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1918–1933
Indiana went dry in April 1918 under its own law, ahead of the national amendment, and stayed dry until national repeal on December 5, 1933. Mishawaka's legitimate brewing interest answered the law as a business question — the Kamm & Schellinger brewery's Arrow line, converted to soft drinks in May 1920 under the slogan "It Always Hits the Spot," is this build's culture record, where it stands at scene size. What belongs here is the enforcement record, and its best single document is the South Bend News-Times of October 19, 1921, reporting the raids of the day before under the headline "Three Stills and Moonshine Seized in Tuesday Raid."
The raiders worked the farms northeast of Mishawaka. Mrs. Stella Kosparak and a neighboring farmer were charged with violations of the Prohibition laws — his surname does not survive legibly in the newspaper text as it has come down, and it is left unprinted rather than guessed. Officers took at the Kosparak farm a copper still the paper called the most up-to-date yet captured by federal agents; at the second farm, by contrast, only two gallons of moonshine were seized. The raid was not the farm's first: Louis Swient had been arrested several weeks earlier in a raid there, and the paper retells that day whole — Mrs. Kosparak met the officers on the road, misdirected them to the old Alfrid farm across a cornfield, and warned Swient, who dismantled his still and threw part of it into a field before his arrest; he was still awaiting trial when the October raid returned.
The era's ordinary texture stands one column over. The Mishawaka Enterprise of Friday, April 30, 1920, reports a daylight robbery of the kind the dry years' crime columns were full of: on Tuesday, April 27, at about 10:30 in the morning, a young man walked into the F. P. Emerson home at 303 East Third Street, passed Mrs. Emerson in her own house, and took Raymond Emerson's suit, overcoat, and pocketbook; a reward of thirty-five dollars was offered and no trace of the man had been found. It is printed at its size — one paragraph in one weekly — because that, times a thousand unrecorded weeks, is what the enforcement-era record mostly was.
Sources:
- South Bend News-Times, October 19, 1921, "Three Stills and Moonshine Seized in Tuesday Raid" (Hoosier State Chronicles) — the text partly damaged in transmission, as noted in the entry
- Mishawaka Enterprise, April 30, 1920 — the Emerson daylight robbery, as transcribed on the St. Joseph County genealogy record
- The culture fragment of this build — the Arrow conversion of May 1920 at scene size