Hell’s Corner

The old Sixth Ward was a muddy backwater when John Lueck opened the first saloon there in 1875. The backwater became a bustling borough. Lueck’s bar was a catalyst for the transformation. 

Looking towards the northeast corner of 6th and Ohio, and the saloon John Lueck built in 1875.

When the Sixth Ward was created in 1871, it was the least populated ward in Oshkosh. By 1891, it was the city’s second most populous and the most Germanic in composition. More than 40 percent of the residents were foreign-born. German was the ward’s native tongue.

The influx was so rapid that the original Sixth Ward had to be split in 1893. Everything below 9th Street went into the new Thirteenth Ward.

The new boundries of the old Sixth Ward after the 1893 division.

The Lueck saloon passed into the hands of a new man in 1892. His name was John Sippl. He embodied the Sixth Ward. Sippl was born in Bohemia in 1850. He was 34 when he left for Oshkosh with his wife and two children. Sippl got a job driving a beer wagon for Lorenz Kuenzl, a fellow Bohemian. Kuenzl ran the Gambrinus Brewery on Harney Avenue.

Gambrinus Brewery beer rolls. This photo was taken around the time Sippl worked there.

John Lueck’s saloon was probably on Sippl's route. He leased the saloon when Lueck retired. It looked like a good fit: a fellow Highholder holding forth at a bar that was foundational for the Sixth Ward. But what looked good in theory got whacked by reality.

The Sixth Ward was growing saturated with saloons. There were now more than 20 bars within a few blocks of Sippl’s place. The one that did him in was built just across the street.

The Pabst Exchange at the southeast corner of Sixth and Ohio. The building still stands.

Pabst Brewing Company discreetly purchased the lot at the southeast corner of 6th and Ohio in December 1896. The brewery’s plan for the property leaked in March 1897. The Daily Northwestern, which possessed a loathing for the Sippl saloon that had incubated during the days of Lueck, sent up a dreamy cheer for the new Pabst place. “The structure will be of brick and its design will be that of an old, German castle.”

It was better than that. It was named the Pabst Exchange, and it was spacious, and modern, and had no equal on the Southside. The barroom was three times the size of Sippl’s. With a club room and bowling alleys to boot. Upstairs was a dancehall. The boxing matches held there were just about the only feature in keeping with the ethos of the Bloody Sixth Ward.

A week after Pabst announced its plans, John Sippl transferred his liquor license to a saloon on Ceape. He’d been run off by the largest brewery in America.

The ornate downstairs bar at the Pabst Exchange. Photo courtesy of Marjorie Douglas.

Hell’s Corner
After Sippl jumped ship, the oldest saloon in the Sixth Ward sputtered. A couple of failed proprietors passed through before the course was corrected. The new direction, however, had nothing to do with being correct.

In the fall of 1898, a Highholder named Clyde Pollack took over. Pollack was nine when he came to Oshkosh from Bohemia in 1881. He grew up a few doors down from the Lueck saloon. He was the right age to take part in the underage drinking sessions the saloon was known for in the 1880s. He was also the right age to be part of the child-labor workforce at the McMillen lumber mill.

The McMillen Lumber mill as it appeared when Clyde Pollack worked there. The mill was located between the Fox River and High Avenue (south of New York).

Pollack’s life sentence at the mill was commuted by the Woodworkers’ Strike of 1898. He was 26 when he began his new career by leasing the old saloon. Probably not the best career choice for a guy like Pollack. He was an unstable boozer with an appetite for mayhem.

A headline following one of Clyde Pollack’s 1890's misadventures.

The saloon gave Pollack space to explore his lewd side. His bar had nothing to offer that the Pabst Exchange didn’t do better. So he offered something the Pabst Exchange didn’t.

Pollack was arrested on January 18, 1900, and accused of “keeping a disorderly house.” A sanitized charge often levelled at brothels and saloons engaged in sex trafficking. Pollack pleaded not guilty and abscond to San Francisco.

Into the breach stepped Anton Mondl. He made Pollack look like a puppy. Mondl is one of the most grossly degenerate saloonkeepers in the underworld history of Oshkosh. He migrated from Bohemia in 1881 and adopted the Bloody Sixth Ward as his new homeland. Mondl bounced around working at lumber mills before he took to the bar at 6th and Ohio in early 1900. He was 40 then. Mondl moved with his wife and two kids into the apartment above the saloon.

The air-conditioning unit in the second-floor window faces into what was once the Mondl family’s apartment above the bar.

The first of Mondl’s arrests occurred in February 1902. He was caught stabling a team of sex workers at the saloon. Among them was a young hustler named Ira Pritty. Mondl was fined, but undeterred. The following January, he was collared for pimping out his 14-year-old daughter. Luckily for Wilhemina Lueck, she had given Mondl the boot just before that charge was leveled. 

