The Jaffes Went From a Tent to a Liquor Powerhouse

When Louis Jaffe established his Seattle saloon and liquor house in August 1889, he initially operated from a tent because a fire had destroyed much of the central city.  With the help of two sons, only a few years elapsed before Jaffe & Company Inc. was advertising as “The Finest Exclusive Liquor Store in the United States.” and the family controlled multiple outlets.

Louis was born in Gniezno, Poland, in September 1835, a city 31 miles from the border of 19th Century Prussia, an area that changed hands between Poland and Germany with some regularity.  As a result Louis sometimes listed his birthplace as Poland, sometimes Germany.  At the age of 21, he emigrated to the United States in 1857 and headed to the West Coast, settling initially in San Francisco. 

Limited information exists on Louis’ activities over the next three decades although it appears that he was able to prosper as a coal dealer in Oakland, California.  When he died, Louis was extolled in the local press as a “well known resident of Oakland, being the proprietor of  a large coal business in this city.” In 1863 he married, possibly a childhood sweetheart.  She was Johannah Oppenheim (also given as“Koppenheim”), also born in Gniezno.  The couple would have eight children, five girls and three boys.

In 1886, now 58 years old, Louis changed direction radically.  He moved to Healdsburg, California, 70 miles north of Oakland, shown above, and purchased the Pridham Vineyards, 264 acres of wine and brandy grapes.  Assisted by two grown sons, Joseph and Herbert  (both of whom had “Louis” as a middle name),  the family plunged full tilt into the wine and liquor trade.

The Seattle Fire of 1889

In  August 1889, the Jaffes moved further north to Seattle, opening just months after a fire had gutted most of the downtown.  Although the conflagration lasted less than a day, it destroyed 25 city blocks, including the entire business district, four of the city's wharves, and its railroad terminals.  Undeterred, the Jaffes set up a 15x70 foot tent at a location on what was then known as Old Mill Street just above Third Avenue South.  They quickly built a three story brick building at 115-117 Second Avenue South and opened a retail and wholesale liquor and wine house called Jaffe & Co. 

The Jaffes featured just a few whiskey brands, all of which mimicked other labels. None were trademarked.  They included “Old Oaken Bucket,” “Louis Hunter 1870,” and “Golden Wedding.”  The family presented them in amber bottles, as shown below.  The Oaken Bucket back-of-the-bar bottle, right, can be identified as a Jaffe product by the script “J” at the top.  The bottle would have been given to saloons, hotels and restaurants doing business with Jaffe & Co.

Within a reasonably short time, the Jaffes’ business mushroomed into a conglomerate.  In addition to opening Seattle’s first commercial winery called the Wine Creek Winery,  the Jaffes owned a saloon and liquor store in Spokane;  Joseph was running a spin-off called the Imperial Liquor Company, and the eldest son, Aaron, managed an enterprise listed as “wine merchants and importers.”  Meanwhile Louis, trumpeting the family’s success, was claiming on his jugs and ads that his Second Avenue headquarters was “The Finest Exclusive Liquor House in the U.S.”

As he aged, Louis’ health faltered.  On February 1, 1905, he died, age 69.  After a funeral service at the Hotel Van Nuys, he was buried in Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland.  Johanna would join him there thirteen years later.  Their joint monument is shown here.  Jaffe &Co. also remained, as a memorial to Louis and his business savvy .  The year after the patriarch’s death, the Seattle directory listed Joseph as  vice president and Herbert, shown above in a passport photo, as secretary-treasurer.  The position of president was left open, likely as a silent tribute to their father, the coal dealer turned wine and whiskey tycoon.  

For the next five years in Seattle, the Jaffe sons battled growing prohibitionary pressures and shrinking markets.  One tactic was issuing advertising shot glasses to be given to the saloons carrying the company brands.  As seen here, the brothers’ shot designs were generally a notch above other merchants as they advertised “Old Oaken Bucket,” “Golden Wedding,” and “Louis Hunter 1870 Rye.”

Recognizing that the days of selling liquor in the State of Washington were growing short, the Jaffes began to move their emphasis from the “Finest Exclusive Liquor House” to becoming less dependent on a Seattle customer base.  The decision resulted in their issuing a new series of shots, one that noted a company shift toward mail order trade.  

