Slim Suda, an Oshkosh Bootlegger

Looking back on it, Slim seemed destined to become a bootlegger. He fit the profile to a T. He was first-generation American. He had grown up in a working-class neighborhood on the south side in the old Sixth Ward between the river and Ninth Avenue. Before he got into bootlegging, he'd had a clean record and a regular job. Edmund “Slim” Suda had all the traits of the prototypical Oshkosh bootlegger.

Edmund “Slim” Suda.

Part 1: A Son of the South Side
Slim was born in Oshkosh in 1903. His mother, Jennie, had emigrated from Bohemia in 1886. Slim's father, Joseph, was born here, but his parents had also come from Bohemia. The year after Slim’s birth, Joseph bought a vacant piece of land at the corner of 4th and Knapp. He financed the purchase with money he borrowed from his brother-in-law, saloon owner Herman Steckbauer. Joseph launched a saloon of his own at the 4th and Knapp property. It's where Slim grew up. The building still stands at 301 Knapp Street.

301 Knapp Street, Oshkosh.

Joseph Suda's saloon ran in tandem with an attached grocery. It was a common arrangement in Oshkosh, especially on the south side. The Suda family lived in the flat above the two businesses. Joseph tended the bar. Jennie took care of the kids and helped run the store. Slim was their second child; their first boy. He appeared poised to take over the business one day. Slim was smart and amiable. At 16, he had enrolled in the Oshkosh Business College. Then 1920 came. And all that the Sudas had built began to crumble.

First, it was Prohibition. The goal of the dry law was to crush the saloon trade. Joseph Suda's reaction was like that of most other Oshkosh saloon owners. He took a license to sell "non-intoxicating liquors" and started calling his bar a soft drink parlor. It almost certainly was never that. In all likelihood, the Suda saloon had become a speakeasy. It would have been Slim's introduction to the business of illegal liquor.

Then on May 13, 1920, Jennie died. She was just 44-years old and left eight children. The youngest of them, her daughter Florence, was not even two-years-old. Joseph was shattered. When the census taker came along a month after his wife's death, Joseph listed Jennie among the residents of his home. Less than two years later, Joseph died. He was 46. His obituary said that "The death of his wife in May of 1920 was believed responsible for a general breakdown of his health. "

Slim and his older sister Mary were now heads of the household. Mary had recently married Anthony Ebersberger. He had moved in with the Suda family prior to Joseph's death. Ebersberger worked as a lineman for the City of Oshkosh until June 4, 1923, when he fell from a telephone pole and suffered a massive head injury. He died the following day.

Later that month, Slim and Mary sold the Suda's home and business to family friend John Drexler. Herman Steckbauer, the saloon owner who had loaned Joseph the money to get started, helped facilitate the deal to get them out of there. Slim and Mary moved the family into a house a few blocks away at what is now 1018 Knapp. Two months later, Mary gave birth to a son she named Anthony, after the boy's dead father.

There were nine of them in that home on Knapp. Mary, a widow at 22, was the oldest. Slim was 19. The rest of them were minors. Five of the kids were under the age of 10. They would grow up in that home. Slim lived there for the rest of his life. The house is still there.

1018 Knapp Street, Oshkosh.

Slim had left school. He needed to make money to help support the family. He got a job as a machinist at Universal Products just down the street from where the Suda's former home, saloon, and grocery had been. He probably passed by the place most days on his way to and from work. The saloon was still open. John Drexler with his "soft drinks" license was selling booze there. The Sixth Ward was awash in bootleg beer and liquor. There was good money in it. That wasn't lost on Slim.


Part 2: The Life of a Bootlegger
In 1980, newspaper reporter Myles Strasser interviewed three men who had been connected to bootlegging in Oshkosh. The interview formed the basis of an article about Prohibition that was written by Strasser and published in the Oshkosh Northwestern on November 13, 1980.

Leroy Youngwirth, who then owned Leroy's Bar on Knapp Street, was the only one of the three men interviewed by Strasser whose participation didn't insist upon anonymity. Youngwirth was the son of Butch Youngwirth, who had led one of the largest wildcat brewing operations in Oshkosh. The other two men were later referred to in Strasser's article as Tom and Dick.

Thankfully, Strasser recorded almost an hour's worth of the interview. I obtained a copy of that recording about two years ago. I've listened to it dozens of times since then. Both of the "anonymous" men leave a string of telling clues over the course of the conversation. The quotes in Strasser's article that were attributed to Tom are mostly from Slim Suda. Those attributed to Dick were mostly from a man whose first name is Cyril, but whose last name I haven't been able to confirm.