Wilhemina had inherited the saloon after her husband died in 1895. She’d been leasing the place out ever since. After ejecting Mondl, she sold the property to a respectable Highholder named John Tomaschko.

The Sixth Ward Beer Baron
Respectable wasn’t cutting it in the Bloody Sixth Ward of the early 1900s. Under Tomaschko’s ownership, the saloon cycled through four proprietors in three years. None could make a go of it in the shadow of the Pabst Exchange. And then a guy came along with an idea. An excellent idea. Something legal, even.

Franz Johann Esslinger

Frank Esslinger was born in Bohemia in 1853. He left for the Sixth Ward when he was 37. Esslinger was working the Southside lumber mills when he hooked up with the Oshkosh Brewing Company (OBC) in the summer of 1906.

OBC was formed in 1894 upon the merger of the city’s three largest breweries. The goal was to drive “foreign” competition out of town. By foreign, OBC meant any brewery that didn’t make its beer in Oshkosh, especially those from Milwaukee. And Pabst in particular.

The Sixth Ward was one of the largest beer markets in the city. Its concentration of saloons and German-speaking, lager-beer drinkers was unrivaled. OBC considered the Sixth Ward its home turf and the Pabst Exchange an insult. In the ensuing years, OBC went about making tied houses out of every saloon in the vicinity of the Pabst Exchange. The only beer sold in these tied-house saloons was beer made by Oshkosh Brewing Company. Pabst was about to be choked out.

OBC tied up Joseph Nigl’s saloon at the northwest corner of 9th and Ohio. The brewery then built a companion tied house across the street, at the northeast corner of 9th and Ohio.

 Former Oshkosh Brewing Company tied houses at 9th and Ohio. The building on the left was home to the Joseph Nigl saloon. The building on the right (substantially modified over the years) was the saloon run by his cousin Al Nigl.

Directly behind the Pabst Exchange, OBC tied up Joe Steckbauer’s saloon at the northeast corner of 7th and Ohio. One block north, Wenzel Miller ran a saloon kitty corner from the Pabst Exchange, at the northwest corner of 6th and Ohio. OBC tied that one, too.

The orange door at the corner of 7th and Ohio was the entrance into Joe Steckbauer’s saloon, an OBC tied house. The backside of the former Pabst Exchange is visible at the left of the frame.

Wenzl Miller’s saloon, with Wenzl Miller behind the bar. In the upper right hand corner of the photo, a lithograph from the Oshkosh Brewing Company is visible. It’s identical to the OBC litho shown three photos above.

Frank Esslinger cinched the noose. On July 5, 1906, Esslinger purchased the saloon at the northeast corner of 6th and Ohio. He then immediately sold the property to OBC. The squeeze began. You couldn’t reach the Pabst Exchange without passing a saloon selling Oshkosh Brewing Company beer.

Esslinger ran the saloon, but most of the operating expenses fell to OBC. For Esslinger, it meant that the money landing on the bar was all his after he paid his beer and liquor bills. The old saloon was back in the pink.

In 1914, OBC won its war against Pabst. The Milwaukee brewery conceded, vacating the Pabst Exchange and then selling the property to OBC. The Oshkosh Brewing Company flaunted its victory. The Pabst Exchange was renamed the Kaiserhof (the Emperor's Court). A name fit for a king.

Frank Esslinger moved on, but the arrangement with OBC survived. Until it came undone in an eruption of puritanism that hit the Bloody Sixth Ward like a bomb. The crater it made was called Prohibition.

The Wild Cat
The saloon was run by John Demler when Prohibition began in 1920. Like every proprietor since Lueck, Demler was a Highholder. He was three when he and his family migrated to America in 1892. He took to the Sixth Ward’s saloon life as a young man. Demler learned the trade at Al Nigl's saloon at the northeast corner of 9th and Ohio. In 1917, he left Nigl’s to take over the OBC tied house at the northeast corner of 6th and Ohio.

Demler showed a respect for the law that was rare in the Bloody Sixth Ward. When the dry law arrived, the neighboring saloons stocked up on bootleg beer and liquor and kept running. Not Demler. He quit the bar and got a job at a lumber mill. But he had this friend…

Frank “Butch” Youngwirth, his wife, Hattie, and their children, circa 1918.

Frank “Butch” Youngwirth was a Highholder and had known Demler since boyhood. Demler held the lease on the property and continued living upstairs, while Butch took over the vacated barroom. The place was back in business by the fall of 1921. A couple of months later, Butch got busted there for selling booze and beating a guy up. Butch wiggled his way out of the liquor charge and redoubled his efforts.

