Home  Other Articles History Excerpt from a Pullman Porter During Alcohol Prohibition
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Excerpt from a Pullman Porter During Alcohol Prohibition |
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"I ran across one of my old cookbooks in there among my things, that I rewrote. That was during the Prohibition time, when the country was dry."
"You couldn't get wine and alcohol to go in dishes that required it, and we had to make up a new cookbook and eliminate that wine and stuff. You had some wine with salt in it for cooking, but you could only use that on meat and so forth like that. You couldn't use nothin' sweet and no drinks.So it was a tough time." "Yeah, that Prohibition went a long, long time. I made some good money during that Prohibition time. Shoot, I used to bootleg that...we get that darned alcohol in Chicago. You get a jug for about two or three dollars and put it in some half-pint bottles or pint bottles. Then every time you had a trainload of soldiers, you could sell it to 'em, see. Yeah, we hauled all those soldiers out from Lake Michigan out to the coast, and every trip or so we had a carload of sailors. And if you had any liquor, they sure would buy it. I sell those pints for a dollar, half a pint for 50 cents. I made good money off of that stuff. But you couldn't carry too much, 'cause you wouldn't want the commissary man see you packin' a whole lotta stuff down there. But what's in your grip you could take. Well, I'd always take a gallon. That was plenty of money in those days." George McLain, the Southern Pacific Cook and Instructing Chef, 1920-1962 from "Those Pullman Blues: An Oral History of the African American Railroad Attendant" by David D. Perata
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