The ax fell in 1915 when Washington, following the trend in other states, voted to become “dry.”  Forthwith neither whiskey or wine or beer could be manufactured or sold in the state. Overnight the door closed on the alcohol conglomerate Louis Jaffe had founded 29 years earlier.  Joseph’s Imperial Liquor Co. marked the occasion by a sign that proclaimed:  “This is the end of our sinning:  ice cream and candy for us.”  The public was implored to: “Help us move this high grade stock of wines and liquors.  Price no object.”  In fact, it was not the end of Jaffe “sinning.”  The brothers wasted no time in moving Jaffe & Co. out of Seattle to the more friendly environment of reliably “wet” San Francisco.  The business survived as a retail and mail order house until 1920 when National Prohibition went into effect.  It was not revived with Repeal.

Note:  This post was created from a variety of Internet sources, census data and city directories of Seattle and San Francisco.

Bullets and Booze: Mixing Hunting and Whiskey

When I was a  reporter on a weekly newspaper in the Wisconsin North Woods in 1958, my boss Dan, a jokester, loved to regale visiting hunters in local bars just as deer season began.  He would tell the outsiders, “I never go out in the field hunting without a few belts of whiskey in me to keep warm.”  Then he would watch with amusement at the looks of alarm on the faces of those in town expecting to hunt on opening day.

Although I think Dan was only kidding, the juxtaposition of whiskey with hunting was a familiar theme in liquor ads before National Prohibition.   Whiskey advertising frequently extolled the value of strong drink for hunters or found other ways of identifying their product with the shooters’ sport.   In the saloon sign above, advertising Kinsey Pure Rye Whiskey, we see a story unfolding.  The hunter and his dog have intruded on posted “No Trespassing” land, only to confront an angry farmer with rod in his hand.  The hunter is offering a flask — obviously of Kinsey Rye — and the farmer seems about to take it.  Moral:  Whiskey is handy to have on a hunt.

The pre-Prohibition Angelo Myers Co. of Philadelphia was not the only liquor wholesaler to make use of this “Field and Stream” fantasy.  Old Overholt, a long-produced Pennsylvania Rye Whiskey, founded as early as 1810, used a similar theme on one of its advertising signs given to saloons. The “No Trespassing” sign is absent here, but the farmer carries a stick.  He seems pleased, however, at being offered a swig from a flask of Old Overholt.  In the distance a bearded yokel is climbing a fence to get his share.   Given the angled posture of the hunter, he may have been imbibing earlier.

“A Stag Party” is a saloon sign meant to be humorous, issued by the George Stagg Company of Frankfort, Kentucky.  Here two hunters are resting from their labors, toasting each other with whiskey from a bottle of Stagg’s trademarked “O.F.C. Straight Bourbon.”  Both are unaware that a large male deer with a huge antler rack has appeared out of the forest behind them.  That buck was the emblem of the O.F.C. distillery that Stagg operated.  The younger hunter also seems unaware that his rifle, resting as it is on his arm, might go off and damage more than his snazzy jacket.

A scene of gunners resting and enjoying a drink, guns close by, also decorated the labels of “Kamp’s Rye Whiskey.”  In this scene the two hunters apparently have spent the day in the field and shot something tough and stringy — perhaps a wild boar — since they seem to be making dinner by boiling what they bagged over a blazing wood fire.  The only camper who seems to be paying attention is their dog.  The source of this whiskey, Kamp Distilling of St. Louis, was not a distiller, but a wholesaler who “rectified” whiskey purchased elsewhere, mixing and blending it, sometimes with other ingredients, to achieve taste and color, then bottling it under a proprietary label.

This theme of two hunters relaxing in camp with their dog and guns was replicated in a saloon sign issued by the company.  Calling this brand of whiskey “The Sportman’s Choice,”  Kamp indicated by this illustration that the hunters were well supplied with whiskey, a full case of quart bottles being evident in the foreground.  It is a wonder these gents could find time between snorts to do any hunting at all.

“Rod and Gun Club Rye,” ads and labels, unlike those above, do not show any overt drinking.  Here the man and his dogs seemingly have flush a pair of snipes and a covey of quail.  The hunter seems in a quandary, as do his dogs, about which birds to shoot.  With the first shot, all will be in flight.  Miller & Mooney began business about 1884 in Philadelphia as liquor wholesalers.  They likely experienced frustration in getting adequate whiskey supplies and so bought their own distillery in nearby Berks County, Pennsylvania.  It was the Wheatland Distillery, operating under the “bottled in bonding” legislation and known in Federal annals as Registered Distillery #75 in the 1st District of Pennsylvania.