Butch Youngwirth wasn’t just another speakeasy operator. His speakeasy was more like his launch pad. His true ambition lay in bootlegging. He’d been working as a roofer, struggling to support his family, when Prohibition began. There had to be a better way. Illegal liquor was it. Once he had the speakeasy going, Butch branched out. He set up a wildcat brewery, just down the street on 6th Avenue, and began making beer. Selling the stuff was the easiest job in the Sixth Ward. And among the most lucrative.

Butch behind his bar, circa 1925. Despite the dry law, there was no shortage of beer.

The money poured in. "I remember Butch made $38,000 one year and $40,000 the next," a former Oshkosh bootlegger named Cyril recalled (last name omitted by request). "That was a lot of money in those days. I remember him and his buddies driving around in their Buicks every Monday to make their collections at the saloons. They’d go over to his place, sit in a booth and put the money in a big pile in front of them. Then they'd start counting it."

Butch set up several more wildcat breweries, always keeping one in reserve in case raids closed the others. "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."

The backside of Butch’s speakeasy, 1924.

By the close of 1926, Butch had outgrown his speakeasy. The brewing business was too profitable to bother with anything else. In the wake of Butch’s success, John Demler reconsidered his respect for the law. He tried going back behind the bar. It wasn’t as easy as it looked. Demler’s license application was summarily rejected, likely due to the notoriety the place had obtained during Butch’s tenure.

Nonintoxicating
The 50-year-old saloon at 6th and Ohio languished as the dry years dragged on. The Oshkosh Brewing Company still owned the property, but wanted out. The brewery found a buyer in 1927. George Utecht was running a speakeasy a block away at what is now 413 Ohio Street. The Utechts had been there since 1892. They were an essential part of the Sixth Ward’s unique culture.

The former Utecht saloon at 413 Ohio. Now Anjie's Bar.

George Utecht leased the building at 6th and Ohio to Earl Sommerfeld. He converted it into an ice cream parlor. It was a flop. The business was sometimes viable, but mostly not. Sometimes open. Often not.

The place didn’t come alive again until the spring of 1933. In April, low alcohol beer – up to 4% ABV – was reclassified as nonintoxicating and, therefore, no-longer regulated under the dry law. Sommerfeld immediately grabbed a beer license and re-lit the drinking lamp. The saloon rose from the dead once again. Its best years were coming…

Earl Sommerfeld’s Rialto Tavern at 6th and Ohio. Leaning against the window is the future owner, John Lemberger.

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This is the second in a three-part series of posts about the saloons, speakeasies, and taverns at the northeast corner of 6th and Ohio and their significance to the old Sixth Ward of Oshkosh.

Here are links to the three posts in this series.

Part 1: Birth of the Bloody 6th Ward

Part 2: Hell’s Corner

Part 3: Lemberger’s Tavern and the End of the Old Sixth Ward.

You can 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.

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Agnes in Flight

Agnes was 40 when she quit the straight world and dove into the underworld. Her scandalous turn brought her to Oshkosh. The Jazz Age was underway and the old norms were breaking down. Agnes took a radical path to liberation.

"The Flapper" cover of Life Magazine, February 2, 1922.

She was born Agnes Flynn in 1879 on a farm in the Town of Chilton. Her parents were Irish immigrants fleeing the Great Famine. In America, they asserted their fertility. A new baby almost every other year. The arrival of Agnes made it an even dozen.

Agnes was two when the Flynn’s moved to Kaukauna. And there she stayed for the next 38 years. She was always a child of her time. At 13 she quit school and at 17 got married. She became Agnes DeBrue.

Joseph DeBrue was the son of Belgian immigrants and five years older than his teen-age bride. Their first baby came a year after the wedding. Agnes gave birth six times in seven years. She was on pace to outbreed her mother. As devout Roman Catholics, their birth control options amounted to abstinence, rhythm and chance. Agnes beat the odds. At 27, she had her last baby.

Summer in Kaukauna, 1905.

The DeBrues were working-class on the verge of middle-class. Joseph was a foreman at the Kaukauna Machine Works. They had a comfortable home in a pleasant town. Their future prosperity was practically assured. Agnes didn’t want it.

In 1919, she filed for divorce from her husband of 22 years. Joseph counter-sued. The judge ruled in his favor and gave Joseph custody of the kids. The youngest was a 13-year-old boy. The middle-aged mother left town.

Cut Loose
First, she went to Fond du Lac. There were friends and family there. Then she hooked up with Herman Wichman. He was 18 years younger than Agnes, about the same age as her oldest child. Herman was married and had two young kids. He worked on a farm west of Fond du Lac, near Brandon.

