The Surviving Son of a Rum Smuggler’s Right-Hand Man Shares Stories from Prohibition-Era Seattle
Bye bye booze. During the dry days in Seattle, one bootlegger had the whole town on the take. The surviving son of the rum runner’s closest adviser shares stories in Prohibition.
Photo: Wikipedia
For an article in the Mudroom section of our October issue, I drove out to Kirkland to drink pink lemonade with a man whom I’d seen in an early screener of Prohibition, Ken Burn’s PBS documentary that airs October 2–4.
His name is Edwin Hunt and he’s lived his whole life here in Seattle, where for years he ran an addiction center. Growing up, he heard stories from his father about his days working for Roy Olmstead, a notorious bootlegger during the Prohibition years who had the whole town on the take. In fact, Hunt’s father helped keep the town on the take: It was his job to figure out a system for paying off the cops.
When I talked to filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick back in August, Novick said that Olmstead was her favorite character in the film. She loved that he was a gangster but a scrupulous one who didn’t resorted to violence. Hunt’s father painted a similar picture of Olmstead to his son, and he shared Olmstead’s notion that money was never worth a human life.
During the making of the film, Novick traveled to Kirkland to interview Hunt and asked him to retell the stories his dad told him about his days as one of Olmstead’s closest advisers.
Stories like this one: Hunt’s parents fled to China when Olmstead and 20 other members of his operation were arrested for their crimes. His father told his mother and his friends that they would travel to San Francisco to catch the getaway boat, even though he planned to catch another vessel in Canada. When his wife saw that they were traveling north, she asked why, and Hunt’s father told his mother that he had lied to everyone about the escape plan because he believed there was a mole in his operation. And he didn’t trust her parents, who considered him an outlaw scoundral. Sure enough, a prohibition agent was en route to San Fran at the same time with a warrant in his pocket. Having successfully eluded him, the couple sailed abroad and lived in China for several year before returning to Seattle and giving birth to Edwin. His father was never arrested.
You can read more about my conversation with Edwin Hunt in the article. Also, there’s a clip from the film in which Hunt discusses all this on the PBS site.
