I always considered my 94-year-old uncle one of
Springfield’s best unofficial historians—he tells me interesting stories that I
had never heard, so when he mentioned a notorious, scruffy Depression-era
group of men called the “Wood Dogs” that used to have drunken parties on the
shore of Watershops Pond, I wanted him to tell me more.
He asserted that the Wood Dogs, many of whom lived in the
Six Corners neighborhood, were virtually wiped out by methyl alcohol poisoning
after one of their outdoor bashes. “Around 10 of them died,” he said. I thought
he had to be exaggerating. Surely I would have heard about this calamity. But
when I looked it up, he was close: on February 1, 1932 nine Wood Dogs perished after
drinking industrial alcohol.
An investigation revealed that the men had been buying
denatured alcohol from hardware stores and paint shops for years and drinking
it at a place off Hickory Street on Watershops—a spot they called “Pittsburgh” or “Smoky City,” the latter nicknamed
after the stuff they imbibed: “smoke,” which is a cloudy, murky white (and
sometimes deadly) cocktail. On the day of the fateful party, one of the Wood
Dogs, 40-year-old Charles Higgins, of 278 Walnut Street, bought methyl alcohol
(antifreeze) from a gas station and brought it to the shoreline behind the
Springfield Ice Company’s icehouse off Hancock Street (pictured below—the conveyor ramp is on the left). He and his buddies built
a bonfire and started sipping.
The white arrows below mark the spot of the party. It’s now the land occupied by Springfield College’s Gulick Hall and its President’s House.
This was no ordinary binge: later in the day the partygoers started getting really sick. Of the 12 Wood Dogs who quaffed the “smoke,” only three survived. No charges were ever filed. The gas station attendant was exonerated because he didn’t know they would drink it.
This was no ordinary binge: later in the day the partygoers started getting really sick. Of the 12 Wood Dogs who quaffed the “smoke,” only three survived. No charges were ever filed. The gas station attendant was exonerated because he didn’t know they would drink it.
Thirty-seven-year-old Michael Splaine was working for the
city as a foreman for a road repair crew and was on his way home from work when
he joined the party. He was feeling cold and gladly accepted the drinks when
offered. I bet that brew warmed him up all right! He also said the Wood Dogs
were in good spirits (Because the spirits were good!) and told him that the liquor was the best they had had in
a long time. For most of them, it was their final bender.
It’s no secret that during Prohibition (1919-1933) some people resorted to drinking denatured
alcohol, and antifreeze mixtures were especially sought after during the Great
Depression (1929-1939) because it sold for 50 percent less than ordinary
denatured alcohol. Despite well-publicized fatalities, people drank it anyway:
on Christmas Day in 1926 and on the two following days, 31 people in New York
City died of methyl alcohol poisoning.
In fact, the Wood Dogs used to drain radiator fluid from
cars parked near Springfield College and drink the rusty liquid!
The end of the article refers to the “1919 catastrophe in
the Connecticut Valley,” in which a (literally) staggering 53 people—not
including the death toll in Hartford—succumbed near the end of the year after
drinking concoctions that were made of whiskey and wood alcohol (methyl
alcohol). There were charges in this
massacre, but it’s hard to tell if there were any convictions from these
holiday parties gone bad.
There were many such deaths nationwide around Christmas of
1919—enough to lead to severe restrictions on the sale of this “coroner’s cocktail.”
The federal government had required companies to
denature—that is, deliberately poison—industrial alcohol to make it undrinkable
long before Prohibition, but bootleggers hired chemists to “renature”
it—sometimes successfully, sometimes not. The Treasury Department’s response,
especially after an estimated 60 million gallons of industrial alcohol was
being stolen every year in the 1920s, was to add even more poisons to it in
1926. This caused the New York Christmas tragedy.
There was outrage. Public health officials were incensed.
“The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in
alcohol,” said New York City medical examiner Charles Norris in the closing
days of 1926. “Yet it continues its poisoning processes, heedless of the fact
that people determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison. Knowing this to
be true, the United States government must be charged with the moral
responsibility for the deaths that poisoned liquor causes, although it cannot
be held legally responsible.”
But in 1927, even more poisons were brought into denaturing
formulas, including kerosene, gasoline, benzene, iodine, mercury salts, ether, formaldehyde,
and chloroform. Yum! I’ll take mine on the rocks! They also upped the
percentage of methyl alcohol that was added: in some cases, denatured alcohol
was now made up of 10 percent methanol.
Later
that year Seymour M. Lowman, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in charge of
Prohibition, bragged that boozers were “dying off fast from poison ‘hooch'” and
that if the result was a sober America, “a good job will have been done.”
The government “spiking” of industrial alcohol ultimately
led to the deaths of more than 10,000 people before the repeal of the 18th
amendment. The New York death toll in 1926: around 400. The following year:
approximately 700.
The government’s “special” (homicidal?) denaturing program
ceased at the end of prohibition, but the stuff is still deliberately rendered
toxic, and people still drank it after Prohibition ended. This happened in
1941:
Unbelievably, Sterno (“canned heat”) caused 31 deaths in
Philadelphia in the Christmas of 1963. Such fatalities are now rare, except
maybe in South Africa and Russia (during a really cold winter).
* * * * * * * *
What became of the rest of the Wood Dogs? Hard to say. Frank
McClellan, one of the survivors, was arrested for stealing a purse the
following year. Was there a booze crew to replace the Wood Dogs on the bank of
Watershops Pond? There were undoubtedly other groups of men who drank in the
woods in Springfield as the Depression went on, but it’s probably safe to
assume that police checked that spot fairly regularly immediately after the
fatal party. Still, a 1947 article notes that there were drunkenness arrests at
the place every once in a while, but not lately. “Occasionally, some of them
would build shelters with branches and old clothes, and even dug holes in the
ground to protect them a bit from the elements. On rare occasions one of the inebriates would steal some minor item and
get in trouble with the cops,” according to the article. But “the Wood Dogs who
used to hang out there for many years have vanished. Probably most of them are
dead, police said.”
Eventually, the woods were gone. Development “wiped out the
wilderness tract where the locally famous Wood Dogs made their habitat,”
according to a 1951 article. Drunks instead made the banks of the Connecticut
River their official party place because it was “far removed from the prying
eyes of suspicious cops.” For many years “it has been the gathering spot for
certain lugs to foregather and sun themselves leisurely.”
Indeed, the term “Wood Dogs” was used by the Springfield
Newspapers to generically describe alcoholic vagrants who used drink…well…in
the woods in the 1940s and 1950s, and the nickname was even used as late as 1960
in an article on drunkenness arrests in Springfield.
Come to think of it, we used to drink in the woods. Were we
the “Wood Dogs” of the late 1970s and early 1980s? After all, we used to drink
some pretty rotgut stuff:
But we definitely didn’t even consider the alternative,
which is why we’re still alive today!
Good thing for us Acres Wood Dogs that the government didn’t poison Southern Comfort or Kappy’s Gin. Then again, it did spray marijuana crops with paraquat. But that’s another story. (Cough!)
