Eyewitness: 1933 Pittsburgh Prohibition ends with a betrayal
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When Prohibition expired, Post-Gazette reporter James R. George decided it would be too obvious to write about the first person in Pittsburgh to have a drink of legal liquor.
Instead, he sought out the last man to drink "moon," and he turned it into a page 1 story.
"The Noble Experiment," during which almost everyone was barred from making, transporting or consuming alcohol, lasted from 1919 to 1933. Franklin Roosevelt, a "wet," had promised to seek repeal of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, which outlawed liquor, when he ran for president in 1932. After his election, Congress approved the 21st Amendment, which once again allowed liquor sales and consumption.
Pennsylvania, Ohio and Utah all ratified the amendment on the same day -- Dec. 5, 1933 -- and provided the necessary two-thirds state approval for it to take effect.
"Kramer's restaurant and the Pittsburgh Athletic Association were probably the first places in town serving liquor," an anonymous reporter for the Post-Gazette wrote the next day. "[D]rinks were being served [at Kramer's] to all and sundry two minutes after the wires ticked the [repeal] message from Utah."
"H.E. Wilson, one of the Kramer customers, was the first man in Pittsburgh to have a drink of liquor under legal auspices so far as it could be determined," the paper reported. "A telephone line was held open from the Post-Gazette office to Kramer's so that Wilson could establish that record."
When the "flash" report came at 5:31, Mr. Wilson "downed a Martini cocktail while his fellow-diners cheered."
Drinkers at the Pittsburgh Athletic Association were not going to be left behind. The head bartender at that private club swore, "with uplifted hand," that 20 customers had downed their drinks at exactly the same moment.
While Pittsburgh's posher hotels and restaurants geared up to sell legal drinks, "speakeasies and bootleggers were giving evidence that they will die hard, if they die at all," the Post-Gazette found on Dec. 5. Their chief weapon "would be lower prices than those to be asked for legal liquor."
"[P]hone-me-on-the-run bootleggers were ready to deliver 'goods' at a moment's notice to celebrators who found legal liquor beyond their pocketbook," according to the newspaper. "One 'bootician' said there was 2,000,000 gallons of alcohol within easy reach of Pittsburgh, ready to be turned into anything ..."
First Published January 10, 2010 12:00 am
