The Real McCoy

Bill McCoy on the Arethusa

Have you ever wondered where the phrase “The Real McCoy” comes from? It’s associated with Bill McCoy, who was indisputably the best rumrunner of all time. He and his brother Ben were talented seamen and yacht builders. One of the unintended consequences of Prohibition is that men who normally made a living legally, like Bill McCoy, found running booze so profitable that they would’ve been dumb not to try their hand. Money, lots of it, could be made and why would two bright, talented young men pass up that opportunity? They didn’t, and became legends in their own time. 

Bill and Ben owned the Arethusa, a 127-foot 157-ton fishing schooner. After a modification or two, she was the fastest sailing ship on the Atlantic seaboard, capable of carrying 6,000 cases of illegal alcohol. 

The Arethusa

Bill and Ben McCoy, however, didn't stop there. They invented the Rum Row method of smuggling—going back and forth from the 12-mile limit offshore where booze was legal and then making landfall at a series of deliveries along the coast. Martha’s Vineyard was one of those stops. Rum Row, in turn, became a party circuit, a virtual regatta where fancy folks could go to gamble, drink, listen to jazz, and even dance. High-end ladies of the night were known to ply these same venues. These offshore speakeasies often had as many as one hundred yachts in attendance.  

Bill McCoy was also known for his taste and procurement of fine rum. If you bought rum from him, you could be assured that it was top drawer, the finest money could buy.  It was, as the saying now goes, the Real McCoy.  

Bill really did not believe he was doing anything illegal and, like many others, felt Prohibition was for other people. He successfully outwitted the Coast Guard for most of his career, but eventually was captured after a fierce gun battle, the authorities shelling his vessel as he returned fire with a gatling gun mounted on the bow. 

Bill’s Wanted poster

His prison sentence was short, only nine months, and much of it he was allowed to wander around and even go to see prize fights. What an extraordinary time. I like to think of the Real McCoy as part of his legacy but, in all probability, it was a phrase used as early as 1909. Nevertheless, Bill McCoy will always be larger than life and a signature character in the history of the roaring 20’s.

- Bird Jones

References:
https://www.tpt.org/real-mccoy/video/the-real-mccoy-uban3s/

https://monmouthtimeline.org/timeline/end-of-the-line-for-bill-mccoy-king-of-the-rum-runners/

https://www.marinersmuseum.org/2022/11/the-real-mccoy/

The Big Combo 1955

This is a showstopper noir film. It’s as if the previous fifteen years had been a warm-up for Lewis’s epic crime bust-up. 

Although this genre is known for some of the most indelible detectives—Marlowe and Spade, in particular—it isn’t usual for a noir to have a cop for its central character. This one does, a literal diamond in the rough.

The plot is simple: Jean Wallace’s Susan is Mr. Brown’s girlfriend, and so much the worse for her. Brown, played by Richard Conte, is the biggest bad guy in town, conglomerating all the crime syndicates into one giant one. Think Amazon: one-stop shopping for all your crime needs. 

Susan Lowell, victim until the final shot

“Brown’s not a man, he’s an organization, and I need money to fight one,” Lt. Diamond says early on, and boy does he know his prey. “It’s like draining a swamp with a teaspoon.”

Our main guy, policeman Lt. Diamond (Cornel Wilde), is hyper-vigilant with Susan as he’s in love with her, and so much the worse for him. 

The Big Combo starts with a bang and doesn’t let up for a second. Every shot is canted just-so, with Alton’s expert camera angles making the audience squirm. The opening sequence of light and shadows shows a woman running and men pursuing and sets the stage for the whole affair.

Susan is trying to escape the boxing match and really, her boyfriend, but his goons keep up with her easily as she’s in heels. Soon they catch her and bring her back to face the music.

Brown doles out orders to Mingo and Fante

Conte’s Mr. Brown as a gangster-CEO is absolutely spell-binding, so much so that we can understand why Susan is both drawn and repelled by him. Even to my jaundiced 21st-century perspective, the scene in which Mr. Brown removes a duplicitous underling’s hearing aid so that he can’t hear the bullets coming for him is especially despicable.

But Brown’s soft gaze and quick patter does a lot to make him sympathetic, even when he intones heartless lines like, “First is first; second is nobody.”

He looks for trouble; she looks to him

As Lt. Diamond gets closer to making an arrest, he zeroes in on Brown’s past to provide evidence. The Swede captain and the half-sane Alicia, Mr. Brown’s emotionally damaged first wife, witnessed one of Brown’s early murders, so Lt. Diamond searches them out to get the goods on Brown. 

