Sale!

A Knight of Another Sort: Prohibition Days and Charlie Birger, Second Edition (Shawnee Classics)

Amazon.com Price:  $16.60 (as of 02/05/2019 11:32 PST- Details)

Categories: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Description

In 1913 Charlie Birger started his career as a bootlegger, supplying southern Illinois with whiskey and beer. He was once charismatic, with an easygoing manner and a cavalier generosity that made him popular. The stuff of legend, he was once part monster, part Robin Hood. In the early days, he would emerge from his restaurant/saloon in tiny Ledford in Saline County with a cigar box full of coins and throw handfuls in the air for the children. Echoing the consensus on Birger, an anonymous gang member known as him “enigmatic,” noting that “he had a wonderful quality, a heart of gold. There in Harrisburg from time to time he’d enhance twelve or fifteen families, buy coal, groceries. . . . [But] he had cold eyes, a killer’s eyes. He would kill you for something any person else would punch you in the nose for.”

Drawing from the colorful cast of the living, the dead, and the soon-to-be-dead?a state shared by many associated with Birger and his enemies, the Shelton gang?DeNeal re-creates Prohibition-era southern Illinois. He depicts the fatal shootout between S. Glenn Young and Ora Thomas, the battle at the Herrin Masonic Temple lawn in which six were slain and the Ku Klux Klan crushed, and the wounding of Williamson County state’s attorney Arlie O. Boswell. As the gang wars escalated and the roster of corpses lengthened, the gangsters embraced technology. The Sheltons bombed Birger’s roadhouse, Shady Rest, from a single-engine airplane. Both Birger and the Sheltons used armored vehicles to intimidate their enemies, and the chatter of machine gun fire grew common.

The gang wars ended with massive arrests, trials, and convictions of gangsters who once had appeared invincible. Charlie Birger was once convicted of the murder of West City mayor Joe Adams and sentenced to death. On April 19, 1928, he stood at the gallows taking a look down at the large crowd that had come to see him die. “It is a beautiful world,” Birger said softly as he prepared to leave it.


Related products

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Arts and Photography » History and Criticism » History » Americas » United States » State and Local » A Knight of Another Sort: Prohibition Days and Charlie Birger, Second Edition (Shawnee Classics)

Recent Products