Keeping Oshkosh Wet with Mayor McHenry

Oshkosh never gave in to Prohibition. This place was always a drinking town. No reactionary law contrived by bigots and bluenoses was going to change that. The personification of the city’s resistance was its outspoken mayor, Arthur Cicero McHenry.

Arthur C. McHenry

A.C. McHenry was an unlikely advocate for Oshkosh’s drinking culture. He was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1881, the son of a farmer. He took a busy and erratic path from there to here. By the time he was 30 McHenry had been a newspaper reporter in Chicago and St. Louis, studied law, fought in Cuba during the Spanish–American War, got married and had three kids, got divorced, got married again, and became a pastor in the Universalist Church.

His preaching brought him to Oshkosh. In the spring of 1912, McHenry was named pastor of St. John’s Universalist Church at the corner of Church and Union streets.

The former St. John’s Universalist Church.

McHenry was a different kind of clergyman. He was not of the fire and brimstone persuasion. The pulpit was his platform for delivering freewheeling monologues on personal liberty and human rights. He’d go after anyone he saw trying to oppress or exploit another: local politicians, fellow clergymen, factory owners. His parishioners loved it. McHenry became, perhaps, the best-known public intellectual in Oshkosh.

McHenry’s book Drops of Running Water, Poems of Life and Philosophy was released eight months after he arrived in Oshkosh.

McHenry’s influence quickly spread. He became a featured speaker at the Progressive Club meetings held at Al Cone’s saloon on Main Street. The Daily Northwestern called his lectures “brilliant and impressive.” But his chumminess with the saloon element didn’t sit well with some religious leaders in town. For decades they had agitated, to little effect, for broad restrictions on saloons. They accused McHenry of pandering and atheism. McHenry punched back calling the anti-liquor clerics “trouble makers who lacked the ability to create public opinion and sentiment on behalf of their reforms.”

Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, October 22, 1912.

The former Home of the Progressive Club and Al Cone’s saloon at what is now 224 N. Main Street.

In 1918, McHenry announced that he was running for mayor. The first plank of his campaign was the promise to “know no distinction between the North side, South side, East side, or West side. The best interest of Oshkosh will be my motto!” His second declaration was the assurance that “I am not and have never been a believer in local or state Prohibition.”

Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, March 6, 1918.

In the April 2nd election, McHenry faced Peter Marden, a bank president living on Algoma Boulevard. Marden was the establishment candidate. He cited his success as a businessman as his primary qualification. The Prohibitionists lined up behind Marden.

Peter Marden

McHenry won in a landslide, sweeping 10 of the city’s 13 wards and collecting a record-breaking majority of votes. That evening, supporters gathered outside McHenry’s home on Amherst Avenue. The Arion Band, 15 strong, arrived and began playing. McHenry gave a speech and “everybody shouted and hurrahed for the successful candidate.” For the first time, Oshkosh had elected a clergyman as its mayor. McHenry resigned his pastorship a week later.

The Arion Band.

There was nothing the mayor of Oshkosh could do to stop Prohibition. The Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified eight months after McHenry took office. And on January 17, 1920, the nation went dry by law. As the police administrator, however, McHenry would oversee the enforcement of Prohibition in Oshkosh. Or lack thereof.

Oshkosh Police, 1920.

The law was clear: the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages was strictly illegal. But under McHenry, the dry law went practically ignored. Ed “Slim” Suda, who ran beer for local wildcat breweries said, "The local police, they seemed to never bother the breweries. They were OK. They all drank it.”

The wide-open atmosphere caught the eye of federal agents. In May 1920, four months into Prohibition, the feds made their initial thrust into Oshkosh. They took down three speakeasies. It was more of a warning than a blitz. One of the raiding agents told a Daily Northwestern reporter that this was just the start. They’d be back.

A former speakeasy at 1601 Oregon. It was raided by federal agents on May 20, 1920.

Two weeks later McHenry announced that he would run for the US Senate on a stridently anti-Prohibition platform. He didn’t stand a chance. McHenry was unknown outside of Oshkosh. He got wiped out in the primary by the incumbent, Republican Senator Irvine Lenroot. Nevertheless, McHenry established his brand as he raced around the state giving rousing speeches, shouting “I hate Prohibition and will fight it with all of my heart and body and soul for as long as I live.” The Milwaukee Sentinel called it the “Gutes Bier uber alles” campaign. Good Beer above everything else.