Strasser begins by asking why and how Cyril and Slim got involved in bootlegging. Cyril immediately replies, "We got involved with that because there was no jobs no place. That was in the depression days. 1929 or 30 in there someplace. And 30 bucks a week was what we were gettin' for working. And that was a lot of money in those days. Everybody else was scrounging around trying to get a dollar here and there. So that's how we started in there. Anyplace was a job."

Slim doesn’t bother to answer Strasser’s question. How could he? How would he have ever explained that 55 years ago he was in his early 20s and needed money to support his brothers and sisters because their parents had just died? Or about his sister and her dead husband and their baby. Or how they sold off the family home and business and were trying somehow to make a new life for themselves. Unlike Cyril, Slim wasn't out of work when he got into bootlegging. He confides later in the interview, "I was working in a machine shop during the day and at night I was peddling."

Slim got into bootlegging around 1926 delivering beer for Elmer Steinhilber. Slim and “Steinie” had a lot in common. They were about the same age and had grown up in the same Sixth-Ward neighborhood. Steinhilber’s parents were German immigrants. Before the bootlegging business took off, he had been helping his father, Otto, run the United Cigar Store on Main Street.

Elmer Steinhilber

Steinhilber’s wildcat brewing operation was already one of the largest in Oshkosh by the time Slim got involved. "I went to work for him before he was handling alcohol," Slim said. "He was just handling beer. When I first started out I was just an operator. I worked on a commission and a salary. I got my flat salary of $35 a week and I got a dollar on every barrel of beer and I got a dime on every case of beer."

The weekly salary of $35 would be worth about $510 today. And then there was the commission. Slim was making good money and almost certainly more from bootlegging than he did from his day job in the machine shop. But it was a gamble. If he had been arrested and jailed, it would have dealt another major blow to a family that was in no condition to take another hit. Slim wasn't blind to the risk.

"If you got caught, you lost your car or truck and got three-to-five months in the House of Corrections and a fine of probably a thousand dollars," Slim said. That would have sunk the Suda family.

The risk was reduced by paying off Prohibition enforcement officials. "These lawyers would take care of us," Slim said. "You paid the first of the month and they distributed the money out. They'd say, 'We'll give you 90% protection. We won't guarantee 100.' But that other 10% could ruin you."

Slim said the money went to state and federal agents. "I'm not talking about city officials," he said. "The local police, they seemed to never bother the breweries. They were OK. They all drank it. But there was this one guy (a local official, Slim was unwilling to name) who had more goddamned guts than a government mule. He'd call you up and say, 'I haven't moved yet, I'm still living in the same place.' He wanted a quarter-barrel of beer and a can of alcohol. But there was no money handed out."

The lack of local enforcement led to an explosion of wildcat breweries in Oshkosh. Slim said he knew of seven or eight operations based here. They had their breweries planted in basements of homes, saloons, and on farms. He said there were two large outfits. The one was run by Steinhilber. The other by Butch Youngwirth.

Frank "Butch" Youngwirth

"He was our competitor," Slim said. “When I started, the agreement was made that we'd make the kegged beer and buy the bottled beer from them (Butch Youngwirth’s group). Then something happened along the line there. First thing you know, they were making kegged beer and we were making bottled beer. Everybody went for themselves.”

The atmosphere was competitive but never grew fierce. "There was no murders or anything like that," Slim said. "We always got along. We didn't try to outdo one another. If your brewery got knocked off (raided) and you needed some beer, you'd go to your competitor and you'd buy beer. When Butch got knocked off they'd come to us and buy some."

But Slim told another story illustrating how dubious the camaraderie could be. "We had a place where we stored our beer out in the country and I sent my kid brother out there to pick up a load. I says, 'Take three halves over to so and so.' I was in bed yet. I'd had a rough night. He finally came back and he said, 'Slim, there's nothing out there.' I said, 'What are you talking about?' I jumped in a pair of britches and a pair of shoes and out we went. It was an inside job. We had about a dozen cases or so out there that were spoiled; that turned sour on us because it wasn't pasteurized right. We had that set aside and we had 200 and some cases of good beer and some 30 halves out there. They took all the good stuff and left the sour stuff there. It was an inside job. The guy finally committed suicide you know."

By 1928, Slim was making enough money bootlegging to leave his day job at the machine shop. When people asked him what he did for a living, he'd say that he worked at the frog farm that Steinhilber had purchased on Josslyn Street near Campbell Creek.

And ad for Steinhilber's frog farm from the February 1970 Journal of the National Association of Biology Teachers.

