Home-Brew Joints, and Wandering Charles

The Gazette is again dropping hints about Prohibition scofflaws,* without naming any names. And an update on Wandering Charles Dewell as he wanders to a new home.


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From the Hobart Gazette of Oct. 8, 1920.

On a 1960 map of Hobart, I find a McClaran's Addition south of Eighth between Lake and State Streets:


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Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

The 1930 directory shows Charles Dewell at 815 Lake Street — within McClaran's Addition — so perhaps that's what the Gazette meant.

I don't have a clue where the "Findling flat on Lake street, formerly the Nitchman house," was. As far as the Gazette is concerned, it sounds as if poor Billy Krull has been handing out house numbers in vain.

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*Reader, did you know that the word "scofflaw" was coined in 1924 precisely to describe people who flouted the Prohibition laws?

A Clean Shirt Forever

It was just ten days into the new year, into the new decade, and our old friend Willard Halsted, the former Ainsworth storekeeper, no longer needed a clean shirt every Sunday.

His death at 62 years of age came as a shock to all who knew him. He had been so active — only the previous summer we saw him doing the carpentry work on a new home for the Dwight Mackey family, and no doubt he had other work not reported on. (I am not sure if he was one of the "Halsted brothers" working on the Chandler barn in November 1919.)

Only recently he had suffered some unspecified ailment (the newspapers being uncharacteristically reticent about its nature) serious enough to warrant surgery at Mercy Hospital in Gary. His operation took place on January 7, 1920; the next day's News reported that he was "doing nicely." Bad news was not expected, but it soon came.


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(His daughter, Hazel, had married Byron Findling in June 1917, and his namesake grandson was now just over a year old. Per the News, his surviving siblings were brothers Albert, Wallace and J.M. (James?) of Hobart, and sister Ruby Rhodes of Gary.)

W.O. lies in Crown Hill Cemetery, near the son who had gone before.



Also nearby, the family monument:




Sources:
♦ 1920 Census.
♦ Indiana Marriage Collection.
♦ "Local and Personal." Hobart News 8 Jan. 1920.
♦ "Prominent Hobart Citizen Dies Suddenly." Hobart Gazette 16 Jan. 1920.
♦ "W.O. Halsted, Hobart Contractor, Passes Away." Hobart News 15 Jan. 1920.