Meanwhile, back in Oshkosh, the knives were being sharpened. In November 1920, a group of anti-saloon elites calling themselves the Good Government League began circulating recall petitions to remove McHenry from office. The group was led by Oshkosh lawyers Robert Clark and Emmet Hicks. It took them a month to collect enough signatures to force a new election.

Walter Marden ran against McHenry in the February contest. Marden was the brother of Peter Marden who McHenry had crushed in the 1918 mayoral race. Walter Marden was an ex-military man who had left active service two years earlier. Yet he still preferred to be addressed as Major. The Major promised that as mayor, his first order of business would be to take down the city’s bootleggers, moonshiners, and speakeasies.

Major Walter Marden

McHenry won in another landslide, surpassing his record vote total of 1918. The drubbing proved to be the last gasp of the pro-Prohibition cabal in Oshkosh.

That summer, the feds returned to town as promised. The raids of August 26, 1921, were a show of force.

Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, August 27, 1921.

McHenry was furious. He confronted the G-men at city hall and lit into them. “Mayor McHenry quite forcibly stated that the City of Oshkosh was not in sympathy with prohibition enforcement,” the Daily Northwestern reported. One of the agents claimed that McHenry tried to carry off evidence - a keg of moonshine - that had been deposited at city hall for safekeeping. As the mayor said, he’d fight them all the way.

His antics made news around the state. And so did the messy ending of his marriage. In August 1921, his second wife, Alma, divorced him. She said he had neglected her and was often away from home for days at a time and that he used profanity. She said he preferred the company of other women and was sometimes shacked up with a woman in the town of Omro. She said he liked to drink liquor.

Chatter about McHenry’s drinking and womanizing had trailed him for the last year or so. He was said to favor moonshine and gin fizzes. His reputation as a lady's man had been broached during the recall election. More than 50 years later, Jake Steckbauer still remembered McHenry dropping by his father’s saloon turned speakeasy at Sixth and Idaho. “Mayor McHenry used to come in,” Jake said in 1978. “All the women liked him."

Jake Steckbauer behind the bar at Steckbauer’s Tavern in 1975.

Around town he was known simply as Mac. And Mac had one more lark left in him. In 1922, he ran for Governor. It was another moonshot. He was challenging John J. Blaine, the progressive incumbent. Blaine’s anti-Prohibition stance made McHenry’s candidacy redundant. So what.

Mac went back to barnstorming around the state. He told anyone who would listen that Blaine was a dry in disguise. Nobody bought that line. McHenry got trounced in the September Republican primary. He pulled in less than 4% of the vote statewide. He didn’t even win Oshkosh.

In the run-up to the election, the Blaine campaign placed ads calling McHenry a joker in every major Wisconsin newspaper. This is a portion of one such ad from the Waukesha County Freeman.

To an extent, McHenry had become a victim of his own success at shaping public opinion. He had entrenched the city’s resistance to Prohibition. In Oshkosh, it was taken for granted that there was nothing honorable about the dry law. The anti-liquor crusaders had been forced from the moral high ground. That territory now belonged to folks who opposed Prohibition. There was no longer a need for a firebrand like McHenry.

His six-year mayoral term was ending. In that time, McHenry had built a roster of enemies at city hall. At the top of the list was Councilman John C. Voss.

John C. Voss

McHenry and Voss had been at each other's throats for years. The one thing they shared was their hatred for Prohibition. Before the dawn of the dry law, Voss had been a beer peddler for Miller Brewing. He began dabbling in politics in the 1890s. Voss was an alderman under the old system, served a term as mayor and city assessor, and became a fixture on the city council. Voss was also the ringleader of the old boys network at city hall.

Voss went hunting for a candidate to unseat McHenry. He found his man in Henry Kitz, a former alderman and council member. Voss helped get the 66-year-old Kitz back into city hall in 1923 as the municipal building inspector. The plan to have Kitz run for mayor was already in place by then. The backroom dealings would come spilling out just days before the April 1, 1924 election. It made no difference. Kitz defeated McHenry by 405 votes.

Henry F. Kitz

McHenry embraced the loss. “Perhaps it’s better for me that the contest resulted as it did,” he said. “I’m glad to get out of the mess at city hall. I feel I shall have stepped out of a prison.”

