Butch: The Life of an Oshkosh Bootlegger

"There were any number of wildcats in Oshkosh,” Cyril said. “But there were two big operations. Butch Youngwirth ran one of them. He was quite a guy."

Cyril worked as a driver during Prohibition transporting bootleg alcohol in and out of Oshkosh. The wildcats he spoke of were breweries that produced beer during the dry years. Cyril knew Butch Youngwirth well. And there's no doubt that Butch was quite a guy.

His full name was Frank Joseph Youngwirth. He was born on August 7, 1892, in Marshfield, Wisconsin. His parents were immigrants from Bohemia who had come to America in the late 1880s. The family moved to Oshkosh when Butch was still a boy. Frank and Albina Youngwirth would have 18 children in all. Butch was their oldest.

The Frank and Albina Youngwirth family, circa 1910. Young Butch stands tall in the center of the back row.

He grew up on the south side in a house on 6th between Idaho and Knapp streets. There was a saloon at one end of the block and a church at the other. His father was a laborer who also sometimes worked as a bartender at Joseph Nigl's saloon at 9th and Ohio. The Youngwirths were part of a growing population called Highholders – a tight-knit community of working-class Bohemian and Bavarian immigrants living south of the Fox River in Oshkosh’s 6th and 13th wards.

Butch Youngwirth's boyhood home at 906 West 6th Avenue.

Butch wasn't much for school. He quit before he had turned 15. He took a job in a lumber yard. He was 20 and still living at home when he married Henrietta “Hattie” Smith in 1913. Hattie was a few months older than Butch and, like him, she was first-generation American.

Butch and Hattie on their wedding day, April 2, 1913.

The newlyweds moved to the other side of town. They rented a small house on a V-shaped lot at the northwest corner of Pearl and Jackson. It wasn't much. Butch got a job working at a machine shop on Oregon. Hattie stayed home and had babies. Their first was named Harold. He was born 10 months after they had married. Almost every year after, there was another baby on the way. Over the next seven years, Hattie gave birth to six more children.

Hattie and Butch, circa 1918, with their four children (left to right) Norman, Dorothy, Clarence, and Harold.

The Youngwirths were scraping by. Butch couldn't seem to settle into anything. He bounced from job to job and the family went from one rented home to the next. They eventually moved back to the 6th Ward and into a rented house on 5th Street. It was practically in the back yard of the house where Butch had grown up. He was working as a roofer when apparently he decided he’d had enough of this kind of living.

In October 1921, Hattie gave birth to George, their fifth son. He would be the last of their seven children. A few months later, Butch took a lease on a soda parlor at the northeast corner of 6th and Ohio. Soda parlors were unheard of in Oshkosh until Prohibition began in 1920. Now there were almost a hundred of them. They had been saloons before the dry law went into effect. Butch's place was one of those that made the switch.

556 West 6th Avenue, the former home of Butch's speakeasy.

There had been a bar there since about 1877 when the property was purchased by John Luck who converted the building into a grocery store/saloon. They had been selling liquor there ever since. The Oshkosh Brewing Company bought the saloon in 1906 and ran it as a tied house until Prohibition hit. In May 1922, the brewery sold the property to a woodworker named John Mauritz who, in turn, leased the building to Butch. Butch got a license to sell soft drinks and went into business for himself.

Butch had no interest in selling soda water. There was no money in that. Like nearly all of Oshkosh's new soda parlors, Butch's place operated as a speakeasy. It wasn’t long before he attracted the attention of the police. On August 7, 1922, Butch Youngwirth celebrated his 30th birthday. A week later, he was arrested on a charge of selling bootleg liquor at his soda parlor. He had picked the wrong time to launch a speakeasy.

Since the start of Prohibition, Oshkosh police had shown little interest in enforcing the dry law. That changed – temporarily at least – after the July 29, 1922 death of Marie Repp. The 19-year-old Repp, had drowned in Sawyer Creek after attending a dancing and drinking party held at a former saloon on what is now Oshkosh Avenue. Her death brought on a public outcry for the police to do something about the tide of bootleg booze flowing through the city. Butch was caught up in the ensuing dragnet.

On the night of August 14, 1922, Butch's speakeasy was raided by Oshkosh Police Chief Arthur Gabbert. Gabbert walked in to find a  young girl with a glass of booze in front of her. Butch was arrested and fined. It was the one and only time he would be arrested on a liquor violation during Prohibition.

The incident did nothing to change his mind about the new path he was on. Butch would go on operating his speakeasy at 6th and Ohio until at least 1926. And as late as 1930, he was still sometimes telling people who didn't know him that he made his living running a soft drink parlor. Everybody who knew him knew better.

This photo, circa 1925, is believed to have been taken inside Butch's speakeasy at 6th and Ohio. Butch stands behind the bar. The lack of signs or advertising for anything relating to alcohol is in stark contrast to the four men with mugs of beer standing at the bar.

It's unknown exactly when Butch transitioned from retailing alcohol to producing it. It's likely, however, that by 1924 he had already begun making his first forays into beer production. Butch was a brewer. Beer was the only drink he made. In Oshkosh, like much of Wisconsin, beer remained the alcoholic beverage of choice throughout the dry years.