Actually, Slim had become a partner in the Steinhilber bootlegging outfit. He said that the group’s principals were himself, Steinhilber, and an Oshkosh butcher named Bruno Siewert. At the time, Siewert was also involved in what was almost certainly a speakeasy named the Green Parrot, an aging dive located on what is now Division Street (formerly Light Street).

The base of operations for the Steinhilber outfit was a speakeasy at the southwest corner of 9th and Knapp that came to be called the Böhmerwald (German for Bohemian Forest). It was an old saloon run then by Ted Miller, who also worked for the Steinhilber outfit. Miller was cut from the same cloth as the others. He was first-generation American and hailed from the old Sixth Ward.

The bar at the Böhmerwald.

"I remember when we got knocked off on the farm and Ted Miller wound up with the pigs," Slim recalled with a wry laugh. "The place was knocked off and he runs out and hid himself amongst the pigs in the pigpen. They never found Ted. He was out there with the pigs." Miller wouldn't always be so lucky to find pigs that would hide him. He would later get arrested and serve jail time for selling alcohol. Miller was one of at least three men from the Steinhilber outfit who served jail time as a result of their bootlegging.

Slim managed to avoid arrest. And by the end of the decade, the operation had grown well beyond Oshkosh. The Steinhilber outfit was also into whiskey by then. Slim said they took their hard liquor out as far as Billings, Montana. He said they were distributing their beer throughout the Fox Valley and into northern Wisconsin. "The farthest we ever hauled beer was into Somerset, Wisconsin," Slim said. "And from there it was distributed to the Twin Cities; they'd come over and get it. That was almost a 300-mile haul"

By 1930, Slim's outlaw existence had become normalized. It was just another job. But with Oshkosh hit hard by the Great Depression, he was getting by better than most of his neighbors. The Suda family, except for Slim’s brother Joe, was still living together at the house on Knapp Street. Florence, the youngest of the Suda children, was now 11 years old.

In the summer of 1931, Slim eloped. Edmund Suda and Edna Baker were married in Waukegan, Illinois on July 23. Edna was 31. She was the daughter of an Oshkosh blacksmith. Slim was about to turn 27. When they returned to Oshkosh, Edna moved in with the Suda clan at the Knapp Street house.

Slim and Edna.

The Suda’s appeared to be a fairly typical Oshkosh family. But the contrast between Slim's home and work life remained stark. He recalled a run he made to Chicago to pick up a load of whiskey from one of the outfits there.

“I had a white shirt on and Oshkosh B'Gosh overalls and down I go,” he said. “The closer to Chicago I got, the scareder I got. Every day you'd pick up the paper and they'd be bumping somebody off down there. I was thinking, Jesus, I don't know if I should go through with this. But if I turned around I'd be the laughing stock of Oshkosh among the bootleggers. So I finally said, to hell with her. I had to go to the Morrison Hotel to meet this guy. I knew these guys. They all had gats (guns). They were tough bastards. I could hardly talk, I was scareder than hell. I left there with 100 gallons of alcohol. I paid $1,800 for it. When I hit Wisconsin, was I tickled!"

Slim remained a bootlegger until the ratification of the 21st Amendment in 1933 shut all the outfits down. The law that had closed his father’s saloon thirteen years earlier had finally been rescinded. Oshkosh's three breweries surged back into production. Black-market beer was made redundant.

When it was over, Slim, like a lot of the former bootleggers, went to work in a tavern. He took a job tending bar at the Dutch Grill on North Main. It was a former speakeasy that had gone legal upon repeal.

The Dutch Grill was located at the southwest corner of North Main and Ceape. It later became the Wharf Tavern.

After a few years of working the bar, Slim went back to the trade he had learned before getting into bootlegging. In 1937, he took a job as a machinist at U.S. Motors in Oshkosh. He worked there for more than 40 years. He joined the Knights of Columbus. He regularly helped out as an usher at Sacred Heart Church. His bootlegging days were behind him.

Slim never denied his past. "There were many tales about Uncle Slim running shine," says Becky Wegener Yurk. Her mother, Florence, was Slim's sister. "He was quite the guy. One of the most kind, gentle giants you’d ever care to know."

Slim is at the far right with Edna in front. Three of his sisters are also seen here with their husbands.
In the front row from left to right are Lucille, Josephine, and Florence. 

Edmund "Slim" Suda died in Oshkosh on July 24, 1986. He was 82 years old. He's buried in Sacred Heart Cemetery.

Here's a follow up to Slim's story: Audio of Slim telling a tale from his bootlegging days.

Special thanks to Becky Wegener Yurk and Dan Radig for the help they provided with this post.