I showed him my pictures of my grandmother and her husband in front of the old Hollywood. With a diabolical smile spreading across his face, he said with admiration, “Johnny Vill never worked a day in his life. He had always stood out. He always had a nice suit and drove a new car.” And this was at a time in the Depression, when lots of people were just scraping by or worse.

As for the old Hollywood, he said, “It was a place where you could rent a room for an hour or two. Or you could get a girl there in the bar. ... It was like a blind pig.” His black eyes shined. “It was a wild place.” He explained that “the girls were from out of town, from Chicago or Milwaukee.” He didn’t remember Mae. When I asked him who was managing the prostitutes, he said he thought it was the man’s job to run the girls.

Like the woman at the senior center, he mentioned “there were a lot of slots there.” He bluntly told me that in the old days, the sheriff would get people in and out of trouble with the law in exchange for money. This explained a little more about what Pat had told me the night before, that the sheriff had just been there to collect payoffs.

On the outskirts of Iron Mountain I called on a woman, whom I had been told had relatives who had owned a brothel on the curve in the highway in the old days. I found her at home, feeding a small army of yellow finches that flew loose in her house. She described the frontier atmosphere in the town back in the 1930s and 1940s, saying that a few crooked local officials had control the town. However, referring to the brothels, one of which had been owned by a relative, she said, “Everybody ran a clean business. That’s just how everyone made a living back then. There was nothing wrong with it.”

I now had a bigger picture to work with. What I knew for sure was here was a young mother on her own, who couldn’t get a regular job, who probably had to work nights and leave her child alone (as many people did in those days), who had no financial security, and who had a live-in Mafia friend. My dad had long since died by the time I came to wonder if she had been trafficked into prostitution. My cousin Doris, in her early 80s, whom I spoke to a couple times on the phone, recently offered, “You know your grandmother was kind of a black sheep.” And then she clammed up on the details.

This little “metropolis” had no houses or other buildings, just bare trees that had already dropped their leaves in September, desolate but beautiful pines, and lonely but lovely lakes. The name of the town? Spread Eagle.He characterized the brothel business as “lucrative.” I had found in the Register of Deeds records that Mae and Johnny paid cash for their place, but it was soon mortgaged. When the mortgage was paid off, it was re-mortgaged, so they themselves were not rolling in money, or perhaps their fortunes went up and down. However, in a letter to my dad, Mae comments on her competitor, the Riverside: “If they close to-morow I guess they can’t kick. They are tying up all the real-estate now they can. Right now they have an all girl band and a woman organ player.”

In his candid manner, Pat mentioned a place that would serve children booze. He went there to drink with his friends when they were kids. The Wisconsin Legislative Committee Report and Recommendations of the Wisconsin Legislative Committee to Investigate the White Slave Traffic and Kindred Subjects confirms the nearly universal distribution of liquor to minors at the time. Also when he was a kid, Pat recalls how he would “go out and shoot deer and get paid for it, so people could strap it on their car and take it home after drinking, gambling, and buying prostitutes on their hunting vacation.”

Pat again said, “We had no law.” He further explained how things ran in the old days. “Local officials pulled the town together and created a Mafia atmosphere. Fines [for prostitution] went to the judge and the sheriff.” In the 1930s and 1940s, the sheriff was elected and held his position without pay. “The sheriff was just there to collect payoffs.” For raids, “the sheriff would deputize people for the day. People had badges at home, so when they were deputized by a phone call, they would just put on the badge and go to the raid.” He said the old phone system had twenty people to a line, each having a different ring. His parents and many others kept a badge and a gun at home for times when they would get the call to be deputized. He said there was a special ring which would signal everybody to come for a raid. “A raid happened when someone was not being paid off properly.” Then arrests of prostitutes (but never the brothel owners who sold the women or their clientele who bought the women) would be made and fines paid, not to the county, but to the sheriff’s own pockets.

Mom’s careful observation from her youth about “judges, lawyers and local officials spending the weekend with young attractively dressed girls,” was another dimension to this quid pro quo relationship. These perks, along with payoffs or fines allowed brothels to thrive under the eye of local representatives of the law.

In addition, some of these same local officials owned the slot machines and reaped a huge percentage of these profits. I had read in the Wisconsin report on the white slave traffic that slot machines were common in the bars the state had investigated. I also remembered something about slot machines in a letter from Mae to Dad and looked it up. Here is a fine description of the situation on June 28, 1945.

As far as slot machines they are positively out, no doubt you read how the governor signed the Anti-gambling Bill. They claim even Bingo is out if that is so I think the Riverside will close up. They put on about three times as many enforcement’s agents so that will keep us closed pretty tight as far as the one oclock closing for awhile. [So and so], the operator of the slot machines was in tonite and took out all the machines and said the people needn’t expect any-thing for at least two years, so I guess that’s that.