Herman F. Wichman.

Herman’s wife died of blood poisoning in 1922. Seven weeks later, Agnes and Herman went to Menominee, Michigan for a quickie wedding. Both fudged their age on the marriage certificate. Herman made himself two years older. Agnes shaved off four years. At 43, she was a newlywed again.

Marrying Herman was like slamming a door on her past. It was an explosively complex relationship. Herman was thickheaded, “powerfully built,” and violent. Agnes was fearless and could not seem to resist him. He frequently beat her. Yet her young husband was surely her subordinate. Agnes brought him along when she moved to Oshkosh. In the summer of 1923, she opened a speakeasy called the Pastime Inn at what is now 24 East Gruenwald Avenue.

The Jockey Club at 24 East Gruenwald Avenue, former home of the Pastime Inn.

The ex-saloon had been vacant since the start of Prohibition in 1920. The place was just north of the Oshkosh city limits, in the Town of Oshkosh. The neighborhood was called Nordheim. It had a reputation for being rough and unruly.

But Nordheim’s lawlessness did not extend to the sale of illegal liquor. The town board had been dominated by Prohibitionists for a decade. They badgered the County Sheriff into raiding the speakeasies that kept popping up near the township’s southern border. The Pastime soon had deputies at the door.

The first raid came in the fall of 1923. Agnes was ready for it. The Sheriff's office complained that during the initial visits, she was too quick for them and had "destroyed the only evidence available.” The evasion triggered a more vigorous investigation.

Winnebago County Sheriff Peter Carlson, who investigated Agnes and the Pastime Inn.

On the Saturday evening of October 27, Sheriff Carlson and his deputies were back. They didn’t bother with trying to catch her in the act. They had learned that Agnes was storing liquor in a shack behind the barroom. They found six pints of moonshine under the floorboards.

They discovered something else inside the bar. There were women hanging out at the Pastime Inn who weren’t there for the moonshine. Carlson handed Agnes a ticket for running an unlicensed dance hall. It was a tactic used against suspected brothel keepers when obvious evidence of a carnal crime was lacking. And it was the first indication that Agnes was offering something more than bootleg liquor.

Agnes was 44 and locked up for the first time. The following morning she pleaded not guilty and got a Fond du Lac friend to post an $800 bond for her release (about $15,000 in today’s money). A week later, her trial began. Everyone was there but Agnes.

Over the next month, Agnes did everything she could to avoid standing in front of a judge. She jumped bail and then claimed she didn’t know about the court date. She missed her next hearing, saying she was too sick to leave home. Her condition grew suddenly worse. By January, she was terminally ill and so close to death that the charges against her were dropped. All of this was a fabrication.

Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, December 24, 1923.

No judge would have fallen for such a transparent scheme without a doctor vouching for her imminent death. Somehow she made that happen. There were several doctors in the area helping folks skirt the dry law. Prescriptions for whiskey were commonplace. Agnes and her doctor appear to have taken it a step further.

The Blazing Stump
While faking her death, she was busy planning her next move. Nordheim had proved too risky. She moved to Appleton and searched for a new place. She found what she wanted near the east edge of Appleton on what was then a lonely road leading to Darboy.

For years, William Hopfensperger had been running a saloon and meat market on what is now County Hwy KK near North Coop Road. It took two years of Prohibition to drive him out of there. Agnes came in and opened another kind of meat market.

The Hopfensperger saloon, circa 1916, about eight years before it became the Blazing Stump.

The place was big with a barroom downstairs, a dancehall upstairs, and private rooms at the rear. A fence stood at the perimeter of the property, adding even more privacy to an already isolated setting. The only thing lacking was a splashy name. She called it the Blazing Stump.

The origin of that name remains in question. But there are a few compelling clues. A member of the Hopfensperger family said there was a natural gas reservoir on the property with a blowoff pipe that they referred to as a blazing pump. That might have been all the inspiration Agnes needed.

Blazing Stump was not original to Agnes. By the 1920s, it had already been applied to a number of bawdy, frontier saloons. The name was popularized by an often-reprinted story that appeared in an 1895 edition of the Overland Monthly magazine. The tale involved an adventurous woman who finds love in a rough, country tavern named the Blazing Stump. The woman in the story was named Agnes.

The Blazing Stump became the best-known brothel in the area. A public secret. The first, and still the best, depiction of the BS didn’t appear until 1966, with the publication of Dirty Helen, the autobiography of Helen Cromwell. Helen was a brothel keeper in Superior and Milwaukee and seemed to know everyone in the Wisconsin underworld. She and two women from her Superior stable spent a night at the Blazing Stump on an unspecified date. Here's Helen’s abridged version of that evening.

