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ADVENTURE SPORTS OUTDOORS “The Voice of the American Sportsman”
THE DESIGNATED GANGSTERS By Norman V. Kelly
I wrote about a lot of villains, good guys, killers, crooks, thieves, and scalawags, mixed in with some admirable, civic minded men and women that shaped and molded our city and its people. I centered eventually on the seedy side of Peoria, the corruption, the crime, the murder and of course the gambling and vice. Local folks were always fascinated with our gangster element, so I wrote and lectured about them as well. I set out to identify and write about these gangsters, but I never really found any. Oh, we had our share of hoodlums, robbers, thugs, killers, gangster wannabes and a pretty long list of police characters. However, if you wanted to see a real live gangster you would have had to head for Al Capone territory, and a few other much larger cities than Peoria, Illinois. During Prohibition we had a lot of
ordinary citizens get into the ‘bootlegging’ business and illegal selling of alcohol, but believe me it was all penny-ante activity when compared to what was going on in the larger cities in America; especially allaround Chicago. Our booze market was small and of course all of our taverns and saloons, along with the distilleries and breweries were shut down. Mayor Woodruff allowed things to flourish during Prohibition with something called Soft Drink Parlors, but it was mild around here to say the least. I often confronted some of our gangster fans who came to my lectures by asking them what they really knew about our local bad guys. I often asked them who it was that they were talking about by asking them not only to give me some names, but what they really knew about them. It turns out that not once did I really learn anything from
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them except that they were just passing on the myths and stories they had been told by their uncles and grandfathers. Most of these myths began after our pet gangster, Bernie Shelton, came to Peoria to live in the later part of the 1930s. I thought that I would give you the briefest version of some of our local so-called gangsters, a small group of men that I began to refer to as ‘Peoria’s Designated Gangsters.’ 1920…1930…1940 It was January 16, 1920 when The Eighteenth Amendment, better known as Prohibition actually began. It was going to be doomsday for the folks in Peoria so they tried to prepare for the black days to come. It was 1920 and our local population was 76,100 people within the confines of our 9.18 square miles we called our city limits. In 1917 all the distilleries and breweries were shut down by something called the Lever Act and the local jobs began to disappear. WW1 began in April of 1917 and
January 2018
some of our jobs came back to us by way of manufacturing war products, added to the fact that 5,500 of our local men went off to “Fight the Hun.” The taverns stayed open until January 16, 1920, so by then folks in town were well prepared for the onslaught of Prohibition. Hoarding was the number one defense in the beginning, and the booze that came into the city by way of Canada was really all we needed. Mayor Woodruff allowed the taverns to open up and call themselves Soft Drink Parlors, and believe me, Peoria had a pretty, bawdy, wide-open gambling town and things went along rather smoothly. The Vaudevillians came to Peoria and it was the beginning of the ‘Jazz Age. Our Crime was kept in check, and Peorians had a lot of fun during that period, and believe it or not during that first decade of Prohibition 28,848 people moved into our city limits as well as hundreds out in the County and it looked like Peoria was not going to disappear after all. We took on Prohibition and The Great Depression and survived all that turmoil. By 1930 things got a bit tumultuous and gambling, crime and vice had a pretty solid grip on Peoria. Now I am speaking of the downtown area, of course; that is
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