Liquor violators fared ill in local courts Tuesday._________________________
* * * John Chester, owner and operator of a lunch stand on Lincoln Highway,† near Deep River, was arrested Monday by Deputy Sheriff Thomas Platt, of Crown Point, on a warrant charging him with violating the state liquor law. The warrant on which Chester was arrested was signed by a neighbor. He was released on $1,000 bond.
†This is probably part of what later became known as Chester's Camp.
Source:
♦ "Kouts Booze Sellers Get Stiff Fines." Vidette-Messenger (Valparaiso, Ind.) 27 Sept. 1927. Access Newspaper Archive. Lake County Public Library. 3 Nov. 2009.
Can't a man do a little bootlegging in peace?
I find John Chester's character intriguing. Indeed, all of these people I've been researching intrigue me, probably more so because I can get only stray, disjointed bits of information about them, just the right foundation for building rampant speculation.
And I must say, conjecture is fun.
The excerpt above shows us that John Chester wasn't above violating the law — but then again, he had plenty of company during Prohibition. I could find only this one article on the topic, so probably he was just a casual law-breaker.
From the information in my earlier post about his bereavements and his suicide, we can leap to a couple conclusions:
♦ Since he was an entrepreneur, first operating Chester's Camp on the Lincoln Highway, then moving on to open another tourist camp on U.S. 12, he must have had some degree of business acumen and initiative, and to operate a business involving so much customer interaction he probably had a gregarious personality (unless he was a Basil Fawlty type).
♦ He seems to have had a deeply emotional side. The gravestone that he chose for his first wife in 1935 emphasizes their relationship and gives the exact dates of her birth and death, which I (untrained in psychology) interpret as a sign of emotional attachment. He was only 47 when he was widowed, and had at least one child still at home; in such cases remarriage might be a matter of convenience as much as anything else, but he formed such a deep attachment to his second wife that upon her death he was distraught and spoke to friends of wanting to kill himself — and finally did so, though it meant abandoning his youngest child, a schoolgirl of 13. We could possibly construe his suicide as the result of some mental illness such as depression, but that's really wild speculation, entirely without evidence.
And thus ends my conjecture for today.
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