Editorial
Front Page - Friday, October 15, 2010
I Swear ...
Hootch heists of boyhood
Vic Fleming
This week’s deadline finds Judge Fleming up against deadlines for the American Bar Association’s Traffic Court Seminar and the 2010 Clinton School Puzzle Festival. Thus, please enjoy a two year-old rerun. – ED.
Bill Bryson’s “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid”(Broadway Books 2006) is not as different from “50 Years as a Judge and Counting” (self-published 2007) by Lawrence E. Dawson, Jr., as the titles might suggest.
Bryson’s book was on the New York Times bestseller list for quite awhile. Judge Dawson’s book did not make that list. Nonetheless, each book being about coming of age, there were bound to be similarities.
From Judge Dawson’s book, referring to his home town of Buena Vista, Ark.:
“... Mr. Ben Lawler, the owner and operator of one of the grocery stores in our town, had made several cartons of home brew. One afternoon, a group of our fellow classmates broke into an empty building that housed Mr. Ben’s home brew and made off with his entire output. Fortunately, the Dawson boys were not involved in that escapade, probably because we knew the consequences that would come to us from … Lawrence E. Dawson, Sr., who was not only a strong disciplinarian but also the local justice of the peace.”
From Bryson’s book:
“Des Moines had four beer distribution companies, all in brick depots in a quiet quarter at the edge of downtown where the railroad tracks ran through. [Noted teenage beer thief Stephen] Katz watched these depots closely for a couple of weeks and realized that they had practically no security and never worked on Saturdays or Sundays.”
The author continues:
“So one Sunday morning
Katz and a kid named Jake Bekins drove downtown, parked beside a boxcar, and knocked off its padlock with a sledgehammer. They slid open the boxcar door and discovered that it was filled with solid cases of beer. Wordlessly they filled Bekins’s car with boxes of beer, shut the boxcar door and drove to the house of a third party, Art Froelich, whose parents were known to be out of town at a funeral.”
In Judge Dawson’s book, the culprits returned the hot hootch and Mr. Ben declined to press charges, lest his avocation become a matter of record. “Back then,” the author writes, “it was legal to make home brew for home consumption, but illegal to make it for sale.” Seems the amount that he had made would not reflect well under either light.
In Bryson’s book, Katz and his friends pushed the envelope till the bubble burst. A certain weekend presented them with no boxcars, so they broke into the warehouse.
“Inside was more beer than they had ever seen – stacks and stacks of it standing on pallets and ready to be delivered to bars and stores all over central Iowa on Monday.
“Working nonstop, and drafting in many willing assistants, they spent the weekend loading cars ... with beer ... Froelich expertly worked a forklift and Katz directed traffic. For a whole miraculous weekend, a couple of dozen high school kids could be seen – if anyone had bothered to look–moving loads of beer out of the warehouse, driving it across town and carrying it in relays into a slightly sagging and decrepit apartment house ...
“It was the biggest heist in Des Moines in years, possibly ever.”
Every teenager within miles knew what was happening and who was responsible. In a dramatic dawn raid, twelve principals were arrested, “good kids from good homes. Their parents were mortified that their offspring could be so willfully unlawful. They called in expensive lawyers, who swiftly cut deals with the prosecutor to drop charges if they named names. Only Katz’s parents wouldn’t come to an arrangement.”
Katz “was charged with grand theft, a felony and sent to reform school for two years. It was the last we saw of him till college.”
Vic Fleming is a district court judge in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he also teaches at the William H. Bowen School of Law. Contact him at vicfleming@att.net.
|
|