Foreword: In researching the lives and careers of pre-Prohibition distillers, liquor dealers and saloonkeepers, court records often are an excellent source of information. They provide insights into the activities and sometimes the character of whiskey men. Featured here are vignettes of three such proprietors who spent copious amounts of time and effort involved in the justice system, often for different reasons.
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| Billy Sunday |
To suggest that Kinsey “Stormy” Jordan of Ottumwa, Iowa, was a complicated character is an understatement. The famous Prohibitionist preacher, Billy Sunday, hailed him “as the only liquor owner who told the truth about booze,” after Stormy had called whiskey “The Road to Hell.” On the other hand, Jordan was described by another anti-alcohol zealot as “a man, known the State and nation over for his shameless, law-defying wickedness….”
In the late 1879’s Jordan opened a saloon in Ottumwa, one he called “The Corn Exchange.” The local newspaper called it “the finest in the city.” He prospered until 1881 when legislators added an amendment to the state constitution essentially voting the state “dry.” With the law due to go into effect on July 4, 1881, Stormy was faced with the prospect of having to shut down The Corn Exchange. Taking the advice of a sympathetic Chicago federal judge, however, the saloonkeeper decided to sue the state.
Accordingly Jordan brought suit in U.S. District Court and continued to run his saloon. He was arrested, convicted in a local court, fined — which he refused to pay — and tossed into the Ottumwa jail, shown here behind the courthouse. His attorneys took Stormy’s incarceration to Federal Judge Love. Love was not a “Dry” sympathizer and, despite the pleas of state officers, ordered Stormy released and ruled that his saloon could continue to operate until the federal case was settled.
Undetered, local officials jailed Stormy a second time and again the matter was referred to Judge Love. This time he scolded, not Jordan, but the local prosecutor. Any subsequent arrest of Stormy, the judge asserted, would taken as meddling in a case pending before his court and would result in the offending local official being fined or even jailed. With this ruling, Stormy kept his drinking establishment wide open day and night. His defiance made headlines across America. As result, Jordan was able to conduct what was said to be the only operating saloon in Iowa. Only many months later when the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled against him did Stormy shut down The Corn Exchange. Then, in a startling about-face, Jordan became an advocate for National Prohibition.
Harry W. Metcalf, a Florida liquor merchant, frequently had a case, but not of whiskey, for the courts of justice. The Florida State Supreme Court building in Tallahassee, shown here, must have seemed like a second home to him. Metcalf won, he lost, but the results never seemed to affect his growing prosperity.
Orlando was the scene of Metcalf’s first court fight. In 1907 an election was held to determine if the sale of intoxicating liquors, wines and beers should be prohibited in Orange County. The Commissioners certified that in the the election 592 votes had been cast against liquor sales and only 589 for them. His saloon in jeopardy, Metcalf took the Commissioners to court, charging that the election was rigged and the results should be voided. In a 3-2 split decision, the Florida Supreme Court agreed with him and nulled the vote. His saloon stayed open.
The year 1915 found Metcalf back in the Florida Supreme Court. In 1913 he had taken a five year lease on space in the Terminal Hotel, located on Bay and Johnson. There he ran a saloon and package liquor store. The Florida Legislature, in another move toward Prohibition, passed what became known as the Davis Package Act. It decreed that a business selling liquor by the bottle on the same premises could not sell liquor by the drink. With other affected whiskey men, Metcalf fought the law right up to the State Supreme Court. This time he lost; the law was declared valid. 
Although forced to shut down his liquor business in 1919, ending sales of his flagship whiskey,"Briar Cave," Metcalf, by now a rich man, began to invest in fruit orchards. Despite his prosperity, however, Harry could not stay away from the Florida Supreme Court. In 1935, he sued a fruit wholesaler for failing to abide by a contract to take produce from his citrus grove. After losing in the local court, he once more repaired to Tallahassee where the Florida Supreme Court justices rewarded him by once more finding in his favor.
Metcalf’s “last hurrah” in the courts was in 1939. He was 77 years old. He sued to void a deal in which he had sold some road bonds then in default, to speculators in return for warehouse receipts representing 400 barrels of whiskey. When the bonds suddenly became valuable and were sold at a huge profit, Harry claimed he had been cheated. This time the Florida’s highest court upheld a lower court ruling that dismissed his complaint. That marked the last time Metcalf shows up in official records.
A lightning rod for trouble, Isaac Ettinger ran a liquor business and saloon in Cleveland for about twenty years. In the process, through his own stubbornness or just bad luck, Isaac seems frequently to have ended up in court. A photo, showing Ettinger in a tender scene with his granddaughter, Doris, seems to belie the fiery and litigious nature of this whiskey man.
Ettinger made headlines in the Cleveland Plain Dealer in a early morning of February 1893 when he, his wife 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. After a verbal battle with Ettinger over buying tickets the conductor threw the four off the trolley and called the police. Isaac was arrested. Taken to the police station at 3 a.m., he made bail and the group was not detained but forced to tramp home through the snow. After a judge dismissed the charges against him, Ettinger filed a damage suit against the streetcar company for $2,000 ($44,000 equivalent today.) The case hopped in and out of Ohio courts for two years — results unknown.
The saloonkeeper frequently was 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. Then Clevelander Mathias Nickels claimed that as he was passing by Ettinger’s saloon a heavy sign had fallen, breaking an large arc light and a piece of glass had flown into his eye. He sued Isaac for $10,000 (equiv. $220,000) 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. It is unclear how either lawsuit turned out.
Note: More complete biographies of each of these whiskey men have appeared earlier on this website: Stormy Jordan, March 30, 2017; Harry Metcalf, May 12, 2012; and Isaac Ettinger, August 9, 1018.
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