The Whiskey Aint Workin'

They knew my name at every bar in town
And they knew all of the reasons why I was coming round
'Cause in my mind, peace I'd find, when they'd start to pour
But now the whiskey ain't workin' anymore
- Travis Tritt

On January 1, 1919, John Jacob Geisen was one of nine men, along with the chief of police, arrested for breaking into a warehouse in Covington, Kentucky and stealing 14 kegs of whiskey. They took the kegs to Cincinnati, which only added to their crime because it crossed state lines. And it was also after the Wartime Prohibition Act had been passed, and was just on the cusp of the Eighteenth Amendment being ratified.

The men were tried together, and J. Jacob Geisen was sentenced to two years in Federal prison. Newspaper accounts of the incident state that Jacob Geisen had connections in Washington D.C. who got his sentence commuted to 3 months in the county jail. It never said who those "connections" were, but I strongly suspect it was his future son-on-law Roy Boe, my grandfather.

Daddy Jake, as my great-grandfather was known, was a saloon keeper in Kentucky. When Prohibition went into effect, he was effectively out of a job. My grandfather, on the other hand, lived in Washington D.C. and worked for several years as a Page in the U.S. Senate. That's where he met my grandmother who had gone to D.C. when she got a job with the War Department. They married in 1920, just after Daddy Jake got out of the county jail from his 3 month jail sentence.

My grandfather took a job in Minneapolis at the Federal Prohibition Director's Office and in 1921 became the Chief Federal Prohibition Director in Minneapolis. As I read more about Prohibition, I have come to learn about the Volstead Act. Andrew Volstead was the law-maker from Minnesota charged with figuring out how to enforce Prohibition. Growing up in MN, Volstead was a common name you hear throughout the State's history. Now I know why.

Years ago, I was reading a book about the gangsters and bootleggers in the Twin Cities and as I read it, I came across names I recalled my mother mentioning as friends of her father's. I asked her about it. I asked her if she thought her father might have been "on the take" during Prohibition. She was adamant that he was not, claiming that he was a "very honorable man." I showed her the book. She grew more and more flustered as she read the parts I had marked. If he was such an honorable man, why were some of these bootleggers such close friends of his? My mother didn't know.

These are the reasons I do genealogy. There are incredible stories behind the names and the dates and the places. Not everyone has an ancestor who went to jail (or wants to talk about it if they did). I love history, and I have a hunger to know my own history. I want to know the events that shaped the people who eventually shaped who I am. I want to understand how the history I have read so much about impacted every day people in the course of their lives. Prohibition was more than just the 18th Amendment. It put people like my great-grandfather out of a job, in jail, and forced him to move halfway across the country once he got out, starting his life over again. These are the real stories in history.