The Swedish-captain-turned-antique-shop-owner is especially memorable as a reluctant stool pigeon, intoning the doomed line, “Nothing kills me. I’ll die in Stockholm like my great-grandfather, age 93. I’m not scared of anyone, including you, so get out.” (Too little too late for Mr. Dryer; he never makes it back to Stockholm.)

A mesmerizing Rita makes the wrong choice

As things heat up for Brown, Lt. Diamond takes the brunt of his anger. Even though the fair Lt. is in love with the gangster’s moll, he still has a sweetheart of a sweetheart on the sly, who gets killed for the simple crime of smoking a cigarette in her boyfriend’s apartment.

Although Jean Wallace is capably captivating as Susan Lowell, Helene Stanton’s Rita is moreso, and never gets her comeuppance, always forced to play second fiddle.

Astounded she’s been passed over for Susan, again

After Rita’s murder, our fair Lt. goes on the rampage, ostensibly to avenge his sweetie, but more likely to get rid of Brown so he can take a crack at Susan. At the end, Sue finally gets to play an active part in taking her boyfriend down, using a spotlight. 

In its entirety, The Big Combo has the pedal to the metal from the first scene of Susan’s fruitless escape attempts to her lover’s similarly doomed attempts in the finale. 

No memorable friendships here

The ending gives us the same big feelings as Casablanca, without the promise of a memorable friendship. At the end, the film’s characters are just as shattered and damaged as they ever were, but now we know to what extent. 

The Mysterious John Dwight

Imagine it, the fog is so dense it’s as thick as pea soup, as the ol’ timers say. You can’t see ten feet in front of you and, all of a sudden, the deck under your feet tilts violently. Maybe there’s a shudder and a bang; maybe there’s smoke. We’ll never know for sure, because nobody really knows what happened when the John Dwight went down in 1923.

The John Dwight, a converted pogy steamer, sank almost immediately in a dense fog on Vineyard Sound on April 6, 1923, in 100 feet of water. She had two seasoned skippers aboard, Captain Malcome Carmichael and John King, and a crew of about fifteen. The Dwight was a rumrunner carrying illegal booze (Prohibition had its perks and money was one of them). Sinking is not uncommon with boats, but sinking with little or no wreckage and no survivors at the scene is, which is exactly what happened with the John Dwight.   

What makes the story even more delicious are the details of what happened next. The Coast Guard searched in a two-mile radius for survivors or wreckage and found not a trace. A full 24 hours later, wreckage and dead bodies began to appear. Seven sailors, all in life jackets, were found floating in the ocean, lifeless, and all seven had evidence of a “wicked free-for-all fight”. The body of Harry King, the son of skipper John King, washed ashore in a skiff on Menemsha. He was face down and the back of his head had been crushed. Just exactly what happened in that mysterious 24 hours between the vessel going down and the appearance of crew and debris?

Better still, it was reported that several weeks after the shipwreck, a strange and beautiful woman arrived in Oak Bluffs, asking questions about Malcome Carmichael and the fate of the John Dwight. Who was this woman? Did she really exist or was this a bit of romantic embellishment to an already complicated story? There were more stories: the crew received $125,000 and, just before she got underway, a New Jersey man appeared with an additional $100,000. So, who was he? 

The few things we do know are that Carmichael and King were never seen again, and that barrels of Montreal Frontenac Ale were found either floating or washed ashore. Sadly, those that found the barrels dutifully turned them over to the Coast Guard. Divers in 1935 discovered that the Dwight’s sea cocks—valves on the hull—were open, indicating she was scuttled (deliberately sunk). But what about all those people? We may never know. The mystery of the John Dwight remains. 

- Bird Jones

References: 

“The John Dwight Mystery - Rum Running, Piracy and Murde.r” OnCape Magazine, 2023.

Allen, Everett S: The Black Ships: Rumrunners of Prohibition  Applewood Press Carlisle, Massachusetts; 1979.

“Sea May Yet Yield Secret of the Dwight” The Vineyard Gazette, Sept 21 1935.

You Have to Run Fast 1961

A tight little noir set in California that gallops along at terrific speed. Doctor Condon (Craig Hill) runs an all night medical center and seems to be unacquainted with the types that show up there. In the middle of the night, some gangsters and their goons drop off a smashed-up detective, who promptly dies on the Doc’s table. The Doc then delivers the corpse to the police, confirming his position as eye witness for the murder and signing his own death warrant with the bad guys in one fell swoop, the idiot.

