Ongoing Adventures of Answer Pile
More responses to things from the Ask…thing. In case there aren’t enough words here already, there are more of them after the break.
——————————————
Q. writetimetodraw asked you:
I just finished an internship at the Erie Canal Museum, and while I haven’t dug around much just yet, figured you would be an excellent resource to answer my nagging question. Was the Erie Canal involved in the bootlegging of liquor in the ’20s? And if so, how much? Thank you so much! <3
A. That sounds like an interesting gig!
As for bootlegging by way of canal - absolutely.
The US-Canada border around the Great Lakes was the biggest hot spot for smuggling liquor into the country during Prohibition. The bulk of the trafficking took place across the Detroit River, but pretty much all of the connecting waterways were put to use, and as you might imagine, a good deal of it was shuffled off into New York. That would be where waterways like the Niagara River, the Oswego Canal and Erie Canals became useful. Rum-runners were known to have traveled the canal with contraband hidden among their cargo, or strapped to the bottom of the boats. Towpaths alongside the canal were used to move liquor, defunct offshoots of the canal were put to use, and in the winter, runners were known to drive right on the ice in some areas, or even pull sleds loaded with liquor. The are a number of former speakeasies - roadhouses, mansions and restaurants - along the waterways in upstate New York too.
If you want to know more about the illicit liquor trade in and around Lake Erie, I suggest looking up the Purple Gang, and characters like Rocco Perri and Stefano Magaddino (a bootlegging undertaker, coincidentally).
———————————————————————————————————
Q. changeling007 asked you:
Do you title your comics with actual words, or do you just kind of roll around on the keyboard until you produce something vaguely pronounceable?
A. I alternate rolling around on the keyboard and mashing it with my face. That’s how I write dialogue too. ‘Pronounceable’ doesn’t really figure into the technique.
