Cleveland’s Isaac Ettinger: A Magnet for Trouble

Every bottle has a story, so it is said.  When the whiskey jug shown here came up for sale at a recent bottle show, it was bought by a friend and I decided to do some research, never guessing at the tempestuous career of Isaac Ettinger, the Cleveland liquor dealer whose name appears on the stoneware.  

Ettinger ran a liquor business and saloon in Cleveland for about twenty years, located at several addresses along Ontario Street, a major commercial avenue.   In the process, through his own stubbornness or just bad luck, Isaac seemed to have attracted trouble.

Isaac was born in Poland, then part of the Russian empire, the son of Joseph and Dora (Bedin) Ettinger.  He emigrated to the United States as a youth and initially settled in New York City where he achieved citizenship in October 1867. 

He arrived in Cleveland sometime before 1870 when he was listed in business directories as a “tobacconist,” making cigars and selling them out of his house at 109 Water Street.  By 1879, however, he had left the smoking business and joined the drinking trade, opening his bar and liquor store at 358 Ontario St., as shown on the jug.  Who would suspect that the benign looking Ettinger, would proved to be anything but. 

Ettinger made headlines in the Cleveland Plain Dealer when he, his wife Yetta, and two of her lady friends, were forcibly ejected from a horse-drawn street car operated by the Woodland Avenue & West Side Street Railroad, the line shown here.  

The incident occurred about  3 o’clock in the morning of February 6, 1893.   After a verbal battle with Ettinger the conductor threw them all off trolley and called the cops. Isaac was arrested.  Taken to the police station at that hour, he made bail and the group was not detained but forced to tramp home through the snow. The newspaper article commented:  “The condition of the weather was scarcely propitious for a long walk at so early an hour, but walk they did.”  

The dispute had arisen over Ettinger’s staunch refusal to pay the conductor fifty cents for the party to ride until he could buy actual tickets for them all.  Claiming that he was sold out of tickets, the conductor asked for cash.  Ettinger had argued long and vociferously he would not pay anything until tickets could be purchased. The result was his arrest, later dismissed.  Ettinger quickly filed a damage suit against the company for $2,000 ($50,000 equivalent today.)  The case hopped in and out of court for two years before being heard.  I have been unable to find the result.

Over the years Ettinger frequently was in and out of court, suing and being sued.  In 1881 he hauled a woman named Rosa L. Block into court for default of a loan, asking for compensation in money and land.  Isaac himself had faced a  bankruptcy suit in 1878 but emerged relatively unscathed.  Additionally, Clevelander Mathias Nickels claimed that as he was passing by Ettinger’s place a heavy sign had fallen from atop the saloon, breaking an large arc light and a piece of glass had flown into his eye.  He asked $10,000 (equiv. $250,000) in damages.  

In 1899 Henry Russon, Ettinger’s business partner in a company called Buckeye Hair & Fiber, charged in Cleveland’s Common Pleas Court that Ettinger had converted to his personal use the company’s entire stock and accounts worth $2,400.  Ettinger, he claimed further, had locked up the store and factory, thereby denying Russon entry to the buildings. He asked the court to dissolved the firm and put it into the hands of a receiver.  It is unclear how either Nickels or Russon’s suits turned out.

Meanwhile Ettinger apparently was a devoted family man.  He and his wife, Henrietta  (called “Yetta”), had two children, Charles, who later assisted Isaac in the liquor trade, and a daughter, Debra.  She married a man named Sands and gave the Ettingers a grandchild, Doris on whom Isaac doted.  He was photographed with Doris on several occasions.  It is hard to believe that the benign grandfather shown here is the same fire-breathing Issac Ettinger described above.

At the age of 83, Ettinger died in March 1925 and interred

in Section 4, Lot 23, Grave 5 of Mayfield Cemetery in Cleveland.  He is buried next to Yetta who died 15 years earlier.  Ettinger’s headstone is shown here.  

By the time the

Cleveland liquor dealer died he had been out of business for a decade, Ohio having voted “dry” in 1916.  By looking into the origins of a bottle or jug as with the one shown here, it is possible to find many kinds of human beings.  In the case of Isaac Ettinger, it was a man who seemingly collected lawsuits like some people collect whiskey jugs.