ALL THE NEWS YOU CAN STAND TO READ
Well not all, but I spent about three very long 10 hour days sitting at the micro film reader in the Patchogue Medford Library looking at the pages of the Patchogue Advance from the fall of 1926 (which was where I left off in August of 2004) up till about 1935. Most of the time it was just me and Zulal in the room and Zulal wasn't giving me any hints about where to look......
I returned with a stack of about 150 -200 print outs mostly of innocuous social goings on in Mastic, Mastic Beach, Moriches, and Brookhaven ........
But every once in a while I would find something of intense interest......at least to me.....like these items I found almost right off the bat....
JUNE 1927
There never was any consistency in the Advance as to where an item would wind up, so you have to check the news from all the neighboring towns. This one dateline Moriches could of been easily missed, as after a few hours of scrolling microfilm, ones eyes begin to glaze over. The first thing that caught my eye here was the name Doris Penney, then it was the sail to the beach with Mrs. W. E. Baker of Mastic..... that would be the soon to be divorced Mrs. W. Edgar Baker and future Mrs. William S. Dana (aka Ella Dana)..BUT it was the last item of a "notable event" that really got my adreanilin going...
SEPT 1929
This next story or I should say a variation of it, I first heard about three years ago direct from the horses mouth...that horse being not Zulal nor Mr. Ed, but one Greta Spiess Tucker, grandaughter of Paul Schulte and longtime propieter of his tavern. She told me that her grandfather bootlegged out of his first business the Mastic Beach Hotel....... I asked her if he ever got caught, she said not really. She then proceeded to send me a bunch of early Mastic Beach photos that are located here. The newspaper typoed his name as Paul Schuett, but I wonder if it was typoed on the search warrent also...if so that might explain Greta's " not actually " and why I found no trace of a follow up to this story that appeared in the Advance on Friday the 13th of September 1929. Actually from about 1928- 33 there was at least one or two stories in the Advance every week about raids or rum running. Some were pretty hairy with gun battles, boat and car chases etc, Because of all the privacy it afforded, Suffolk County was a major manufacturing and import center for booze all during the Volstead Act 1919-1933. And stills continued long after repeal. Of interest is the mention of "a two story house nearby" that had the actual still in it. ...that could of very well been the then empty General Woodhull homestead, as it was directly to the east on the property that the hotel was built on. Two story houses in Mastic Beach then were very rare save for the few 19th century ones.
I have a whole lot more interesting articles from the Advance files and will be adding some in the months to come...stay tuned