A reporter from the Daily Northwestern was more wistful about McHenry’s exit: “A.C McHenry goes out of office after an interesting if turbulent reign. Mr. McHenry went through a picturesque period in Oshkosh history, one that was marked with advancement and growth, providing a thrilling episode in the political story of Oshkosh.”

A.C. McHenry moved on. In August 1924 he was admitted to the bar and began practicing law. His first case was defending Kate Schiessel, a widow living on South Park, who got busted for making moonshine. McHenry got her case dismissed.

Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, October 11, 1924.

McHenry ran for office again in 1928. This time he tried to get elected as Winnebago County District Attorney. He was soundly defeated. In 1929, McHenry moved to Waukegan, Illinois where he continued practicing law. Later that year, he was charged with contempt of court in Waukegan after he punched an opposing lawyer in the face during a trial.

Arthur C. McHenry moved to Kenosha in 1954. He died there of a heart attack in 1956 at the age of 75.

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The Crutch

Here is a disturbing artifact. It’s the infamous Pee Crutch from the sorely missed Repp’s Bar. This relic has been retired from active service and now resides in a private collection where it’s used for display purposes only.

Click to enlarge.

If you'd like some real history on Repp's, check out this video I made with the great Al Repp back in 2017, the year before Repp's closed.

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Peabody's and the Atwood Bathhouse

The name H. A. Atwood is written in brick near the top of the building at 544 N. Main. You have to look closely to see it, but it’s there.

544 N. Main Street.

The building is home to Peabody's Tavern. Its first use, though, had nothing to do with Oshkosh drinking culture. This place was the brainchild of Dr. Herbert Alger Atwood. And his thing was giving baths to people. His specialty was the Turkish bath.

Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, July 18, 1887.

A Turkish Bath at Atwood’s began with you stripping down. Dr. Atwood would then lead you into a steam room where he would heat you to a heavy sweat. Then he’d start scrubbing on you. He’d go over your entire body with a wool mitten to grate away dead skin cells. Next, he’d give you a full-body shampoo. Then he’d hose you off – first with warm water, then with cold – leaving your flesh clean, tingling, and invigorated.

Before coming to Oshkosh, Atwood said he had given over 4,000 such baths. He learned his technique from a master, his father, Dr. Isaac Atwood. The elder Atwood had been applying Turkish baths to Western Wisconsinites since the 1870s.

Atwood the younger was 45 and operating a bathhouse in Fargo when he began scouting Oshkosh in March 1887. No doubt, he liked what he saw here. Two months after his initial visit, Atwood leased a building near the corner of Parkway and Main. The place was prototypical Oshkosh: a cigar factory on one side and a saloon on the other. By the summer of 1887 Atwood was working up a lather at his first bathhouse on Main Street.

Atwood’s first bathhouse in Oshkosh was located at what is now the parking lot next to Winners Sports Bar in the 600 block of N. Main.

Herbert Atwood presented himself as a doctor. It was an honorific he appears to have awarded himself. There’s no indication in his biography that Atwood received medical training of any kind. Nonetheless, he claimed his bathing methods could cure just about anything: diabetes, pimples, rheumatism, all forms of kidney and liver ailments, neuralgia, dyspepsia, headache, night sweats, limpness, lameness…

The Turkish cure didn’t always take. In 1889, one of Atwood’s “patients” dropped dead during a visit to the bathhouse. The incident didn’t dent Atwood’s reputation. People swore by him.

By 1891, Atwood had outgrown his original location. That summer, construction began on the Queen Anne-style building that still bears Atwood’s name at 544 N. Main.

Atwood’s new bathhouse was a Main Street attraction for the next 30 years. The good Dr. Atwood missed most of that. In 1903, he contracted tuberculosis. But not even the dreaded TB could keep Atwood from his bathing campaign. It wasn’t until the sweltering summer of 1906, when he began spitting up blood in the bathhouse, that Atwood finally threw in the towel. He expired ten days later in the apartment above the bathhouse that he kept with his wife, Anna.

Herbert Alger Atwood was 64 years old at the time of his death. His body was loaded into a Northwestern Railroad car and taken to Lake Mills, the town of his birth, where he was buried.

Anna Atwood leased the bathhouse to a bath man from Appleton named Sam Hyram. Both Sam and his wife, Kittie, were established bath givers. The Hyrams even added a new wrinkle. They introduced communal bathing for folks who didn’t want to soak alone. The bathers were segregated. Ladies were allowed to bathe en-masse from 8am to noon. The “Gents” got their turn from 1pm to 10pm. The extended hours for the fellows seems to indicate that group sponging was more popular with males. Go figure.

Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, September 16, 1907.

It didn’t go well. Soon there were suggestions that the Hyram’s bathhouse hygiene left something to be desired. And in 1911 the couple got bounced out. Their replacement was Ernest Reif, an Oshkosh native who had married Atwood’s daughter, Frances, in 1907. Reif was working as a laborer at Schmit Brothers Trunk before becoming head scrubber at the Atwood. He promised that the place had been thoroughly disinfected, renovated, and put “in a perfect sanitary condition.”

But Reif came to the game too late. Indoor plumbing was now standard in Oshkosh homes. The need for public bathing facilities was at an end. Reif managed to keep the bathhouse going until 1922. In 1923, Atwood’s building was turned into a wallpaper store.

An Exercise in Forgetting
The Atwood building saw 75 years of flux and failure after the baths were taken out. All sorts of businesses took a turn there. Stores that sold fruit, furniture, fur… A business would come in and be gone a couple years later. They all lacked the sparkle of the Atwood baths.

The first tavern was planted there in 1941. It was put in by Joe Barnett who had been running a bar next door, named the Annex, where Peabody’s Sideyard now sits (some people may remember that bar when it was called The Sheik). The new tavern in the Atwood building survived into the early 1950s. It was called Club Ramie for most of that period. The place was part tavern, part dance hall and featured a steady stream of well-known dance and jazz bands.

The recordings jazz musician Bob Anderson made for Jump Records in Hollywood were cut during the same period when he played at Club Ramie. Click here for a sample of the sounds played at the club in the 1940s.

Club Ramie turned into the Crow Bar in 1950 and promptly failed. Then another rotation of unremarkable endeavors passed through. By 1965 the Atwood building was sitting vacant.

The Atwood Building in 1965. The sign for Percey Fur was left behind in 1941 when Percey Fur left the building.

Morgan Brothers Music was the last business to take hold here prior to the Atwood finding its true calling as a tavern. The music shop occupied the building from 1975 through 1982.

Another tavern finally arrived in 1983. It was called the Blue Moon Cafe and was run by a couple of Vietnam war veterans named Jim McCarthy and Michael Schrage. McCarthy and Schrage started out across the street at 579 N. Main with a vegetarian restaurant also named the Blue Moon Cafe. In the fall of 1983, they moved the business to the east side of N. Main, ditched the vegetarian angle, and made their new Blue Moon into a legitimate night club.

October 28, 1983.

Jim McCarthy (left) and Michael Schrage at the Blue Moon bar in 1984.

McCarthy and Schrage had a silent partner in the business named James Brill. It all started to fall apart in 1985 after Brill got caught holding a quarter pound of cocaine. Brill was revealed as the head of a multi-million dollar drug ring. In 1986, as part of his plea deal, he agreed to forfeit his interest in the Blue Moon. Brill went to prison and the Blue Moon went into foreclosure.

The crash of the Blue Moon instigated a decade-long sequence of tavern failures at 544 N. Main. In 1986, there was Harvey’s, which gave way to Boomer’s in 1991. Boomer’s went out a year later. It became Sydney’s for a couple of years, and then the short lived After Dark, which was followed by Three Fingers Pub in 1994. Each of these taverns was something of a throwback to the days of Club Ramie. Live music, especially blues, was the main attraction. It was not enough. The Atwood was back in foreclosure in 1996.

The Atwood building finally found its purpose again in 1997 when Wally Melchior opened Peabody’s Ale House. Melchior was a veteran barman who had been running the Lizard Lounge (now Reptile Palace) on High Street since 1987. He changed the focus at the Atwood from blasting the blues to better food, craft beer, and single malt scotch.

Wally Melchior

Melchior sold Peabody’s to real estate developer Eric Hoopman in 2008. The building is currently owned by Brickhouse Properties. Despite the ownership changes, the name that Melchior gave the tavern 27 years ago remains. Peabody’s has been there for almost as long as the Atwood bathhouse was.

There have been countless renovations to the Atwood building since its construction in 1891. The upheavals obscured the history of the place. But the building’s exterior remains essentially true to the vision Herbert Atwood had for his Turkish bathhouse… with his name still there, written in brick high above Main Street.

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