We arrived in Appleton late in the afternoon. The big convention parade was just over and the streets were swarming with people. We checked into a local hotel and I made a couple of inquiries. All inquiries pointed in the same direction: about three miles out of town to a place called "Blazing Stump." It was a converted farmhouse in the fork of the road.

We entered the farmhouse and found the place absolutely jammed with men. A pale, limpid, distracted-looking guy was standing behind a beat-up bar, dishing out the rottenest moonshine I had ever tasted. I signalled to the girls and they flew up the stairs. There was a slight squabble among the men about who was going to be first with the girls. I helped settle it, and the remainder of the fans lined up to wait their jolly turns…

As the night wore on I felt like a timekeeper at a track meet. I pretended I was a coach at a ball game, and every time there was an opening available I'd slap a new "player" on the rump and tell him to get in there and fight for the home team. At seven-thirty we pulled up stakes and went back to our hotel room. The girls had made well over five hundred dollars each.

Helen Cromwell, circa 1946.

Despite the hot and heavy traffic, Agnes had little trouble with police or Prohibition agents. Yet she had plenty of other trouble. Most of it came from her husband. Herman Wichman’s venom was made more toxic by his binge drinking. He began carrying a gun and was growing increasingly erratic. His beatings of Agnes were more frequent. In the span of eight months, Herman broke her nose twice. She finally kicked him out and filed for divorce.

Agnes liked to drink, too. In August 1924, she was arrested in Winnebago County for drunk driving. She gave the cop a fake name and a hard time. He tacked a drunk and disorderly onto her résumé. Her soon-to-be ex-husband bailed her out of jail.

Her hearing on the charges was moved to Calumet County, the same jurisdiction that oversaw the Blazing Stump. Not a good move. She told the judge, “I was sleepy and that may have affected my driving to some extent, but I certainly was not drunk.” He laughed at her and fined her $25. And then he gave her an ultimatum: get out of the county in 30 days or go to jail.

That same week, Agnes was in an Oshkosh courtroom getting her divorce from Herman Wichman. They had been married for two years and one day. The judge added a restraining order that excluded Herman from Agnes’ affairs in general and the Blazing Stump in particular. It was an unusual decree considering that the business was illegal. It didn’t matter much. At the end of September, she moved out of the Blazing Stump and Calumet County.

Burning Out
Five years had passed since Agnes had left her first husband and their children in Kaukauna. She now inhabited an alternate universe. She was locally famous. Her name, attached to one outrage or another, appeared regularly in area newspapers. When an older brother died, the obituary listed her as Agnes DeBrue. She hadn’t used that name in years. The name Agnes Wichman, a name everybody recognized, would have attracted the kind of attention her family didn’t want.

But she wasn’t turning back. Neither was Herman Wichmann. He ignored the restraining order and was twice arrested for beating Agnes after their divorce. The first attack got him a five-dollar fine (about $100 in today’s money). The second cost him nothing. The charge was dropped after Agnes went back to him.

Two months after their divorce, and 10 days after her latest beating from him, Agnes and Herman were back in Menominee, Michigan. Another quickie wedding. Another chance to lie about their ages. After all that had transpired, it was both awful and touching that they would even bother.

The newlyweds returned to Appleton and a home just west of Richmond Street on what is now Wisconsin Avenue. They installed a barroom and got back to work. The moonshine was flowing, the ladies were laying, and the neighbors were complaining.

Around midnight on a Sunday in early December, Appleton police raided the home. Agnes, Herman, and a sex worker named Jennie Miller were arrested. A guy named George Doine was hauled in, too. He got off easy. Doine claimed innocence, saying he had noticed a chimney fire and went inside to put it out. The judge was so tickled by the lovely metaphor that he allowed Doine to go free. The punishment was saved for Agnes and Herman.

Appleton Post-Crescent, December 30, 1924.

Agnes had been ordered out of a county for the second time in four months. And four months later, Herman Wichman made matters worse. He was arrested in Waupun for getting drunk and beating up his brother. While he was being held in the Fond du Lac jail, Herman babbled about Agnes. He claimed she was working with Prohibition agents gathering evidence against bootleggers. His loose talk got picked up by a reporter. The story appeared in newspapers across central Wisconsin. He might as well have put a target on her back.

She couldn’t take it anymore. Agnes dropped Herman and dropped out of sight. She disappeared for a year.

Out of the Shadows
Agnes was calling herself Helen Leiberg when she resurfaced in the spring of 1926 in Aurora, Illinois.

McCoy’s 1926 Aurora City Directory.

