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About Cottage Grove sentinel. (Cottage Grove, Or.) 1909-current | View Entire Issue (June 19, 2019)
COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL | WEDNESDAY, JUNE 19, 2019 | 11A Offbeat Oregon World champion boxer by day, shanghaier by night for a customer and forced him to ship out. for The Sentinel The crimp then collect- n 1903, shanghaier ed the sailor’s room and Larry Sullivan was at board from the captain the height of his power of the ship as an advance in Portland. Hard-fisted against the sailor’s future and belligerent, yet social- wages — plus a bonus fee ly polished and with what that was popularly called passed in old Portland so- “blood money.” Shang- ciety for refined manners, haiing, which all crimps he was able to seamlessly practiced from time to move between the rough, time but which they all hard-drinking world of the vigorously denied ever old North End waterfront, doing, was doing the same and the refined gentle- thing with a stranger who men’s-club atmosphere of was not a boardinghouse the Arlington Club. guest — a new friend at It was Larry who’d first the bar, for instance, or the realized that, by organiz- out-of-town customer of a ing the great anonymous friendly prostitute.) population of sailors In the late 1880s, Larry drifting in and out of port, partnered up with the he could create a political Grant brothers of Asto- base for himself and use ria, forming the digni- it to swing elections with fied-sounding firm of gangs of “repeaters” who Sullivan, Grant Bros. & would drift from ballot McCarron — forming a box to ballot box on Elec- solid Portland-Astoria tion Day. consortium. Then, after This led to Larry the Grand Old Man of becoming politically Portland shangaiers, well-connected enough Jim Turk, weakened his to start taking over the position by trying to open sailors’ boardinghouse a shop in Tacoma in 1891, business in Portland. Larry and the Grant boys (Sailors’ boardinghouses moved in on his racket. were lodgings in which Then when Turk died, sailors could stay “on in 1895, Larry changed credit” while their ships up his game. The plan, were in port. When a ship now that Turk was out of needed a crew member, the way, was to establish the owner — called a a monopoly; leverage his “boarding master” by his political connections at friends and a “crimp” by the local and state level to everyone else — basically give him political cover; picked one of his guests, and jack up the prices he like a chef selecting a lob- charged the ship captains ster from the tank to cook for his services. By Finn J.D. John I knock-down-drag-out bar fight that Mysterious Billy started when out drinking with Larry. The two of them, with a companion named Jack Fahle, went to the Spo- kane Saloon near Second and Burnside, and there they encountered a trio of mos “Mysterious Swedes drinking 20-ounce Billy” Smith was orig- “scoops” of beer. inally from Canada but Billy, having already settled in Portland around shipped a full cargo of in- 1893 or 1894. When he toxicating beverages before arrived in Stumptown, arriving at the Spokane, he was boxing’s official took offence at something Welterweight Champion one of the Swedes said, of the World — a title whereupon (in the words he earned in 1892 and of the Oregonian’s report- held, on and off, until er) he “jumped on him 1900. (Welterweight is the and pounded his head till middle weight class, for it was soft.” boxers 140 to 147 pounds; “About this time Pow- heavier than Lightweight ers” — the owner of the and lighter than Middle- bar — “entered the room,” weight.) the reporter waggishly However, boxing was a recounts; “and, seeing that side hustle for Mysterious the well-known reputation Billy; apparently it didn’t of his place for a quiet make enough money to and orderly house was live on, even for a world somewhat in danger, he champion — or, more like- proceeded to restore quiet ly, managers and promot- and harmony by seizing a ers were raking off all his chair and laying about him winnings. His day job was with it among the three as a crimp. Swedes. His night bartend- Mysterious Billy started er also took a hand in the his crimping career circa scuffle, which raised such 1895, working as a board- a commotion that a police inghouse runner for Larry officer entered to see who Sullivan. was being killed. The two of them, as pro- “On the arrival of the fessional boxers and very officer, the three Swedes rowdy men, hit it off right were the only ones that away. A hilarious news knew anything about any article from 1896 tells trouble, Powers, Smith, of the