Word: smokes
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Once famed for its nightly swarm of bums staggering from one swinging door to another, Manhattan's Bowery has been a comparatively sober thoroughfare since Prohibition. The bums have been lounging in speakeasies, drugstores, paintshops where "smoke" (colored, usually poisonous, alcohol) could be purchased for 15? the glass, 50? the pint. Last week the Bowery bums were on the street again, pitifully wandering, finding neither swinging doors nor "holes in the wall...
Many a Bowery "smoke joint" was closed last week by the local Prohibition Administrator, Major Maurice Campbell; many another closed through fear. Thirty purveyors of cheap alcohol were held under $2,500 bail for arraignment before a Federal grand jury. In almost every case, the alcohol in evidence was of the type used to keep automobile radiators from freezing. Despite the reassuring names of some "smoke" salesmen (Mike Whiskey, Frank Barri), almost all 30 were dealing in liquid death...
Records show that "smoke" fatalities in the Bowery district average one man per day since May 10. This led Major Campbell to take his men downtown. During the raids, Bartender Sam Liebreman, finding a corpse in his speakeasy, looked its burned lips over, telephoned police to come carry it away. He showed officers his own 17-gal. stock of 15? liquor, protested : "It's all okay, what I been selling. He got it somewhere else. Have a drink...
Rufus Cutler Dawes, brother of U. S. Ambassador Charles Gates Dawes, was awakened by smoke from a small fire in his Evanston, Ill. home. With the help of servants he carried out the family silver, extinguished the blaze...
...paper. When you're fifty-five and you've been there twenty years, they give you a week's pay. Bye-bye, little boy, another guy hobbling on a cane in the State institution. Or work for the Sun, that gentle old Y. M. C. A. Smoke a cigaret in the city room and you'll be sleeping on a park bench the same night. Or work for the Post, with the Great White Father of the Curtis publications spying on you from Philadelphia. Oh yes, Mr. Lorimer. Oh no, Mr. Lorimer. Or work...