She had probably known Chester Leiberg since the early 1920s. He was dividing his time then between Oshkosh, where he worked as a bricklayer, and Florence County where he did seasonal work in a lumber camp.

Agnes was living with Leiberg in Aurora by early 1926. They were married later that fall. She wrote on the marriage license that she was 42 and that her last name was Flynn. She was actually 47. Chester Leiberg was 36.

By 1929 she was calling herself Agnes again. She and Chester remained in Aurora until Prohibition ended. Her notorious past was receding. They moved back to Wisconsin.

Herman Wichman was gone by then. He ended up in Detroit and got married again. And again. And again. His life after Agnes was only slightly less repugnant. He died in Detroit in 1959.

The Blazing Stump was renamed the Clover Inn after Agnes left. The new proprietor, Louis Soffa, tried turning it into a respectable country tavern. It was a flop.

Appleton Post-Crescent, December 30, 1924.

About five years later, the Clover Inn backslid. A longtime flesh-trader named Ella Gouley relocated there after being driven out of her Menasha brothel. “Dirty” Helen Cromwell knew her as “​​Old Ma Gooley” and wrote that “She was grotesque… the ugliest apparition of a woman I had ever seen – clumps of fat all squashed together like mounds of modeling clay.”

Agnes and Chester Leiberg were living near Tipler in Florence County when the Blazing Stump turned into a hot topic again. A 1939 raid uncovered ties to the Milwaukee mafia. The story was shared by newspapers across the state. Agnes must have heard about it. Most of those stories contained a reference to the old days of the Blazing Stump.

The Clover Inn name never did catch on with folks living in the area. The Appleton Post-Crescent was still calling it the Blazing Stump when the tavern was destroyed by fire in 1945.

Clippings from August 1945, and the burning of the Blazing Stump.

Agnes had left that scene 20 years ago. She had since reconnected with her children. How much of her story did they ever know?

In 1950, Agnes and Chester celebrated Christmas and the New Year in Kaukauna with her three daughters and youngest son. Their father, Agnes’s first husband, had died in 1945. She and Chester were heading back to Tipler when their car collided with a truck carrying 12 tons of pulpwood. Chester was driving and wasn’t hurt. Agnes took the full force of the collision. They used wrecking bars to get her out of the car. She was taken to the hospital in Oconto Falls and died 15 minutes after her arrival.

The obituary of Agnes Leiberg was a study in omission. Not a whisper of her wild years. She was buried in St. Mary's Catholic Cemetery in Kaukauna. The dating on her gravestone shaved a year off her age. Agnes would have liked that.

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The Green Front Inn Speakeasy & Boxing Club

There is a building on Main Street with a stone embedded at the top that has “Joe. Laus 1894” carved into it. Joseph Laus was into candy. The “Laus Block” was home to the Laus Candy Company for 38 years.

What was once known as the Laus Block at 576 & 578 North Main Street.

But this story isn’t about candy. It’s about what happened after a part of that building was leased to a trio of scofflaws and how they used it as a clubhouse for their underworld adventures. This story begins with the death of Joe Laus.

Joesph Laus.

Laus had been making candy in Oshkosh ever since moving here from Milwaukee in 1879. He’d come to the right place. If a city is known by its appetites, then alcohol and candy would be the cravings that explain 1890s Oshkosh. With a population of 27,000, the city supported 120 saloons and 25 confectioneries. Joe Laus thrived here. Right up until he died in 1925.

His children inherited the business and the building. The candy company occupied the north half of the Laus Block, what is now 578 N. Main. The south half – 576 N. Main – was vacant. The Laus kids kept the candy shop running, but then did something Joe Laus would never have done. Two months after their father died, they leased the adjoining space to three young men who wanted to open a soft drink parlor.

Maybe the Laus kids were supremely naive. Or maybe just careless. In Oshkosh, “soft drink parlor” was synonymous with speakeasy. Having an illegal booze dive next door to the home of the Caramel Nut Sucker was no way to sell candy.

Oshkosh Daily Northwestern; June 23, 1926

The perpetrators of the speakeasy were Arvin “Dick” Schrader, Herb Koeck, and Roman Schwartz. Dick Schrader was the oldest of the bunch and, initially at least, the ringleader. He was a 26-year-old baker and World War I vet. Schrader’s wife was Herb Koeck’s sister..

Herb Koeck was a 19-year-old Southside fighter. He grew up in his father’s saloon at the corner of 6th and Knapp. He was better known as Battling Herb. Koeck quit school at 15 and began his boxing career about a year later.

