Anna Wood’s Twilight Garden

Anna Wood could have been the poster child for the Jazz Age in Oshkosh. She was everything a young woman was not supposed to be: rebellious, independent, daring. She liked men. She liked liquor. She was free. 

Anna became Oshkosh famous in 1923, when she ran a downtown speakeasy, dancehall and jazz club called the Twilight Garden.

The former home of the Twilight Garden at what is now 19 & 21 Waugoo Avenue. The club occupied the second floor of the middle building among the three adjoining structures shown here.

The Twilight Garden was a couple of miles from where Anna was raised, but it was ages away from her Southside start. She was born Anna Poeschl in 1892. Her parents had come to America from Southern Bohemia a few years earlier.

Anna's father, Gottfried Poeschl.

The Poeschls were Southsiders, conservative Catholics whose social life revolved around the St. Vincent’s Parish on Oregon Street. Later, they moved over to Knapp Street and joined the Sacred Heart Parish. Anna’s old home still stands, a couple of doors up from Sacred Heart Church.

417 Knapp Street, Anna’s former home.

Marriage à Trois
Church going didn’t subdue Anna’s lust for life. At 13 she quit school. But not for lack of ability. Anna was bright and well spoken. But if school was too dull, her next tether wasn’t any better. Anna went to work at Paine Lumber. Her father also worked there. So did a man named Frank DuBois. He was a widower and 14-years older than Anna. DuBois got her pregnant in the summer of 1911. They married three months later. DuBois moved in with the Poeschls on Knapp Street.

Frank DuBois

Anna’s daughter, Jeannette DuBois, was born in early March 1912. The kid was five months old when Anna dumped the baby’s father. She divorced Frank and bounced him out of the house.

About a year later, Anna hooked up with another Southside woodworker. This one was named Joe Bloechl. He was closer to Anna’s age. They married in February 1914 and lived at the Knapp Street home with Anna’s parents. This marriage lasted three years. Bloechl divorced Anna, saying her treatment of him was cruel and inhuman. He would not be the last man to make that claim.

Anna was 26 when she netted her third husband, a guy named Robert Wood. He worked in his father’s flower shop next to Riverside Cemetery. Anna moved in with Wood above the flower store. But she wasn’t going to be dependent upon another man. Anna bought a new Dodge and launched a taxi business. Wood’s Taxi Line may have been the first Oshkosh business of its type owned and operated by a woman.

Careful Lady Driver. Daily Northwestern, June 16, 1919.

Anna had a provocative effect on her new husband. Robert Wood quit the flower shop and went to work for Anna. They bought a second taxi, a seven-seater, and moved into a downtown flat near the corner of Main and Waugoo. Anna hired a dispatcher and set up an office in their apartment. Anna’s daughter Jeannette migrated downtown with them. Wood had two kids of his own, but they lived with his former wife. The money he’d been sending them stopped after Anna came along.

The front page, January 16, 1919. 

Anna’s Twilight
The dry law spawned opportunities for those who could tolerate risk and buck the norms of polite society. Perfect for Anna. She terminated her taxi line and dove into the underground.

Around the corner from her apartment was a rowdy speakeasy and jazz club. The Twilight Garden opened in January 1922, above an undertaker, at what is now 19 & 20 Waugoo Avenue. It was launched by Henry Grusnick, a moonshiner. Grusnick was working up one of the largest bootlegging rings in Oshkosh.

The Twilight Garden in relation to the location of Anna’s apartment, shown from the southeast corner of N. Main & Waugoo.

The Twilight Garden wasn’t just a booze joint. It featured table seating surrounding a large dance floor where flappers hoofed to the sounds of jazz bands. Anna came into the picture early on, exactly when is unknown. But by the end of 1922 she was running the place. The club’s slogan – One Step Nearer the Moon – may have been a cunning reference to the moonshine served at the top of the stairs.

With the street numbering change of 1957, the address for the Twilight Garden property became 19 & 21 Waugoo Avenue.