John Ellwanger, a German immigrant who began his career as a delivery boy in a Dubuque, Iowa, dry goods store, and went on to become a wealthy whiskey wholesaler, featured a hunter in his sign for “Old Knapsack Rye.”  Given the startled look on the face of nimrod, my guess is that he has a flask in his own knapsack and has been reminded to take a swig.   Ellwanger used his resources from selling whiskey to become a leading business and political figure in Dubuque during the late 19th Century and into the 20th.

  

Theobold & Son of Columbus, Ohio, left little to the imagination by their saloon sign for their flagship brand, “Old Coon Sour Mash.  Above is the image of two hunters in the twilight with coon dogs who have treed a small raccoon that is looking at them intently, obviously with some apprehension.   The hunters, however, seem transfixed on a bottle of whiskey that one of the men is offering the other.  The dogs seem disinterested in the quarry.  It may be that Old Coon has saved the hide of the treed version.  The Theobolds were in business from 1860 to 1916 when Ohio voted to go “dry.”

The label of the “Off & On” whiskey appears to show a hunter who is in no quandary about what to aim at.  Crouched on the forest floor, he is intently banging away at his unseen quarry.  This was one of many brands from the Herman Myer Company of New York City.   Like other wholesalers Myer was rectifying and bottling whiskey under his own labels.  One of my favorite Myer brand names is “Naked Mermaid.”   Herman apparently was getting supplies from a relative with a distillery in Covington, Kentucky.

These nine pre-Prohibition whiskey ads provide ample testimony to the links that have existed from time immemorial  between alcohol and hunting — a relationship as fresh as the present.  The moral is:  If you don’t have a gun, stay out of the woods during hunting season — and maybe even if you do.

Note:  More complete narratives about several of the “whiskey men” referenced here may be found elsewhere on this website:  Theobold, April 2, 2011; Ellwanger, Feb. 26, 2012;  Overholt, July 2, 2012, and Stagg, April 30, 2016.

The Winands of Maryland and “Pikesville Rye”

 

                                   

In the Summer of 2016, when word was received that "Pikesville Supreme Rye" would no longer be produced,  it sent Maryland bar owners and citizens alike rushing to buy and stash away as many cases as possible. News stories followed in which Pikesville Rye was hailed as an iconic whiskey with a history that encompassed three centuries, first distilled by a family named Winand.  Yet no one seemed to know much about the Winands.  This vignette will attempt to remedy that void, as well as carry the Pikesville Rye story forward.

The patriarch of the Winands clan was John Winand, born in Wales in 1830.  His date of emigration to the United States has not been recorded.   John’s first stop was in Pennsylvania where he met and married Elizabeth, three years his junior and an immigrant from Ireland.  Their first child, William, would be born in Pennsylvania.  By 1860, John, shown here, was recorded living in Baltimore and working as a distiller, likely employed by one of the city’s many rye whiskey makers.

At the time of the 1870 Census, the Winands could count six more children, Lewis, 12; Thomas, 10; John, 9;  Mary , 7; Katie, 5; and Michael, 2.  The Winands distilling dynasty was beginning to take shape.  Father John clearly had been doing well as a distiller, registering a worth of $2,750 for the census, equivalent to $64,000 today.  With his profits, John about 1869 bought a piece of land in a rural hamlet known as Scott’s Level, not far from Baltimore and adjacent to a community called Pikesville.  There a distillery was built.

As he aged, Father John brought three of his sons into the distilling business, Louis, Thomas J.., and Michael.  With his passing, Louis became the chief operating officer and the company name L. Winand & Brothers.  In 1897 the Maryland state tax commissioner reported that the taxable value of distilled spirits for the year was $25,208.   By 1904, production under the direction of  Louis increased more than threefold as Maryland recorded a taxable value of $87,684.

Then Louis inexplicably disappeared from the scene.  His younger brother Thomas was ready to step into the role of what now was known as The Winand Distilling Company.  He continued the trend of ever increasing distillery output.  By 1907, Maryland was charting the value of Pikesville Rye production at $130,8996.  Michael was employed as company treasurer.

By the time Thomas took over the business, the distillery, shown here, had grown significantly from its origins.  So had his family.  In keeping with the large clan his parents had created,  Thomas in June,1892, at age 32 had married Gertrude Nevins, a Maryland native ten years his junior.  The couple over the next 17 years would have a family of nine children, three sons and six daughters.

Throughout the early 1900s Pikesville Rye continued to enhance its reputation,finding a particularly strong customer base in Baltimore.  With the coming of National Prohibition, Thomas and the other Winands involved with the distillery, after more than a half century of  success for Pikesville Rye, were forced to shut down their distillery.  Thomas retired, living long enough to see Repeal.  He died in July 1951 and is buried with other Winands in a plot marked by a cross in Baltimore’s Druid Ridge Cemetery.  The family is remembered in Pikesville’s environs by a street name, a school and Winands Tae Kwon Do Studio.