The Doc gets spooked when his armed police protection gets shot by the thugs (who wouldn’t?) and decides to take things into his own hands by getting the heck out of Dodge.

Fast forward a year later and the Doc has thankfully cut his blond dye job and settled down as a clerk in Summit City, a quaint Western town in the mountains of Northern California. It’s a town that runs on hunting money, so don’t let the deserted streets fool you. In one week, the sheriff informs us, the town will be swamped with hunters—fish in the summer and deer in the winter. 

Doc Condon has settled down restocking shelves instead of sewing sutures, and he lives in Ye Olde Hunting Lodge with a Korean War vet and his charming daughter, still unmarried and hovering the drain of spinsterhood. 

We step back into the action as Laurie (Elaine Anderson) is getting annoyed at the run-around Doc Condon gives her as she increasingly tries to wheedle her way into his world and out of singledom for good. He, of course, is petrified of getting gunned down by a hit man at any moment, and bides his time watching the papers for signs that the craven gangster Craven will blow his cover and get himself arrested. 

Craven is also laying low, and is also cooped up in a hotel room with his poor moll, who takes the brunt of his frustration and pent-up anxiety and, for some unknown reason, sticks around.

And the doubling doesn’t stop there. What You Have to Run Fast does more than anything else is show its audience how blurred the line between good guy and bad guy can get. 

Of course, Craven’s thugs find our poor Doc, who has had to reveal himself as a medical man to save a friend and who’s already spilled the beans to his would-be wife and her wheelchair-bound dad (legs blown off in Korea, been waiting patiently with a rifle on his lap for his comeuppance).

Now the good guys and bad guys are swarming Summit City, as well as the hunters, all wearing very similar (especially in black and white) hunting plaids. And the film’s title is absolutely correct—you have to run fast to avoid those flying bullets, especially in the low cover provided by the the Sierra Nevada’s rocky foothills, which is where the pot shots really fly in the final scene. The final shoot out is quick and good, with both leads–Craven and Condon–giving in to their true characters. 

Laurie and her pops have some fun too—Pops gets to shoot at bad guys again and Laurie no longer has to face life as a spinster, bless her heart. Now she’s found herself quite a man in the fella who dropped into town out of the blue, lied about his identity for 12 months, is actively being chased by criminal elements, and there’s more. But at least he’s a doctor! Daddy approved. 

This taut film is quick and brutal, with some solid acting and a satisfying ending. More than anything, I liked the blistering pace. Even though director Cahn and writer Hampton swapped the dusty streets of Tombstone for snow-clad tors of the Sierras doesn’t make You Have to Run Fast any less a Western, where matters must be taken into one’s own hands and sometimes you find out you’re the bad guy after all. 

- Marshall Highet

Chasing Fall While Listening to Stories

Searching for stories is a benign addiction but an addiction nonetheless. Powerful, seductive, and relentless, an addiction to other people’s stories is a fix easily fixed. Stories are everywhere; they stitch us together and create common places in-between the chasms. But to get the best stories, you have to travel. You never know where you might find the next book.

At this moment, I’m on a small, 29’ powerboat, headed down the East Coast chasing fall and listening to stories. Traveling by water is very different from traveling by land. So far we’ve encountered whole segments of the American experience that are only available to people who travel on boats or live on the water. 

Our vessel, a Dyer 29’ named Goose, is one of the smallest to attempt this 900-mile trip from Newport, RI, to Charleston, SC. We are an unlikely sight  –  an elderly classic boat with two elderly not-so-classic crew. Almost everywhere we go, people stop to comment or ask about her and then us. Usually, after a moment, they start talking about themselves. 

We’ve chatted with fishermen, boat captains, delivery captains, and tug operators, and met folks that simply live aboard a boat and hang potted plants off the transom. We’ve seen marvelous vistas like the vast salt marshes of southern New Jersey called the Pine Barrens – all barren and piney. We’ve even encountered a lighted inflatable dragon. Mostly, we’ve met a big swath of simply nice folks. And stories, as always, are everywhere. 

One evening, we tied up Goose at a small boat yard and the dock master told us the story of his grandfather, a kid from Sicily, and how he found a home in Jersey and stayed for generations. Sal has a photo of his grandfather on his virgin voyage to the States with Lady Liberty behind him.

As we went down the East River, past the Statue of Liberty, she struck me as quite a sight, all alone at the entrance to the harbor. Just for a second, you can imagine her through others’ eyes in their approach, anxious and optimistic for a new chapter. 

