Capone Stories ---Al Capones Girlfriend

I have given over fifty speeches and done just as many book signing on Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair. At the speeches and signings people bring memorabilia from the fair and their stories of Al Capone. Here are a few....

He had on a brimmed cap and walked up my book table. Yeah, I knew Capone. I was in the Barnes and Noble doing a book signing. I looked at the man. Really? Oh yeah. My mom was his girlfriend. She was a number. Real good looking see.  Anyway she and Capone got into a fight. She was real good looking and so they get in this fight and Capone gets mad and I'm only ten years old but these two goons come to the apartment and take me down to a a speakeasy on Maxwell Street.

So Im pretty scared cause these guys have guns. So they take me into this speakeasy and its real dark and I cant see nothin. My mom had told me she and Al were in a fight. I think he hit her or something. So these guys sit me down at a table and this big fat Italian guy comes in and sits down in front of me. He starts hitting me all over the place, slapping me around. I don't know who the guy is but he starts asking me whats wrong with  my mother. Like I said she was a real number.

So after a while he stops hitting me and the goons take me back to my apartment. The man looked at me and smiled. And that was Al Capone? Yeah. That was Capone. Yeah. He and my mom got back together for a while but then they broke up. The man paused and shrugged. But she was his girlfriend. My mom...she was Al Capones girlfriend.

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair

The Cautionary Tale of Ken Burns Prohibition

You cant' help but finish watching all three nights of Ken Burn's Prohibition because it is so damn interesting in terms of what is going on today. You have this radical element called the Drys in congress who are supported by a radical element in rural Protestant America that basically wants to  take away the right to drink from the immigrants in the cities. Then it spreads out into a moral crusade for God and country and an amendment is passed that doesn't represent the country but goes through nonetheless and the country goes dry for thirteen years.

And because of the Drys America descends into lawlessness. Capone and the boys fire it up and cities like Chicago become like the Wild West. Speakeasys and stills pop up all over the country and people go blind from bad alcohol and are shot by government enforcers of the Volstead Act that is radical all in itself with prison terms for even knowing somebody is selling booze and not turning them in. Personal freedom takes a severe hit and the country is consumed with this war on drinking while steaming toward the Great Depression.

You certainly see the parallels with zealots in government today who say they know what is best for our country now. Like the Drys these fiscal warriors do not bend. Not an inch. The Drys would never accept even a modification to Prohibition that would allow people to drink beer and wine. It was all or none. Sound familiar. We cannot extend our debt ceilings or get just about anything through congress because of an all or none faction. The same moral crusaders invoke God and Country and speak of our children as the victims. The Drys cried out with the same "its for the children."

And of course it ended. The very intransigence of the Drys undid them. Prohibition was repealed in 1933 and the Drys vanished from the political landscape. Everyone was in agreement, Prohibition was a disaster for the country. It left us with organized crime, maimed people, dead people, and a collective hangover to the folly of enforced moralizing by  government decree.

It is our cautionary tale.

Rocket Man ...a Catcher in the Rye for the Forty Somethings