Here begins the second half of the Pikesville Rye story.  Shut down by  Prohibition,  Pikesville Rye disappeared from 1920 until 1936 when a Baltimore businessman named Andrew W. Merle bought the recipe and rights.  Merle did not own a distillery but contracted production out to a facility to create Pikesville Rye for him and bottle it in Maryland.  Merle chose, and perhaps helped create, Standard Distillers Products, a subsidiary of The Corporation Trust Corporation.  The two companies shared offices at 300 East Lombard Street in Baltimore and owned the Monumental Distillery in Lansdowne, Maryland. It had sufficient capacity to distill and bottle Pikesville Maryland Rye.

 As a result, Merle was able to get his product to a growing customer demand for Pikesville Rye.  Said to have been damaged by an explosion in the late 1930s, the Monumental Distillery was replaced by the Majestic Distilling Corporation of Baltimore.  Shown here, that facility continued to produce Pikesville Rye until 1972 when it too went out of business.  Before closing it had produced sufficient stocks of the whiskey to satisfy customer demand — chiefly from Baltimore — until 1982.

Subsequently the brand name and recipe were sold to Heaven Hill Distillery in Bardstown, Kentucky, a move that must have raised eyebrows if not howls of outrage.  An iconic Maryland rye was now being produced in Kentucky.  Shame and scandal!  Marylanders soon got accustomed to the idea.  Pikesville Rye had joined a long list of distinguished brands that Heaven Hill managed to keep alive long after other popular pre-Prohibition whiskeys had faded from the memories of all but old timers.  Sold as Pikesville Supreme, “The Aristocrat of Fine Whiskies,” and apparently made from the original recipe, this 80 proof rye continued to beguile Marylanders. Though the market was shrinking for rye whiskey, Pikes­ville Supreme had a solid, if modest, customer base. "We were making rye, we had rye to sell, and we had a distributor who wanted that rye in Maryland. So, we continued to service that business,"  explained a Heaven Hill executive.

As time passed and tastes changed, the drinking public in Maryland, and particularly Baltimore remained passionately devoted to the original recipe Pikesville Rye, many unaware that its distribution was largely limited to the Baltimore area.  The ax fell in the summer of 2016 when word came that Heaven Hill was phasing out production of the “solid, unassuming spicy yet smooth” iconic 80 proof rye in favor of a 100 proof Pikesville Rye.  Cries of disbelief in Baltimore and the hoarding began.

And so it goes.  The name Pikesville continues to be seen on rye whiskeys available throughout the country but the original recipe, the one created by the Winands more than a 125 years ago and sacred to many Marylanders, is no longer sold.  Given the “nine lives” of the brand, will another chapter be written before long?

Notes:  This post draws on a number of sources for text and illustrations.  Chief among them is an article by Andrew Zaleski that appeared in the Washington Post Magazine on January 25, 2018.  John Lipman is the photographer responsible for several of the images here.

 

Emil Wanatke and the Shootout at Little Bohemia

Forced to shut his Chicago saloon by National Prohibition, Emil Wanatke, shown here, relocated with his family in 1929 to the tiny town of Manitowish Waters, Vilas County, in Northwoods Wisconsin. There he built a lodge he called “Little Bohemia.”  Five years later Little Bohemia would become nationally famous, some would say infamous, as the site of a gun battle between gangsters headed by the notorious John Dillinger and an inept FBI squad out to capture them. 

Wanatke’s Chicago attorney also was Dillinger’s lawyer and it was he who is believed to have arranged for Dillinger and his associates to spend a few days in a relaxed hideout at Little Bohemia, known for its good food and drink.  Prohibition had just ended.  Wanatke had opened a bar and hired bartenders.  We can presume that the gang also brought along their own bootleg booze.

It was the middle of the Great Depression, business had been slow, and Wanatke was struggling to pay his mortgage.  Dillinger, pledging that his men would cause no trouble, paid him $500 for the gang’s three day weekend stay, the equivalent today of almost $6,000.   Although this money was welcome in hard times.  Warantke also appears to have had other things in mind.  The gangsters, who included the ruthless killer “Pretty Boy” Floyd, were themselves worth a great deal of money.  The reward for Dillinger alone was $10,000 (equiv. $178,000 today).  Moreover, Wanatke knew he could be charged with harboring criminals.  “Dropping the dime” on them, i.e. alerting authorities, would help absolve him of blame. 

