My first post/thread here. I'm a guy who is big-time into old airplanes, but this site has been a real gem for me and my growing interest in traditional rods, '30s roadsters and dirt track stuff, and all that real early stuff. I'm really getting more and more interested in the stuff going on in the 1930s. Bad ***, raw, Great Depression machines really hit that sweet spot. Anyhow, I've written/am writing some articles about 1920s-1930s liquor smuggling with airplanes in and out of Canada from New York State. Cool stuff...fascinating.....etc etc. In digging into the details, I've come across some car stuff and I'm getting more into it. Turns out, there was a pretty substantial car culture going on in the northeast during Prohibition. Alot of larger operations and individuals doing the cross-boarder thing, and cars were really the primary mode. And, most importantly, it turns out that there were lots of guys doing some interesting things to cars to make em haul more and go faster. Here in NY, dudes and gals would make runs out of Canada and go straight to NYC.....thats a run! They'd carry a frickin ton of liquor and haul ***. I know the whole liquor-running thing is most ***ociated with Southern folk, running 'shine out of the hills and all that, but here in the Northeast it seems that there was also a car thing going on surrounding this. It tended to be longer distance, closer to organized crime (duh), and for higher stakes. It was all over by '33 for the most part, so the cars we are talking about are late teens stuff through early '30s. To me, this seems to be a bit of an unexplored corner of this world. The cars these runners ran tended to be "sleepers".....engine stuff done, suspension stuff, and hidden compartments. I wonder how much influence this era had on the real early rods, dirt track guys, etc?? In my travels, I came across a wonderful old book called "Booze Runner." Its a first hand account of a guy in NYC who agreed to make a few runs in the early 30s because he was broke. In one section he describes and lays out the "work" that was done on the cars he ran up to Canada, got loaded, and sped back to the City with. Tomorrow I'll get that quote out and post it. From what I've read a lot of liquor running operations were done via rental car agencies, who had the mechanics who had the skills to build up these cars. Anyway, long-winded....sorry! If anyone here has more knowledge/insights on this stuff here, maybe we can post it and open up some cool stuff. I'll be posting more for sure. Thanks everyone!
I have read accounts of Prohibition rum runners based on interviews with rum runners and even met a few myself. None of them mentioned modified cars, I would like to learn more about that. In the accounts I have read and the guys I spoke to, they did not do anything special to their cars but depended on being sneaky or just buying a fast car. One guy I talked to, lived in Windsor and played violin in a band called the Gondoliers in a speakeasy in Detroit. First thing he did when he got the job, was buy an old Studebaker touring car that burned oil. He didn't care what kind of car, as long as it burned plenty of oil. Next he took a 1 gallon oil can, washed it out clean, and every day filled the can with whiskey. He carried the can on the front floor of the car, not hidden. When crossing the border each day he would stop the car if asked by the customs inspectors, but leave it running. Smoking to beat the band of course. If they asked him to shut it off he would say he was afraid it wouldn't start again. They would search the car, pull up the seats, etc but never checked the oil can in plain sight. In this way he made an extra $40 a day, selling the liquor to his boss. At that time $40 was a hell of a good week's pay.
Thanks for the responses so far! From all the research I've been doing, it seems like there was a whole spectrum of folks running booze, from amateur-hour individuals trying to make a buck, to well-oiled organized-crime operations that were sophisticated on almost every level. The cars ranged from the big powerhouses, to trucks, to the more common stuff. It was all represented. In my initial post, I mentioned a fairly rare book that I found to be not only fascinating, but really opened this topic for me. Its ***led Booze-Runner by a British citizen who wrote under the pen-name "Dean Frith." It was published in 1935 and was written about the period between 1929 and 1933. Frith, running low on funds, ended up meeting some folks who knew some folks, and ended up hiring on to the working end of an established operation moving booze direct from Canada to NYC. The runs were up to Canada, load up, and back to NYC. Thats about 400 miles one way. The route was well-known and established....the rum-highway. The opposition were Troopers, Customs men, local police, and "hijackers," who would establish roadblocks and steal the liquor loads. Here are some choice quotes relevant to this topic from Booze-Runner: Pg. 15 "We use ordinary Chevrolets. Chevvies; and whats more they only belong to us on the Time-Payment system. So if we have to jump and leave a car, then it's not our loss but the company's!" [The company being referred to here was named in the book as "The Bought-Back Automobile Co. Inc." which was a used car rental/leasing company that had a legitimate trade as well as a regular illegitimate trade in providing specialized booze cars to this organization.] Pg. 24 "....'you cant be too incon****uous in this racket--thats why I use these Chevvies as booze-cars. Thousands of 'em on the road....." " 'But aren't there times when you need the speed that a bigger engine could give you?' .....'Sure! But listen Dean [author]; these Chevvies have got specially-tuned motors, and even when carrying a full load can hit it up to nearly eighty. Thats faster than the motor-cops can go and there isn't any motor-cycle cop that would try any funny business with a booze-car travellin' at over seventy. They know they'd be twisted into the ditch with a turn of my steering-wheel if they rode along-side o' me!' " [Frith says that the type of Chevy they were using were roadsters.] Pg. 28 " 'I like cars as some guys like horses and dogs. I get alot of fun tuning up a motor, you know. Now these Chevvies, f'instance, they don't have rumble seats but big luggage-containers. So I strip out all the bee-yutiful Fisher body-work till I get down to the General Motors tin of which the cars are made. That gives me a whale of a lot of space for carrying booze. 'Specially the way I carry the stuff. Not in cases, me lad. But just racked up, row upon row of bottles as tight as I can get 'em! With a bit of good luck and good packing I can get over three hundred quarts in the back. Then I put a couple of dozen under the seat here, about four dozen on the floor by your feet, and as many odd ones as I can get into the door pockets and onto the seat!' " [The person speaking in this quote was an old-hand who was also one of the mechanics that worked for the leasing company that built up the cars.] Pg. 33-34 "...[he] then explained how he had put extra leaves into the rear springs to carry the heavy loads. Further, he told me the sets of number-plates each car carried hidden under the running-boards, and how these were changed at different parts of the journey south again. This was done so that the cars would have number-plates whose sequence would be commonplace to the districts through which they would be driving. 'Makes us look local,' he amplified. 'Then the cops don't look too hard if your license-tags have a homely figure on 'em.' Only the finest and strongest tyres were fitted to [his] cars. And he said, on the tyres depended everything--liberty and life itself. Furthermore, it lessened the risk of blowouts and punctures--which it was imperative to avoid if possible, on account of the difficulty of jacking up a booze-laden car with anything less than a truck jack." Speaking of the car's color: "Well, on its last trip it was all green. Trip before it was grey with orange wheels--before that it was a dandy cream colour. I always change the colour of the car each time I go up." So there are some quotes specific to the cars themselves. I think its important to note that this book and the above quotes and cars they are referring to were very much of the late-Prohibition period....30-33. The operations were mature, the routes mature, and the methods fairly well-developed. Anyway, interesting. Cars with "tuned" motors, jacked up suspensions, and secret compartments. Kind of cool.
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