Anna may also have been part of Grusnick’s larger bootlegging operation. The connection is suggested by the moonshine plant Anna established in a five bedroom flat she leased near the northwest corner of 8th and South Main.

As always, Anna pushed the limits. Inside the second-floor apartment were two whiskey stills and a makeshift packaging department. Her husband didn’t share her appetite for the wild life. Robert Wood was threatening to divorce her. Among his other complaints, Wood was inflamed by Anna’s frequent absences, insinuating that she was seeing other men. The couple reconciled. But Wood’s misgivings were soon borne out.

Oshkosh Police came to search the South Main Street apartment on the Friday afternoon of January 19, 1923. Neither Anna nor Wood was there. But Anna’s 10-year-old daughter Jeannette was. The little girl invited the cops into what was later described as “an extensive plant for the manufacture of illegal liquor."

Daily Northwestern, January 20, 1923.

The place must have reeked with the smell of whiskey making. The rooms were packed with barrels of mash, fermenting wash, distilling equipment, and bottled moonshine. The cops next searched the Twilight Garden. They came up dry. Anna and Wood were arrested later that afternoon and immediately pleaded guilty. They were each fined $250 (about $4,750 in today’s money). Anna, flush with cash, paid their fines and walked. Her husband walked in the other direction.

Robert Wood got scared straight. He wanted a divorce. His petition recounted Anna’s “cruel and inhuman” ways. Wood claimed Anna was “addicted to the use of vile and abusive language” and “beat and bruised” him unmercifully. He said she often strayed from their marriage. Wood filed for divorce and went back to the graveyard flower shop.

Two months after the first raid, the cops returned to Anna’s South Main Street apartment. It started like a replay of their January visit. Once again, young Jeannette was the only one home. But now, there was more moonshine, more equipment, and more raw materials on hand. The Daily Northwestern reported that the search “disclosed a situation which caused others conducted by the police to pale into comparative insignificance so far as quantity of contraband material is concerned. The patrol wagon was fairly filled.” Anna went to the station and turned herself in.

City of Oshkosh police outside of the police station along with the patrol wagon that hauled away Anna’s distillery and moonshine.

The cops also went back to the Twilight Garden. This time, they found the goods. They arrested John Mottl, an employee of Anna’s. Mottl divulged more to the police than he needed to. Anna had nowhere left to turn.

Chief of Police Arthur Gabbert was waiting for her when Anna was brought into court. After her first arrest, little was made of her young daughter being left alone at the moonshine plant. Gabbert wasn’t letting that happen again. He testified that Jeannette had been forced into helping her mother make moonshine. Gabbert wanted the child removed from Anna’s custody. He wanted the maximum fine and jail time for her. The judge gave Gabbert everything he asked for.

Arthur Gabbert

Anna was sentenced to six months in jail and fined $500. Another four months would be added to her sentence if her fine remained unpaid when her scheduled release date arrived. John Mottl's testimony led to the closing of the Twilight Garden. The court also took away Jeannette. Anna’s daughter was placed in the custody of her godmother, Anna Penzenstadler. It was an ironic turn. Court officials didn’t realize that members of the Penzenstadler family were as deeply embedded in the underground liquor scene as Anna was.

It was arguably the harshest set of penalties yet handed down to an Oshkosh bootlegger. The most unjust piece was the stipulation of additional jail time if she didn’t come up with the $500 while locked in jail. Anna claimed she had no way of paying the fine. Her assets were still tied up in her ongoing divorce case. About a month into her jail term, she was allowed into a work-release program to raise the funds. No normal job would pay her what she needed. A good wage for an Oshkosh woman at this time was less than $60 a month.

There was no point in slaving away at low-wage work. Anna had a better idea. She still had access to the Hudson touring car that she and Robert Wood purchased after shutting down the taxi line. Anna turned the car into a rolling liquor store.

A 1922 Hudson Super Six, the model Anna drove.

Anna was regularly released from jail to go to her job. Whoever vouched for her employment was clearly in cahoots with her. Anna’s “job” amounted to parking her large car at some well-traveled byway and selling pints of moonshine from it to passersby. It was risky, but risk was something she always seemed comfortable with. Her fearlessness betrayed her time and again.