The city grew rife with wildcat breweries. They sprung up in nearly every part of town. There were a number of organizations behind these breweries. "There was quite a few, little small ones," said the former bootlegger named Cyril. "Maybe 7 or 8 of them, I'd say, at least."

There were two organizations, though, that operated on a larger scale. Butch built his outfit into one of them. The other had its headquarters at the southwest corner of 9th and Knapp at a tavern that came to be known as the Böhmerwald.

What would become the Böhmerwald Tavern in the early 1900s.

An Oshkosh bootlegger named Slim was among those involved in the Böhmerwald group. “When I started, the agreement was made that we'd make the kegged beer and buy the bottled beer from them (Butch’s group),” Slim said. “Then something happened along the line there. First thing you know, they were making kegged beer and we were making bottled beer.”

These were not simple, homebrewing set-ups. These were commercial, albeit illegal, breweries in the truest sense. Some had bottling lines and pasteurized their beer. Others sold beer by the keg into saloons and private clubs. Some employed salesmen and delivery drivers and had production levels that surpass those of the craft breweries we have today.

One such brewery that Butch kept was located at 1325 Oregon. It operated in tandem with a speakeasy run by Mary Kollross at that same address. Mary's brother Eddie Kollross was part of Butch's outfit. When that brewery was raided by federal agents in 1930, they discovered more than 160 barrels of finished beer on hand and a four-head bottling machine.

The middle building with white siding at 1325 Oregon Street was the location of one of Butch’s breweries.

The risk of a brewery being raided was ever-present. For Butch, that risk was more financial than existential. "He’d pay the guy who owned the land to keep the brewery there, and also to take the rap if they got caught," Cyril said. "If they got sent to the House of Corrections in Milwaukee, Butch would pay him well for the time he spent there. I think about a hundred bucks a week."

Meanwhile, the beer kept on flowing. "He had quite a few places in town where he could be back in business in 24 hours if the feds came in and busted things up," Cyril said. "He only had one going at a time, but the others were always ready." Butch's oldest son Harold said that at one point his father had seven breweries; some in production others in waiting.

Butch wasn't averse to getting his family involved. One of his breweries was in the basement of the home where his sister Mollie lived at 826 West 6th Avenue. Her husband, Hubert "Hub" Molitor, was later arrested when he was caught working at what appears to have been another of Butch's breweries located on a farm on 20th Ave. When that brewery was raided in 1931, more than 350 barrels of fermenting beer were found on the premises. Federal agents described it as "a most elaborate plant... filled with large vats."

 The Oshkosh Daily Northwestern headline from August 26, 1931, after the raid on what was, in all probability, one of  Butch’s breweries.

The tall, thin young man who married Hattie Smith in 1913 had become a person he could scarcely have imagined a decade earlier. In the latter half of the 1920s, Butch's illicit operation flourished and he made no bones about who was boss. "He was an honest man," Cyril said, "but I'll tell you, you towed the mark when you worked for him. He was as honest as you could find, but he was big too, and he was about as wide as he was tall."

Butch was 6'3" and weighed about 250 pounds. His physical presence was central to the persona he adopted. "The guy was so intimidating," said his grandson Wayne Youngwirth. "He had hands that were just massive and he could be such a prick. He always wore this big ring. That thing was the size of a super-bowl ring. He'd sit there and turn it around on his finger when he talked to you."

"You remember old Bruno Siewert?" Cyril said. "He was a great big, heavy butcher. He was about as big as Butch. Well I’ll tell you, I walked into a tavern one time and Bruno Siewert was there drunk and so was Butch; he had a good shine on. And Bruno Siewert picked up a half-barrel full of beer, you know it was one of them wooden kegs and they were heavy. He put it on his shoulder and walked back and forth across the barroom with it. He set it down and said 'I'll give a hundred dollars to anybody here that can do that.' Butch gets up and says, 'Well, you just lost yourself a hundred dollars.'"

It was all part of the show. By the end of the 1920s, he had made himself notorious. "Butch was the most well known because he was always out and about drinking and gambling," Cyril said. "Geez, he was a wild man. Everybody knew him. I remember him and his buddies driving around in their Buicks every Monday to make their collections at the saloons. When they got all the money, they’d go over to this place, sit in a booth and put the money in a big pile in front of them. Then they'd start counting it. But they never bothered to count the singles. Just the big stuff. The singles they put off to the side."

That same scene was played out in the Youngwirth home. Butch's youngest son, George, recalled beer peddlers coming to the house at two or three in the morning to drop off money they had collected. The dining table would be heaped with cash. "I remember Butch made $38,000 one year and $40,000 the next," Cyril said. "That was a lot of money in those days."

It certainly was. And what Butch didn’t gamble away he kept mostly for himself. At the time, modern homes in Oshkosh were selling for less than $5,000. But Butch was keeping Hattie and their seven children in a $25 a month rental (since demolished) at 8th and Knapp. Butch wasn't spending much time there.