Rounding out the trio was Herb Koeck’s unlikely best friend, an Eastsider named Roman Schwartz. He had been an honor student and noted athlete before he started running with Koeck. Schwartz was 17 when he quit school in 1923. That summer, Koeck and Schwartz tried walking to California. The trek gave them plenty of time to talk about what they'd do when they got back to Oshkosh.

The Green Front Inn
You had to get a $50 license to run a soft drink parlor in Oshkosh. Dick Schrader put in the application and moved into the apartment above 576 N. Main. And at the end of June 1925, the Green Front Inn was open for business.

There were approximately 90 speakeasies in Oshkosh that summer. That figure doesn’t include the countless beer flats and blind pigs hidden in private homes throughout the city. Competition among the illegal booze merchants was fierce. Koeck, Schrader, and Schwartz hit upon something novel to make their place stand out: boxing.

Battling Herb Koeck (left) and Young Shaw.

Battling Herb and Young Shaw were Oshkosh’s two most popular boxers. Battling Herb had a mauling style. His attack described as tiger-like. Young Shaw, whose real name was Bill Schraa, was a headhunter. A devastating puncher who could “deal out dreamland wallops with either paw.” On more than one occasion Shaw broke bones in his hands while hammering an opponent’s skull.

Koeck and Shaw trained in a make-shift gym squeezed in at the rear of the speakeasy. The fighters would go through their paces and then spar for a few rounds with different opponents. It became a popular attraction, and the Green Front Inn became the headquarters for Oshkosh boxing fans. On fight nights, they’d gather and get lit, then head out the back door and slide down the block to catch the latest boxing card at Armory B.

Armory B at the north east corner of Merritt and Jefferson; the home of boxing in Oshkosh in the 1920s.

The Green Front Inn was the talk of the town by the fall of 1925. It was one of the few Oshkosh speakeasies to receive press coverage for something other than being raided. Which led to it being raided.

On the Thursday evening of October 29, a squad of state Prohibition agents swept in and ordered everyone out… except for Dick Schrader. The mop squad found more than a dozen bottles of moonshine. Schrader was arrested and taken away to spend the night in jail. His first call was to attorney Richard “Romeo” Laus, son of the late Joe Laus of candy company fame. The Green Front Inn gang would keep Romeo busy for some time to come.

Two months later, the Green Front Inn got busted again. The dry squad returned on December 28, 1925 to find Battling Herb Koeck taking a break from his training with a bottle of moonshine. Koeck went the same route as Schrader: a night in jail as prelude to a lengthy court battle where every shred of state evidence was disputed. The flimsy denials paid off. Both cases were eventually dismissed.

The Kindermann Cabinet
The Green Front Inn had become a symbol for the freewheeling liquor trade in Oshkosh. The attention presented a significant downside. State Prohibition agents were now determined to bring the place down. Koeck, Schrader, and Schwartz had never been careful. Their only concession to the dry law was to stow their stockpile of moonshine in a coal bin just outside the back door. Inside the speakeasy, caution was thrown to the wind. Now, they had to do better than that.

The rear entrance and back yard of the former Green Front Inn. The coal bin where moonshine was hidden was just outside the lower door on the left.

What they needed was a spot inside the speakeasy where they could conceal the booze when they were pouring drinks. There was a Southside carpenter who specialized in this kind of thing. John Kindermann was known among Oshkosh bootleggers for his architectural subterfuge. His masterwork was the underground distillery in his own backyard near 7th and Sawyer. The dugout was accessed through a secret door in his basement. It was the most elaborately concealed moonshine plant in Oshkosh.

Kindermann was hired to build a hidden compartment in the Green Front Inn. He devised a plan for a tall, hidden cabinet built into a wall between the bathroom and the barroom. The cabinet would be accessible through a concealed hatch. With the hatch closed, the cabinet full of moonshine would be undetectable.

A week after Herb Koeck’s bust, Kindermann went to work building the secret chamber. He was toiling in the early morning hours, when both the candy company and speakeasy were closed. Kindermann was there when a cop walked by the Green Front Inn just after 3 a.m on the Tuesday morning of January 5, 1925.

Officer Elmer Ludwig squeezed in a motorcycle sidecar.

Elmer Ludwig was the city’s pioneering motorcycle cop. But he had to walk the beat when it was too cold for cycling. He was also one of two sharpshooters on the force. Scouting a deserted Main Street in the frozen wee hours was a step down from the sort of excitement he liked. This morning, though, was different.

Ludwig noticed a faint light coming from the back of the Green Front Inn. He saw a man moving around in the dim glow and assumed it was a burglar. Ludwig ran around the corner, down Parkway and to the back of the building. He pounded on the back door, demanding that it be opened. Through a window, he spotted Kindermann heading for the front door. Ludwig took off after him.