courtroom drama and the bartender having that followed a massive apparently forgotten all Accordingly, he set about running all the com- petitors out of the board- inghouse business. By the turn of the centu- ry, he’d succeeded in doing so, and had the market to himself … with one espe- cially galling exception. A The Rotary Club of Cottage Grove Is pleased to announce the recipients for the 2019 Rotary Scholarships Kennedy High School Sydney Pate Maggie Penland Cottage Grove High School about the disturbance.” Billy was fined $25 for this little bit of horseplay. Larry, who had the good sense to leg it before the cops came, got off scot- free. But the peace and amity that made it possible for Billy and Larry to go out together to drink and brawl with loggers was not to last. About five years after the Spokane Saloon incident, Billy partnered up with the White Broth- ers — Jim and Harry, who were also working as runners for Sullivan at the time — and established a sailors’ boardinghouse on the east side of the river, by the Albina grain docks. Although Billy and the White boys saw their oper- ation as covering the east side and leaving the west side to Larry, Larry didn’t see it that way. For him, competition was compe- tition. It was to be gotten rid of as expeditiously as possible. Of course, Larry’s usual way of doing this involved pounding heads until they were soft. He was a skilled and accomplished heavy- weight boxer, a talent that frequently came in handy when it came time for one of his guests to ship out and the guest was reluctant to fulfil his “obligation.” But Mysterious Billy was the welterweight champi- on of the world. And sure, as a heavyweight Larry had a good 50 pounds on him; but he was no world champion, and plus he was getting older. So, Larry pulled some strings in the Legislature and got Billy’s operation outlawed. Now, as a practicing historian I have to confess that I have no hard evi- dence that Larry pulled those strings. But, know- ing how well connected he was politically, the fact that in 1903 the state Leg- islature created a Sailors’ Boardinghouse Commis- sion whose obvious sole purpose was to grant a monopoly to Sullivan, Grant Bros. & McCarron is good enough for me. The new commission moved immediately to do exactly that. It issued pin-on badges to Larry and his employees identi- fying them as authorized crimps, and a letter to Billy and his partners ordering them to imme- diately cease and desist operations. T he commission members justified this little exercise in “Conspir- acy in Restraint of Trade” with the highly dubious claim that, by establish- ing a monopoly in the boardinghouse business, they were acting to reduce prices. Since Turk’s death, Sullivan had consolidat- ed his monopoly and used it to run the average blood-money bonus up over $100 a head; shippers had started avoiding the port, and consequently the cost of shipping sailors was on everyone’s mind. What Sullivan did was to boldly harness that sen- sitivity and use it to make things worse, while trying to convince everyone that it would actually make things better. It was rather like a fox arguing that the solution to a chicken predation problem was to license a single fox to eat all the chickens. The problem was, although the new com- mission had the law on its side, it had none of the popular respect and legit- imacy that usually goes along with it. This was probably because, although it was fully empowered to revoke licenses for all violations of the state law (for in- stance, boarding incoming ships to entice sailors to desert, or charging $100 blood-money bonuses instead of the legally stip- ulated $30), it never did anything of the sort. Those practices went on unabated and unpunished. What the commission did do, at every opportunity, was to order all of Larry Sullivan’s competitors to go out of business. Those competitors, not surprisingly, challenged the commission’s author- ity, both in the courts and on the streets. We’ll talk about what sort of success they had, and how the Portland Shanghaiing Wars con- cluded, in next week’s column. (Sources: Portland’s Lost Waterfront and The Oregon Shanghaiers, two books by Barney Blalock published in 2012 and 2014 respectively; Portland Morning Orego- nian archives from 1896, 1902, 1903, and 1904) SOUTH LANE COUNTY FIRE & RESCUE SAVE MONEY. SAVE LIVES. Gwenyth Fisk Kenzie Parsons Keely Galbreath Congratulations on a job well done! Ground Ambulance Memberships $65 per year Ground Ambulance & Air Membership $115 per year Rotary Club of Cottage Grove Call 541-942-4493 for info. FOR EMERGENCY DIAL 911 Serving South Lane County.
