Liquor And Lust

THE EASTSIDE wasn't always the epitome of placid suburbia. The overwhelmingly male working-population of its early days made it a typical frontier town, with plenty of illegal and extralegal affairs going on.

A dance hall predated any church buildings within Issaquah city limits.

Even when organized religion arrived, taverns outnumbered houses of worship.

So did men. Until the 1920s, males outnumbered females 2-1 in the Northwest. And on the Eastside, most of those men were young, strong miners, loggers, mill workers and farmers with appetites for booze, brawls, card games and evenings with wanton women.

In the Eastside's earliest days, when lumber mills and mining towns were company-run affairs, workers would go to Seattle for liquor and female companionship. But as the small towns boomed, hotels blossomed to accommodate both the housing and recreational needs of transient lumber and mining crews.

One entertaining aspect was drinking.

Loggers, miners and railroad men liked their liquid refreshment. In 1907, when the Milwaukee Railroad was being built, King County granted 31 saloon licenses for the North Bend area alone. Tavern owners set up card rooms for a cut of the action.

Parties got rowdy.

"There's a reason the old Issaquah jail, used from 1914 to 1924, was made of cement," said Nancy Horrocks of the Issaquah Historical Society. "Wood wouldn't hold the miners or loggers. They were so tough they would kick their way out of a wooden cell."

Defying Prohibition

When the 18th amendment to the U.S. Constitution banned liquor - from 1919 to 1933 - the Eastside was anything but dry. Oldtimers joke about the "night lights" - fires from whiskey stills hidden in the woods and valleys could be seen from any hilltop.

David Horrocks cautions against judging local hooch entrepreneurs harshly because Prohibition was so unpopular. His family property south of the city was rented out during that era. When family members moved back, they discovered alterations. Wainscoting in the dining room concealed a storage area with moonshine.

Horrocks literally stumbled into a still, falling through a hole in the back yard that was an underground room containing copper tubing, tanks, shelves and bottles.

"We had bottles of the moonshine in the fruit room for a long time," said his wife Nancy. "Stills were known to be all over the place."

It was easy to get the ingredients. Any farmer with chickens could order extra corn mash. Sugar was sold for cash and, according to another late historian Edwards Fish, was shipped to the Eastside by the carload.

Making it was one thing; selling it was another.

One known outlet was The Blind Pig by Lake Washington in the Juanita area, says Kirkland historian Alan Stein. Evidence could be poured into the lake when a raid was pending.

The late historian Lucile McDonald, who interviewed many early settlers, identified the location of several stills, including one on Market Street in downtown Kirkland, one in Juanita, and one near the intersection of 23rd Street Southeast and 108th Avenue in Bellevue.

Neighbors near the latter got suspicious when the laundry hung out to dry consisted only of whiskey-stained tea towels, but by the time officials were alerted, the renters had disappeared.

A local taxi operator was known to deliver whiskey as well as passengers, according to historian Nancy Way in her book, "Our Town Redmond." The Stone House in downtown Redmond has also been cited as a Prohibition-era drinking establishment, as well as several former resorts on both Lake Washington and Lake Sammamish. Many were billed as dance halls. (During Prohibition, dance halls were popular legitimate entertainment centers patronized by all economic classes.)

Brothels a booming business

Although rumors and folklore abound about hotels and motels that were fronts for brothels, corroborative materials are rare. Such establishments rarely rate bronze memorial plaques from early historians, usually womenfolk who ignored such human frailties.

A former hotel and house in Snoqualmie have been identified as brothels by Richard Anderson, curator at the Northwest Railway Museum in Snoqualmie and Upper Snoqualmie Valley historian David Battey.

The Blind Pig, mentioned as a liquor outlet, also supposedly offered friendly females.

Flesh shows have had people up in arms as recently as three years ago when Bellevue citizens fought the topless dance club Papagayo's in the Fred Meyer Shopping Center.

There have been others.

Woodinville's Good Time Charlie's, a topless dance club, closed in 1985. Bavarian Gardens in Factoria, which closed in the early 1980s, featured a 400-pound dancer named Big Fannie Annie. Babe's, a male strip club, operated briefly in Factoria in 1995.

Redmond once had an X-rated movie theater.

A Bothell soda-pop bar called Mama Hoopah's opened in 1982 and law- enforcement officials made many arrests for prostitution, lewd conduct, sale and possession of drugs and selling alcohol without a liquor license. The owners had neglected to get an adult-dance-club permit so Bothell closed it six months later.

A few of the early taverns still exist as community watering holes. Issaquah resident Walt Seil, whose grandparents homesteaded on Tiger Mountain tells a family story about one tavern, now called the Rollin Log, on East Sunset Way in downtown Issaquah.

The city was still small - less than 1,000 residents - in the 1940s when Seil's father, Ed "Nogs" Seil served as town marshall.

"Dad kept the peace without lawyers and judges," Seil said.

One night Nogs was called to handle an uproar in a local tavern. The ruckus began when a 90-year-old gentleman bought an 80-year-old woman a beer. The 90-year-old verbally and physically objected when another man tried to buy the woman a drink.

Nogs led the 90-year-old to jail but left the cell door unlocked. From the shadows across the street, Nogs and Seil watched as the 90-year-old peered out of city hall. He then scurried down the street to his nearby home.

"The 90-year-old was my grandfather," Seil said.