The cop raced around the corner and saw Kindermann running south down Main Street. Ludwig chased after him on the icy street, shouting for him to stop. Nothing doing, Kindermann kept running. Ludwig couldn’t keep up. He pulled out his pistol and fired a warning shot. Kindermann was getting away. Ludwig took aim and fired again.

The bullet went through Kindermann’s right leg, shattering his fibula. The carpenter went down hard in the parking lot of the Gibson Tire Company. Ludwig called in for help. Kindermann was scooped up and carted to the hospital. John Kindermann recovered. The Green Front Inn went on life support.

A 1926 drawing of the Gibson Tire Company at what is now 537 N. Main.

The former Gibson Tire Company, now the Gibson Social Club, and the approximate spot where Kindermann was shot.

Punching Out
The shooting and secret moonshine cabinet made for splashy news in the afternoon paper. The uproar pushed Dick Schrader over the edge. Six wild months at the Green Front Inn was all he could take. Schrader signed off and moved out.

That left Herb Koeck and Roman Schwartz. Neither had yet turned 21. That alone should have excluded them from getting the permit required to keep the place open. Except it didn’t. A few lies later, the license was transferred to 20-year-old Battling Herb Koeck. Battling Herb wasn’t quite living up to his name anymore.

A boxer training in a speakeasy may have been novel, but it wasn’t especially productive. Koeck had been struggling in the ring ever since the Green Front Inn opened. In December 1925, he was knocked out by a Milwaukee boxer named Joe Ortez. It was the last time Koeck would get a main event bout. Battling Herb Koeck was never the same.

Joe Ortez and the card for Battling Herb Koeck’s last main event, December 11, 1925.

Things were going no better at the Green Front Inn. The city council unanimously rejected Koeck’s application for license renewal in 1927. So Roman Schwartz applied for it. After some debate, the license was granted. And that didn’t sit well with state Prohibition officials.

State agents raided the Green Front Inn again in February 1928. They dug six pints of moonshine out of the coal bin and arrested Roman Schwartz. The agents must have been disappointed not to find Herb Koeck there. The raid, clearly some time in the making, smacked of retribution. That same evening, the same squad of agents arrested Koeck’s brother Martin at his home on Seventh Street, and Koeck’s father, Joe, at his speakeasy on Sixth & Knapp. Martin was making moonshine. Joe was serving it. They all went to jail.

Joe Koeck’s speakeasy at the north east corner of Sixth and Knapp, circa 1928. Now home to the 1890 Pub & Bistro.

Romeo Laus was back in court with another client from the Green Front Inn. But State officials weren’t going to let Roman Schwartz slip through the cracks like Schrader and Koeck had. After six hours of deliberation, the jury returned a guilty verdict. Schwartz was able to avoid jail time by paying $600 in fines (about $11,000 in today's money). It was the end for the original Green Front Inn.

Roman Schwartz moved to Fond du Lac and declared bankruptcy. He got a job as a janitor and was never arrested again. Schwartz remained in Fond du Lac until his death in 1956 at the age of 50.

Arvin “Dick” Schrader returned to the speakeasy business in 1929. After a bitter fight, the city council narrowly agreed to grant him a license for a former Main Street saloon that had been called the Phoenix House in its heyday. Schrader managed to avoid getting busted there. He remained in the tavern trade in Oshkosh for the rest of his working life. Dick Schrader died in 1982 at the age of 83.

The Phoenix House Hotel and Saloon which became Schrader’s speakeasy in 1929. The lot is now occupied by the Sideyard at Peabody’s

Battling Herb Koeck returned to his father’s speakeasy at 6th and Knapp and continued pouring moonshine. He got busted again in 1931. And, again, he managed to beat the charges. He remained in Oshkosh, usually working as a bartender, until 1945 when he moved to San Francisco. He died there in 1951. Herb Koeck was just 45 years old.

Battling Herb Koeck, circa 1950.

The Green Front Inn wasn’t quiet for long. In April 1928, a new speakeasy went in. The place was raided once more in 1931. When Prohibition ended in 1933, the former Green Front Inn became a legal bar named the Colonial Tavern. The last bar there was Snookum’s, which closed in 1980. The photo below is from the late 1960s, when it was Ted’s Place with a Chief Oshkosh Beer sign over the entrance.

The former speakeasy at 576 N. Main is now home to the 920 Tattoo Company. No boxing. No moonshine. But there’s a green front once again framing the stores of the old Laus Block. An unwitting nod to the roaring Green Front Inn.

The 920 Tattoo Company at 576 N. Main, formerly the Green Front Inn.

The roof-line mural on the south wall of the former Green Front Inn.

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