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CSotD: The only way to stop a bad man in a car

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Mike Peterson Published: February 17, 2013 1 minute 2 comments

The Knight Life, with a Biblical passage that makes the whole argument worthwhile.

Fact is, the comparison is not all that far fetched. Funny, yes, but not far fetched.

Back when I was doing the "Lookback" feature at the paper where I worked, the issue of registering cars came up in the 75 Years Ago files, and it was greeted with objections that it would impinge on people's freedom. But Antonin Scalia had not been born yet, so it went forward.

Putting license plates on bumpers was not entirely effective, however. One of the difficulties in catching rum-runners in the days that followed was that, because cars didn't have permanent VINs, it was hard to prove that a particular car had or hadn't been stolen or who might have been responsible for its use. Cars were essentially untraceable.

So it was not unusual for bootleggers to use "disposable" cars: Either stolen or purchased inexpensively at auctions.

Then, if the police closed in, they simply abandoned the car and ran off into the woods, the profit margin on Canadian beer and whiskey being such that occasionally losing a carload and the car itself was just part of doing business. 

And then there was the separate issue of (A) who gives a damn and (B) what constitutes proof?

For all his faults, J. Edgar Hoover did make some inroads in both areas, but when, in 1924, a young deputy in Northern NY pursued some of these bootleggers and took a fatal charge of shot in the chest and face for his efforts, the fact that the abandoned Packard was licensed in the city of Plattsburgh and that a jacket left in the car had the name of a local man stenciled inside did not lead to any arrests that I was ever able to find, either in newspaper files or in histories of the era.

It was never personal. It was just business.

And only the "dry" newspaper did much reporting on the death to begin with. The "wet" paper nearly ignored it.

However, that same year, the state of New York began, for safety's sake, to license drivers, as this August 25, 1924 clipping from the Plattsburgh Daily Press attests:  

I am intrigued by the provision that, while any court or issuing agency can apparently suspend or revoke a license, only the Commissioner of Motor Vehicles himself can restore it. Combined with the fact that they printed up 2.5 million blank licenses, it kind of suggests that they weren't expecting a lot of them to be suspended.

Also, the line about date-of-birth towards the end, though accidentally repeated, remains pretty illegible. It's taking into account that, while drivers could get a license at 18, they weren't adults until they turned 21, so parental permission was required.

As for poor Phoebe Lucy in the brief at the end, the account leaves a question or two. Given that the village of Chazy is north of Ingraham, well, It's possible that she lived in the town of Chazy but not the village, since Ingraham is a community within the larger town itself. Or it's also possible that the report got the directions switched and she was headed north.

Not only is it slightly likelier that she'd be coming home from Plattsburgh (the circled "P") but it's considerably likelier that someone southbound would be running without lights and would abandon their car.

No, I didn't just stumble across all this by happenstance.