Of golden weddings and pocket-watches

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I celebrated my 57th birthday this week with my family, and I (of course) tried to pump my father for information. At age 80, he told me that he has learned more about Uncle Charley from this blog than he ever did from his poor father.

One of the things he told me while discussing prohibition was a smart-aleck stunt grandpa Fred pulled.

Apparently my great-grandmother, Anna Rebecca Troxel Huls, had a prescription for medicinal whiskey which was news to me! Apparently she and great-grandpa Gene were teetotalers,  but she did leave the bottle out on the sideboard. She didn't drink, but she wasn't going to hide it either. (Dad thinks she might have even been a member of either the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Ohio Anti-Saloon League.)

According to Dad, grandpa Fred strode into the dining room one day when home from Ohio State, grabbed the bottle of "Golden Wedding" off the sideboard, and took a big swig within their view -- hurting his parents deeply.

It was an action he always regretted, especially after their deaths in August 1934. Grandpa Fred used to show me the gold pocket watches both Charley and he received on their 21st birthdays for abstaining from alcohol. (Sadly, he sold them when he thought no one in the family wanted them.)

Grandpa turned 21 on August 10, 1925 -- six months after Charley's death. I wonder when he began drinking?

Dad wasn't positive the brand was Golden Wedding, but it was the brand he remembered and I had never heard of it so I had to look it up.

First of all, I loath whiskey, bourbon, and scotch so any errors are mine.

Golden Wedding was originally an American whiskey brand started about 1856. In 1920, Lewis Rosenstiel purchased a distillery that contained barrels of Golden Wedding and sold it as medicinal whiskey.

Golden Wedding survived prohibition and its repeal and moved in 1948 to Valleyfield, Quebec where it became a Canadian whisky. I am finding conflicting information about whether or not it is still made.

The best thing about Golden Wedding whiskey (in my opinion) is the golden, carnival glass bottle it frequently came in. My paternal grandmother collected carnival glass, but I never saw anything like these bottles lurking about their house!

Ironically, my great-grandparents never got to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary. They both died from injuries they sustained in a car accident in 1934 after 35 years of marriage. 

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Ohio is going dry

Writing these blogs in 2021, I tend to forget the changes that have occurred during the past century. I was briefly puzzled while reading Charley's letters home when he mentioned certain people being either "dry" or "wet."

Oh yes, prohibition.

The Prohibition Era began in Ohio on May 27, 1919 -- nearly six months before the 18th Amendment was passed by Congress to become a national law on Oct. 28, 1919. One of the major reasons that Ohio went dry ahead of the rest of the country was the influence of the state’s temperance movement, including such groups as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Ohio Anti-Saloon League.

The Ohio whiskey war

I have long adored this Feb. 21, 1874 illustration from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper; the ladies of Logan singing hymns in front of barrooms in aid of the temperance movement. Looking at it I can't help but wonder if any of my ancestors are in it. I know my family at that time was supposedly dry.

Prohibition in the United States was a nationwide constitutional ban on the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages from 1920 to 1933. Not all alcohol was banned though; for example, religious use of wine was permitted. Private ownership and consumption of alcohol were not made illegal under federal law, but local laws were stricter in many areas, with some states banning possession altogether.

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The Poisoner's Handbook

I swear, I am in so much trouble if the authorities ever view my computer's browser history -- or my reading list.

I am currently reading the New York Times best-selling non-fiction book by Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Deborah Blum: The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York.

A fascinating Jazz Age tale of chemistry and detection, poison and murder, The Poisoner's Handbook is a page-turning account of a forgotten era. In early twentieth-century New York, poisons offered an easy path to the perfect crime. Science had no place in the Tammany Hall-controlled coroner's office, and corruption ran rampant. However, with the appointment of chief medical examiner Charles Norris in 1918, the poison game changed forever. Together with toxicologist Alexander Gettler, the duo set the justice system on fire with their trailblazing scientific detective work, triumphing over seemingly unbeatable odds to become the pioneers of forensic chemistry and the gatekeepers of justice.

Curiously, Ms. Blum didn't say much about strychnine. I wrote Ms. Blum inquiring about its absence and she kindly responded and gave me permission to quote her:

When I was first planning out The Poisoner's Handbook and made a list of essential poisons, strychnine was high on my list. But as I continued my research, I ran into a logistical problem. While there were, of course, scattered strychnine poisonings there were none that engaged Norris and Gettler in any challenging way, none on the scale of your story, no remarkable mysteries, until 1943 (in which a homicidal dentist emerged). The arc of my story ended in 1936. For a while, I considered using strychnine as the poison focus of the epilogue but once I tried testing that approach out, I realize that it made no sense in terms of the information that I needed to put into that closing section. So...I very reluctantly ended up not including strychnine in the book, which is something I often talked about while on book tour. And later, when I was blogging for Wired, I made a point of doing a post about strychnine to relieve some of my frustrations.

I highly recommend this book. It is well written and not bogged down with too much scientific jargon to confuse the non-chemist. It is a fascinating look into the birth of forensic science in the United States, especially in the Jazz Age with Prohibition to complicate matters.

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