Moreover, as time wore on and the guests grew more and more aggressive,  Wanatke’s wife, Nan, became apprehensive about family safety.  Wanatke wrote a letter to the police in Milwaukee about the situation but did not know how to get it out of the lodge and mailed.  He knew the letter would not be delivered before Monday, when the gang was leaving, but he wanted officials to know details of the weekend in case something violent happened.

Nan, shown here with the family dogs, provided an answer.  She asked for and got permission from Dillinger to attend a birthday party for a family member at the home of her brother, George La Porte, who lived a few miles away.  While driving there with their son she became aware of being followed.  It was the ever suspicious “Baby Face” who eventually turned back.  When Nan told her family of the situation, a plan was hatched to contact the FBI in Chicago.

 

Leaving her son behind in safety, she returned home and told Wanatke of the scheme.  He agreed and when La Porte arrived the next day was able to slip him a note in a cigarette pack with the names of the gang and the license plate numbers of their cars.  La Porte left without attracting notice and notified the FBI.  After confirming with Washington headquarters the legitimacy of the lead, on April 23, 1934, the FBI flew in agents from Chicago and St. Paul to the nearby Rhinelander Airport.

Purvis

The agents, led by Special Agent Melvin Purvis, had little time to plan the raid and little experience at executing one.  They had only a single automobile for the agents.  As they approached the lodge a car exiting containing three people mistakenly was identified and shot up.  Not only was an innocent passenger killed, the noise alerted the gang lounging in the Little Bohemia’s bar, shown below.  Immediately Dillinger and two henchmen gathered up their money and guns.  After a brief firefight with agents, the three on foot ran to a neighboring resort, commandeered an automobile, and escaped.

Nelson

‘Baby Face’ Nelson was also able to avoid capture, albeit with a bloodier trail. He killed one FBI agent, critically injured another, and stole the FBI vehicle for his getaway.  The entire gang had eluded capture in the botched raid. An FBI agent and an innocent bystander had been killed, two other FBI men had been serious wounded.    Although a Hollywood movie starring Ward Bond as Purvis later attempted to put a positive spin on the shootout, at the time it was seen as a black eye for the FBI and its director J. Edgar Hoover.  

A new book by Beverly Gage on Hoover called “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century” relates: “Hoover recognized the bloodbath at Little Bohemia as a crisis of major proportions….At best, Little Bohemia might be seen as a nightmarish series of mistakes.  At worst it could be interpreted as an indictment of Hoover’s entire system….”  Demands were raised in Congress and the press for dissolution of the FBI.  Popular Humorist Will Rogers commented:   “Well they had John Dillinger surrounded and was all ready to shoot him when he come out.  But another bunch of folks came out ahead, so they just shot them instead.”

But Hoover’s headaches meant nothing to Wanatke.  In the depths of the Great Depression, he had hit a bonanza.  The shootout at Little Bohemia had made headlines all across the Nation.  With gangster-mania at its peak, thousands of Americans were keen on seeing the the place where it all played out.  Wanatke’s business boomed.

 

In response, the lodge owner kept the bullet-ridden wall panels in place and created a mini museum of the event in Little Bohemia.  He displayed news clippings and items left behind by gang members as they fled the scene.  Wanatke also produced for tourists a bulletproof vest and .38 caliber handgun he claimed had belonged to the slain FBI agent, Carter Baum.  Grilled by the FBI, he confessed that he had made up the story.   Wanatke also sold an autographed photo showing him standing with his arm around Dillinger.  He later admitted that the picture, reproduced below, was a fake and that he had superimposed Dillinger’s photo on his own. 

Eventually law enforcement agents caught up with the gang members.  Some like Dillinger and Nelson died in a hail of bullets.  Others were captured and sent to prison.  Melvin Purvis later died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, some said an accident, others suicide.  J. Edgar Hoover went on to become a feared power figure for decades in Washington, D.C. 

Meanwhile Little Bohemia has continued in business down to the present day, until recently operated by Wanatke’s son, who would relate to visitors his experience as a boy playing catch with two of the most dangerous men in America, John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson.  

Note:  This post is the result of my 60-year fascination with the events of 1934 at Little Bohemia. It began in 1959 when I was a reporter on the Vilas County News Review and several times drove past the lodge — but regretfully never went in.  In lieu of a personal encounter, I have found multiple accounts of the shootout online that are distilled in the account here.