What they made went by all sorts of names: Moonshine. White Lightning. White Mule. Bathtub Gin. Some made wine. Many made beer. Their basements were chambers of distillation and fermentation. They sold their goods to supplement their working-class income. There were hundreds of such people in Oshkosh. They began with the dawn of Prohibition in 1920 and continued until the dry law was recalled in 1933. This city was crawling with bathtub bootleggers. Folks like these…
Dove Street Donker
Moonshine was just a side hustle for Ted Donker. His main gig was cutting wood at Paine Lumber. In his free time, the Netherlands-born Donker ran a low-key distillery in his home on the old West Side of Oshkosh. Donker’s place is still there.
![]() |
The former home of Ted Donker, at 1109 Dove Street. |
Donker’s bootlegging was more discreet than most. He didn’t take the risk of selling his booze on the underground market. Donker’s moonshine appears to have been made for a specific customer: his father-in-law, George Morasch.
Morasch had converted the living room of his home on Oshkosh Avenue into a blind tiger, an illegal bar, where he sold drinks to people from the neighborhood. Oshkosh was peppered with places like this. Drinkers felt less exposed to arrest when partying in a neighbor’s living room than they did at a speakeasy.
Ted Donker’s bootlegging came to an end on the Saturday afternoon of February 3, 1923. He was home from work, cooking up another batch of white mule when the cops arrived. They caught him in flagrante delicto with two barrels of fermenting mash and two gallons of finished moonshine. Donker was carted off to jail. The following Wednesday, he faced the judge and confessed his guilt. Donker paid a $250 fine and headed back to his job at Paine Lumber.
Bruette’s Blind-Sided Tiger
Peter Bruette had been a saloon owner before Prohibition. He bailed out after the dry law hit, and opened a micro-mart at his home, which still stands.
![]() |
Peter Bruette’s former home, 514 W. Lincoln Ave. |
You couldn’t fit much of a store in such a small space. But selling coffee and cigars wasn’t the point. Bruette needed a pretext for all of the people traipsing in and out of the place. His home was a blind tiger where he sold homemade wine for 15 cents a glass, or about $3 in today’s money. That was a bargain, especially after Prohibition inflated the cost of alcohol.
![]() |
Home winemaker’s like Bruette often used Grape Brick to make their wine. One brick produced a gallon of wine. Grape Brick was readily available in Oshkosh during Prohibition. |
Bruette’s wine room was raided in 1926 after one of his customers ratted him out. Matthew Paulick had gotten stewed at Bruette’s dive on a Saturday night in January. The cops found Paulick later that evening stumbling down Parkway looking for his home, which happened to be on Waugoo. Once in custody, Paulick spilled his guts. The cops then headed to Bruette’s house and caught him red-wine-handed.
Bruette appears to have struggled with the art of vinification. One of the wines confiscated at his house measured just 1.7% ABV. Another came in at an exhilarating 17.3% ABV. The unpredictable quality may have accounted for the low price.
Kinderman’s Cave
A Southside carpenter named John Kinderman took the underground booze scene in Oshkosh to another level. His moonshine was actually produced under the ground. Kinderman had carved out a subterranean cave behind his home on West 7th Avenue. He then built an addition to his house over the secret cavern. It concealed one of the largest home-based distilleries in Oshkosh.
![]() |
Kindermann’s former home at what is now 1131 W. 7th Ave. The red arrow points to the addition Kinderman built over his secret cellar. |
Kinderman was a Bohemian immigrant who took to bootlegging shortly after Prohibition began. By the time he was busted in May 1925, he was producing moonshine in quantities few could match. But the raiding squad was stumped when they invaded his home. The only hint of Kinderman’s crime was the rank odor of moonshine brewing.
One of the cops kept sniffing around. His nose led him to the crawlspace under the new addition to the home. Poking his nightstick into the ground, the cop heard the rap of wood on wood. He brushed away the dirt to find a hatch into Kinderman’s booze crypt. Down below, he spotted a doorway into the basement under the original construction. The investigator pushed open the door and saw his stunned fellow officers staring back at him.
![]() |
The Oshkosh Police Force during the early years of Prohibition. |
Kinderman had disguised the doorway into his secret chamber by sawing concrete blocks in half and securing them to the door from the cave side with screws. The blocks fit seamlessly into the basement wall, flawlessly concealing the passageway. One of the cops later called it “The most perfect piece of bootleg camouflage ever discovered in Oshkosh.” It wasn’t perfect enough.
![]() |
Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, May 5, 1925. |
Stashed inside the cave was a whopping 70 gallons of moonshine and a 40-gallon still. Kinderman was hit with a $500 fine (about $9,000 today). John Kinderman gave up on moonshine, but he didn’t leave the racket. His singular talent for building secret spaces brought him to the attention of other bootleggers. But that’s a story for another day.
