100 years ago in Spokane: Drug store owner accused of bootlegging

From our archives, 100 years ago

The Pacific Drug Store was the site of the largest booze bust in Spokane since the beginning of state prohibition.

Police confiscated 12 barrels of whisky, along with hundreds of bottles of beer, wine, sherry and rum. The haul took up most of the police storeroom at headquarters.

Police had heard rumors for weeks that the drug store’s owner, A.H. Goldberg, was a major bootlegger. They began to surreptitiously watch the neighborhood, and on one occasion the undercover officers “climbed into a hay mow and covered themselves with hay” while they watched bootlegging operations.

On this occasion, they watched Goldberg deliver two bottles of “horse medicine” to a teamster. It was actually whisky. Police jumped out and arrested Goldberg near an old shed behind the drug store, where he stored the booze.

Goldberg and a clerk were arrested for violating the prohibition laws, but the case wasn’t entirely straightforward. There were exceptions for alcoholic “medicine” in the prohibition laws and Goldberg maintained his innocence.

“I intend to fight this case to the limit and see if a druggist, established as I have been for six years, has any protection under the law,” said Goldberg.

From the censorship beat: City commissioner Fred K. McBroom threatened to confiscate films if theater managers did not comply with censorship laws. He cited the case of “The Isle of Love,” in which censors ordered a bathing scene cut, because a character named Helen steps out of the water and conceals herself behind a rock.

But the movie was shown with that scene intact.