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