![]() | |
Living next door to John Kinderman was a fellow bootlegger named Frank Schneider. The former Schneider home at 1127 W. 7th Avenue is shown on the left. |
The Moonshine Wunderkind
Kinderman’s next-door neighbor had whiskey ambitions, too. But Frank Schneider couldn’t squeeze a distillery into his cramped life. He was working 60-70 hours a week at Paine Lumber and living with his wife and their eight kids in a 900-square-foot home (one bathroom). Schneider solved his dilemma by finding an accomplice who could provide him the space to realize his illegal aspirations.
His collaborator was Joe Paulus. Like Schneider, Paulus was a Bohemian, Czech-speaking immigrant. He also worked at Paine Lumber. More importantly, Paulus had an old, roomy home near the lonely south end of Knapp Street.
![]() |
The Paulus home circled in red at what was then the nearly desolate end of Knapp Street just north of 18th Ave. The area has since filled in substantially. Click the image to enlarge it. |
Schneider built a still and set it up at Paulus’ house. Finding time to operate the thing, though, seems to have been an issue. Luckily for Schneider, Joe Paulus’ son Frank took an interest in what his father’s weird friend was cooking up in the basement. By 1922, possibly earlier, 15-year-old Frank Paulus was running the still. He may have been Oshkosh’s youngest moonshiner.
Young Frank made the moonshine. Old Frank peddled it. But Schneider was somewhat less careful than his teenage counterpart. Police got wind of the operation in early 1923 and secured a warrant to search the Knapp Street home. Young Frank was busy brewing up another batch when the cops came calling at 10pm on Saturday, January 27, 1923.
![]() |
Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, January 29, 1923. |
Police quickly determined that Frank Schneider was driving the operation. He was slapped with a $250 fine. The case against Joe Paulus was dismissed. Fifteen-year-old Frank was put on probation. And so ended the promising career of the precocious bootlegger.
No Escape
Prohibition resistance was in Frank Penzenstadler's blood. He was the sixth child from a hard-drinking, saloon-owning family of Bohemian immigrants. With the arrival of the dry law, he slipped into moonshining. It was the natural thing to do.
Frank’s day job had him cutting stone for Wenrich’s Granite Works on Main Street. His nights were devoted to his avocation: cranking out liquor in his home at 737 W. 5th Avenue. His fountainhead was a 10-gallon still that he made from a wash boiler.
By 1922, Frank was known well enough in illicit booze circles to have drawn the attention of federal agents. Most often, they were occupied with syndicates and speakeasies. But Frank was among the unlucky dozen they went hunting for when 13 feds crashed into Oshkosh on the Friday evening of January 6, 1922.
The feds got Frank, along with his still, and 12 gallons of pure moonshine. He paid a $250 fine. Then he went home and built a 12-gallon still.
A year later, the county sheriff was hunting him. Frank was caught again at his home in the summer of 1923. He had more than 50 gallons of high-test moonshine there. Frank was in deep shit. The second offense and the quantity of liquor meant jail time. He slipped out the back door while the deputies were rummaging through the home he shared with his wife, Adeline, and their six children.
Frank went on the run, holding out for two weeks before giving himself up. They gave him four months of hard labor at the abhorrent county workhouse. It did not go well. Frank became unhinged about a month into his sentence. He was moved to Oshkosh’s Northern State Hospital for the Insane.
Frank was released from the asylum about six months later. His frame of mind had not improved. He seems to have believed that Adeline betrayed him in some way. He was bent on retaliation. Frank got back to the city in late March 1924 and immediately attacked his wife. Adeline saved herself by hitting him with an iron. Frank was arrested and thrown back in jail.
He was back on the street a couple of days later. Adeline took pity on him, and the two reconciled. But six months later, he was gone for good. Frank died of tuberculosis on October 8, 1924. A bad end for a troubled man.
![]() |
Sacred Heart Cemetery. Oshkosh. |
Last Call
Frank’s bitter end wasn’t the ordinary route out of Prohibition. Ted Donker’s life after moonshine was far more typical. He and his wife, Matilda, raised six kids at their Dove Street home where he used to run his still. He was employed as a woodworker in Oshkosh for 48 years. Donker died in 1956 at the age of 73.
John Kinderman returned to carpentry, working for many years as a cabinet maker at the Radford Company. He lived to the ripe age of 92. He and his wife, Mary, had four children. His secret cave might still be there.
Peter Bruette and his wife, Anna, raised their three kids in the former blind tiger where Pete sold his wine. Following his arrest, Bruette took a job at Oshkosh Trunks and Luggage. He passed away at age 63 in 1947.
Frank Paulus, the teenage bootlegger, turned 18 and got married three days later. He and his wife, Lucy, had eight kids. Paulus worked at Morgan Door as a supervisor for 40 years. He was an avid reader and liked to hang out at his cabin in Richford. He was 90 when he died in 1997.
![]() |
Frank Paulus, the teenage bootlegger, later in life. |
The Prohibition adventures of people like Pete Bruette and Frank Paulus were consigned to the past. These folks were often reluctant to share their stories. As the years went on, it became evermore difficult for them to explain their arrests and criminal past to a younger generation who couldn't possibly understand what that period had been like. The days of bootleg booze were left to fade away.
Contact me at OshkoshBeer@gmail.com to receive an email notification when I publish a new post. Your email address will never be shared or sold.