In the innocence of her youth, Iolan Margaret Robb unwittingly broke the law by carrying bootleg whiskey to clients of her stepfather. She unabashedly detailed the experience to an overflow crowd at Saturday evening’s Allen County Historical Society spring meeting.
Nich Lohman skipped to the other side of the fence and told about how to make home-brewed beer, a perfectly legal enterprise in Kansas.
“This (crowd) is much bigger than we expected,” said Larry Manes, an ACHS director, as available seating in the society’s downtown museum quickly filled. “I guess offering free alcohol brings out a crowd.” Lohman brought along a dispenser that featured three different beers he had made.
Robb owned the night for drama and poignancy.
Before she was old enough to understand what was occurring her mother, Marjorie, divorced her birth father, Phil Butler. She wouldn’t speak to him until she was in her 30s. At age 3, in 1942, her mother married Lewis — better known as Snipe — Thornton.
“I always considered him my father,” Robb said, “and tonight when I refer to my father, it will be him. He was always good to me and watched out for me,” although she can’t remember when he ever called by her given name. “It was always Shorty, which I was. I’m not sure he knew what my real name was.”
Bootlegging during the war and afterward was Thornton’s avocation. A stealth means of delivery of whiskey sold had young Margaret tuck a bottle into the bib of the over-sized overalls she often wore for the occasion. “If I was wearing a dress, I’d carry it in a little bag,” she added.
After moving from Iola to a wood-frame house along Deer Creek, where then U.S. 169 crossed the stream, Robb’s delivery duties waned. Instead customers knew special places nearby, including under the nearby bridge, where Thornton would leave a bottle of booze in a shallow hole.
“I don’t know where the whiskey came from,” Robb said. “It was always late at night after I was asleep,” although later she recalled taking road trips into Missouri to pick up fresh supplies.
Thornton’s reputation as a bootlegger affected Robb’s childhood.
“I didn’t have any friends come to play, because their parents knew about the bootlegging,” she said. A big, mean dog filled some of the void. After Thornton brought home the dog, it and Robb quickly became close; the dog even would challenge her parents if it sensed she was in line for punishment.
Then tragedy struck. The wood house burned, with the dog — “I called him Fido,” Robb laughed — inside. “We found him in the bathtub.
“I know who burned the house, it was arson,” she said. “But I don’t want to say who. It was someone who had a grudge against my dad.”
The family stayed put on the rural place, in a house this time Thornton built of stone — and having features to help with his bootlegging.
“There were hiding places all over the house,” she said. The back side of a shallow cedar closet dropped down when a peg was removed, opening a space just large for Robb to squeeze in and stack the merchandise. The cupola over the front steps also was a hiding place.
“It took four families of owners before all the hiding places were found,” Robb mused.