Don't Leave Home Without It

Moving is never easy. Not if you’re moving ten miles from your last spot or a thousand miles, as I have recently.

It’s hard mostly because of all the stuff. As humans, we have a tendency to acquire stuff. We can’t help it. Even the most Spartan among us would at least need a rucksack of gear to get by; I, it seems, need a fully packed moving truck.

Moving is especially hard with kids and dogs and plants and all the other living creatures we have to uproot in order to get from here to there. (I suppose now my here is this place, when not so long ago it was a very distant there.)

With the emotional turmoil and physical exhaustion, every single one of us newly moved-in folks feels like we’ve been run over by a steamroller – your back hurts, your feet hurt, but there’s nowhere to sit because of all the boxes. And you can’t find the tape; you can never find the tape.

In this last move, I felt particularly shattered. It wasn’t until I began to set up my study, unpacking my books and old journals and photos and typewriters, and all the other flotsam and jetsam I’ve collected, that I began to feel at home again. Something about seeing the well-read, well-loved words and the familiar faces peeking out of their frames brought me back to myself. Not suddenly, with a snap, but slowly, like dripping honey or pooling wax.

This new place still doesn’t feel like home, with its confusing street progression and unfamiliar grocery store layout, but I am more at home in it. And if we are at all adventurous in our lives, striving out into the world to look around all we can (and maybe write about it), then we must learn to carry our homes within our hearts, lest we get lost without them.

No Sweaters for Marshall!

It’s incredible the number of things we take for granted, simple things, like sweaters. It is equally impressive the number of things that have vanished, are utterly unfamiliar to us now, or have morphed into something else. One of the challenges and rewards of writing historical fiction is developing radar for what we assume to be accurate and what we discover anew.  

A case in point is sweaters and peels. When writing Hold Fast, Marshall had written a fantastic piece about the two main characters freezing in their hammocks below decks. Her solution was to have them pull on their sweaters. She left me an exuberant voicemail saying just that. Alas, I had to call her back and say, “No sweaters, Marshall, a smelly, boiled, woolen, clunky jacket, yes, but sweaters were not available in that period or in that place.”  

In the research process of Blue-Eyed Slave, we discovered peels, and we don’t know how we ever lived without them. Peels look remarkably like pizza oven paddles, but they are so much more. In trying to figure out what a kitchen might look like in 1764, we came upon the peel – a handy instrument to pull bread and other foods out of the chimney ovens. We imagined how deft those wielding the peel could become, especially as it’s one of your only instruments to get stuff out of the fire. 

There were other comforting discoveries, like how waffle irons were a staple of the outdoor early Charleston colonial kitchen. (Good old waffles, too bad they missed the maple syrup.)  In general, this process of locating and verifying the minutiae of material culture and daily life is like becoming a time traveler on a foreign assignment in a past era. Even the most mundane object tells a story: a sweater, or the lack thereof; a waffle iron; a peel.   

Live Oak

Marshall and I are both New Englanders and come from strong, seafaring stock. We know the coast of Maine, Massachusetts, and the Elizabeth Islands by heart. Our bones are deeply embedded with the harsh winters and muddy springs. But instead of writing about what we knew, we had to learn a new place, learn it to the bones because that is where we found the story or, more accurately, where the story found us.  

This is a daunting endeavor, especially writing about such a storied place as the low country of South Carolina and the people and events long since beyond the memories of anyone currently living. However, that is exactly what we did in our forthcoming book – Blue-Eyed Slave – due out in February of 2022 from Köehler Books.

The trick, for me as the researcher, is to find an image that carries me through the explorative process and use it as a metaphor for the work. For me, the live oak is the low country. The roots are deep, the branches wide. They are ancient, the oldest one 500 years old. They whisper in the wind and are resilient. Their twisted branches are stories that live on the landscape, some elegant and others painfully distorted. 

This book began as a footnote from an academic paper about Harry’s Negro School located in the Glebe land in Charleston from 1741 to 1764 and funded by the vestry of Saint Philips Church. The Negro Act of 1741 forbade the education of slaves, so did Harry and his school come about? This is not a pretty story nor is it tidy, but like the live oak, it is resilient and captivating in its own way.  

Like the oak, the roots of this story are vast and stretch across archives, parks, lots, gardens, back alleys, wharves, libraries, and obscure references. Oaks take time to grow into themselves, as does research, but in the end there is something universally endearing and satisfying not only in the process but in the result.