In the spring of 1925, Butch who was then 32, impregnated a 20-year-old woman who lived nearby his family’s home. Her name was Caroline Nachtmann and she lived with her parents at 1048 West 7th Avenue. She remained there after the birth of her daughter, Phyllis Ann Nachtmann, on December 17, 1925. Caroline's relationship with Butch was ongoing. It's not known when Hattie learned of it or of the daughter Butch had fathered. But their marriage deteriorated in the years that followed.

His relationship with Hattie wasn't the only thing coming to an end. By 1931, there was little doubt that Prohibition would be repealed. The return of legal beer was assured after Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president in 1932. That spelled doom for the bootleggers. Butch’s business was wiped out when beer was legalized in April 1933. He wasn’t caught unprepared.

In 1930, Butch and Eddie Kollross bought a saloon formerly owned by Pabst Brewing. The building was near the northeast corner of Wisconsin and Pearl. There had been a speakeasy there during the early years of Prohibition. In August 1932, Butch bought out Eddie's stake in the property. And in 1933, after beer became legal again, he re-named the bar Butch's Tavern. He joined the Bartender's Union. He went legit.

Butch's post-Prohibition business card.

It was not a smooth period of transition. In 1932, he'd crashed his car into a vehicle on 4th Street. The occupant of the other car, Theodore Staerkel, was injured in the collision. Butch drove off. He was arrested the following morning and charged with drunk driving and leaving the scene of an accident. Staerkel wanted charges pressed, but a week later changed his mind to the dismay of the district attorney. Butch got off with a $100 fine.

Then in 1934, Butch and Hattie's oldest daughter, Dorothy, died at their home following a tonsillectomy. She was 18 years old. Butch and Hattie divorced not long after. The kids stayed with her. Hattie later moved the family into a modest home she purchased at the corner of 10th and Knapp. Butch moved into an apartment above his tavern on Wisconsin. His oldest son, Harold, went to work for him tending bar.

Butch with his parents in the early 1940s.

The former bootlegger settled into an existence more mundane than the one he had grown accustomed to. He had managed to put some money into real estate and stocks, but as the years went on almost all of that was sold off to pay for his gambling and the price of maintaining a reputation that had become central to the identity he liked to project.

"In taverns, he was always buying drinks and trying to be the big-time operator," recalls his grandson Wayne Youngwirth. "He was always throwing money around." Butch wouldn't talk about bootlegging, but as Wayne came of age he began to learn bits and pieces of the story. And there was a certain privilege that came with being his grandson. Wayne said, "By the time I was 15, my brother and me were going into bars and everybody knew we were Butch's grandsons. These older guys would say 'Get Butch's grandson one.' No one ever gave us any shit."

But the downside was fierce. "Grandpa was such a mean son of a bitch," Wayne said. "I could tell you story after story about him. He never was a family guy, but he would come over every Sunday for dinner. My dad helped him out all the time, but Butch would never do a damned thing to help him. None of his boys liked to talk about him because of all of the shit he pulled when they were growing up. He’d come home in the middle of the night screaming and hollering, all bombed, and then there were the mistresses and all of that. They knew everything, they saw it. My dad forgave him all the time for the bullshit he pulled. I never could understand that."

Hattie died in 1957 at the age of 65. She was buried in Lake View Memorial Park next to the grave of her daughter Dorothy. Butch was still seeing Caroline Nachtmann. For years she worked at Diamond Match, just down the street from his tavern. She still lived in the house at 1048 West 7th Avenue where she had raised their daughter. The house had become hers after the death of her mother in 1954. Caroline Nachtmann committed suicide in that house in 1965. She tied an electric cord around her neck and hung herself from a sewage pipe in the basement. Her body was discovered later that day by Phyllis, the daughter Butch had fathered.

Butch sold his tavern to his son Harold in 1963. He retired the following year at the age of 72. A year after that, Harold sold the bar to the Wisconsin Board of Regents. They tore it down. Butch moved into a small apartment attached to the tavern owned by his son Leroy at 7th and Knapp.

Leroy’s Bar at 701 Knapp Street.
The adjoining building at 703 Knapp is the apartment where Butch resided during the final years of his life.

"Grandpa, as he got older, was burning through everything he had," Wayne said. "Leroy built that apartment for him. My mom, who hated him, always had to take meals over. He didn’t go out much anymore."

On April 27, 1973, Butch was admitted to Mercy Medical Center. He never left. Butch died there on May 2, 1973. Frank Joseph Youngwirth was 80 years old.

"My dad called me and told me Grandpa passed away," Wayne said. “I had already heard it from Leroy. There was a lot of bitterness there. The kids all got together and I'll never forget it. I was sitting there and I knew it was going to get heated. Leroy got up and said, 'Where are we going to put him?' Then Clarence got up and said. 'That fucker is not going to be buried next to my mother. That fucker can rot in hell.' It was vicious. He was buried at Sacred Heart Cemetery next to his mistress. I helped carry that son of a bitch right there to his grave."

Butch’s headstone in Sacred Heart Cemetery.
The statue of the Madonna seen behind it stands beside the grave of Caroline Nachtmann.