Anna was busted again on July 21, 1923. Her luck had tanked. She was parked on Jackson Street near the north end of the bridge when a Prohibition agent based out of Milwaukee drove by. The agent saw her pass a bottle to a man who had approached her car. The Prohibition cop jumped out of his vehicle and arrested Anna and her customer, a chiropractor named Elwyn Reynolds.

The north end of the Jackson to Oregon Street Bridge looking south, early 1920s.

Elwyn Reynolds got the worst of it. He had recently arrived in town after fleeing Indiana, where he left an angry wife and a pile of debt. Indiana officials heard of his Oshkosh arrest and dragged him back home. For Anna, it was the third bootlegging arrest in seven months. Her work release privilege was revoked. Her future appeared evermore grim. And then her luck turned around.

Ten days after her arrest, Anna was taken from her cell to the courtroom where prosecutors surprised everyone by dropping the charges. They declined to say why. Her luck didn’t end there. Her divorce case was settled. In his scramble to break away from her, Robert Wood left almost everything to Anna, including $600 in cash and their car. Anna paid her $500 fine and was granted an early release from jail on August 15. Free again.

Anna Goes Dark
After that, she kept to the shadows. Anna appears to have stayed in Oshkosh, at least initially. Where she lived and how she supported herself is unknown. Was she reunited with her daughter? Her post-jail life gets reduced to questions. Fourteen years without leaving a trace.

Anna reappears and marries again in 1937. Lester Harry was born in Two Rivers and was 12 years her junior. They lived in Birnamwood in Shawano County, where they ran a roadhouse tavern. Anna was with Harry until 1944. She was 52 when they split up.

Anna remained in Shawano County until she married a Green Bay railroad worker named Howard Maloney in the summer of 1952. She was 60 and starting her fifth marriage. This one lasted longer than the others, until 1963 when Maloney died.

Howard Maloney

Anna lived in Green Bay for the rest of her life. She wasn’t entirely forgotten in Oshkosh. She was invited home in 1966 to take part in a Mother’s Day ceremony at Sacred Heart Church. Anna and nine other mothers from the old neighborhood were honored.

Her last days were spent in a Green Bay nursing home. Anna could still captivate. She was adopted by a group of children who lived nearby. They called her Grandmother Maloney, and for her 100th birthday, they made her a necklace strung with 100 pasta shells.

Anna died in 1993, one month shy of her 101st birthday.

Fort Howard Memorial Park, Green Bay.

A Note on Sources
I wish this wasn’t the case, but listing the sources for these stories would take more time than I can afford. There were about 160 sources that went into writing this piece. That said, I want to touch on one aspect in particular. Early in this story I mentioned that “Anna was bright and well spoken.” This wasn’t speculation. While researching this, I was able to access court documents from the early 1920s that included several pages of testimony given by Anna. The intelligence and composure she shows there is exceedingly evident.

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Oshkosh’s Bathtub Bootleggers

Stories about Prohibition are too often over-populated with flashy gangsters like Al Capone or Bugs Moran. But in Oshkosh, those stories never rang true. Here, the war against Prohibition wasn’t fought by gangs with guns. It was waged by homebrewing amateurs with “alky cookers” and crock jars making bootleg liquor for their friends and neighbors.

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.

Morasch’s home and blind tiger (indicated by the arrow) is seen here in April 1922. This later became the site of Tiger’s Den Bar, 1224 Oshkosh Ave. The lot is now vacant. Photo courtesy of Bob Bergman.

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.

The Penzenstadler family of Oshkosh. Frank appears in the back row on the right. His father, Edward, is seated in front of him. Edward ran a saloon at the northwest corner of 9th and Knapp. In the back row on the left and wearing a bow tie is John Penzenstadler who operated a saloon at the southeast corner of 9th and Ohio. Photo Courtesy of Janet Wissink.

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.

A wash boiler still similar to that used by Frank Penzenstadler.

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.

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