Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:03 Welcome to brain junk. I'm trace Kerr and I'm Amy Barton and this is a brainstorm. I would like to talk about prohibition and those crafty bootleggers today. Ooh, 1920s let's go back. Okay. And so we're all very familiar with the whole, the global idea of the rum runners and the bootleggers. And it's a really interesting time in history. And one fact I'd never come across, my husband, Chris pointed out to me, there is a 1922 article in a Florida newspaper called the evening independent that ran a story on the bootleggers attempts to evade the law. The bootleggers figured out a way to hide their tracks, literally by putting, it looks sort of like an ice skate, the old fashioned ice skates, but they would put two who's on the ice skate and they would strap into the bottom of the shoe. So as the bootlegger walked along, he made cow tracks, so one at the front, just where your toes would be and one on the heel.
Speaker 0 01:03 And so then there were no footprints at the place that they stopped at. So you could stop the car, you could get out, you could unload, sneak off into the forest because the moving from place to place wasn't hard, but hiding your track really hard. Sneaky. And that really only lasted a short time, it sounds like, because once law enforcement caught onto that, they're like, there's a suspicious number of moves here at the side of the road. All of these cows are going in exactly the same direction and they seem to be unloading something back and forth, back and forth. So the officers believed that that invention came from a Sherlock Holmes story where the villain shod his horse with shoes. So the imprint would resemble a cow suit. So they thinking somebody was reading for lock Holmes and it was like, this is a terrific idea.
Speaker 0 01:52 It's not only was, it's not a bad idea. Somebody got sloppy though and left their shoes. Oh no. Yup. Um, other fun things in my wanderings and looking at this, the, in efforts to hide alcohol from law enforcement, people would make book shaped flasks from earthenware. So you might have a book on your shelf. That's not a book. It's an earthenware flask or just the old carved out book with a flask inside it ladies word flasks in their gardeners and they were hollow Keynes. It's so funny. It's like how did this log it passed and then everybody was just not following the law. Right. But the law enforcement had to enforce still. That's so weird. What a funny time. Yeah, so it became almost a competitive sport, it seems like. Oh yeah. Well, I've got alcohol and every single one of my pens. Exactly. You think this is gasoline. You're not totally wrong. That's my brainstorm. Wow. Anytime you need another dose of fact tacularness
Speaker 1 03:00 ask your smart speaker to play brain junk podcast. You can also find us on Twitter as at my brain junk, and we're on Facebook and Instagram as brain junk podcast. Amy and I will catch you next time when we share more of everything you never knew you wanted to know, and I guarantee you will not be bored. Somebody better make me a cocktail.
