Clyde “Booty” Keiser faced an uphill battle. It was March 1912 when Keiser went before the Snyder County license court to ask that his retail liquor license be transferred from the hotel that he operated on North Market Street in Selinsgrove to a building just down the street—but at the very center of town. The Selinsgrove Times predicted that Keiser, manager of the City Hotel for the past two years, would have a hard time convincing two out of three judges to allow a liquor license within forty feet of the town’s public school.
Keiser was one of nine children, in a family that was knee-deep in the political and economic life of Selinsgrove and eastern Snyder County. His father, Percival, operated hotels, a ferry service across the Susquehanna, and an ice delivery service in the decades after the Civil War. When Percival died in 1907, the local press treated it as the end of an era. But Booty carried on where his father left off. He bought and sold land, he won contracts to reinforce county bridges, and he joined numerous fraternal clubs that gained him local clout. Booty climbed the ladder steadily, serving as a county committeeman for the Republican party. He was a savvy player in local politics, and that went hand-in-hand with holding a liquor license. Just five months before his license hearing, when Judge Albert Johnson did a campaign tour of Selinsgrove, it was Keiser who acted as his official host and handler. Johnson won that election and now sat on the bench to decide Keiser’s fate.
In the end, the hill that Keiser had to climb was not very steep. Despite the testimony of a few children about the availability of alcohol and the danger of a tavern so close to a school, Judge Johnson transferred the license. Keiser argued that he had to move his business due to the high rents charged at the City Hotel site; Johnson agreed, and issued a statement from the bench about the scourge of high rents and their undermining of the Brooks High License Law. If tavern proprietors had to pay such high rents, Johnson reasoned, they would find ways to make more money to offset the burden. Selling on Sundays was the most likely method to which desperate tavern operators would turn. Keeping rents low, said the judge, would help protect the community’s morals.
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With that decree, Judge Johnson allowed Keiser to open what would become the Farmers’ Inn at Pine and Market Streets. In the summer of 1915, he moved again, taking over the McKee’s Half Falls House twelve miles south of town. For five years, Keiser ran that hotel and catered to the motoring crowd. In 1921, Keiser returned to town and took over the National Hotel until March 1923. In 1926, Booty and his wife Emma opened a tea room on Market Street. He was in his mid-fifties at this point; Emma was in her late thirties.
From the turn of the century until his death in 1918, Abraham Whitmer, of East Pine Street on the Isle of Que, was Snyder County’s distributor for Sunbury’s Moeschlin Brewery. His bottling plant sat on Water Street, just north of the railroad tracks. The beer business did well for Whitmer; along with Dr. B.F. Wagenseller, Whitmer was one of the first Selinsgrove residents to purchase an automobile (in 1912). This was a clear sign of wealth, though Whitmer likely knew his business was always under threat from moral crusades.
In the mid-1910s, as temperance and prohibition sentiment became more pronounced in Snyder County, alcohol licensees like Whitmer surely felt the pressure applied by reformers. Attendees at an April 1912 meeting of the Selinsgrove parents-teachers association circulated remonstrances, documents that presented the case against specific alcohol licenses and, more generally, against all licenses in the county. In surrounding counties, crowds packed licensing hearings each winter to argue their case for or against the sale of alcohol. Each winter, too, the local press built up the suspense around which licenses might be refused.
In February 1915, Whitmer was the only wholesale licensee who applied. Two other wholesalers had dropped their bids for licenses in the previous few years, leaving Whitmer a local monopoly on beer distribution. Across the river, in Northumberland County, seven wholesale licenses were granted that year. Whitmer’s license was approved, as were the licenses of eleven retail locations in Snyder County. This was down from thirty-two licenses held in the county in 1912. Moreover, four other 1915 applications were held for further scrutiny. President Judge Albert Johnson believed that these licenses were unnecessary or that the applicants were unfit to sell alcohol in Snyder County.
Use the slider to see the change in Snyder County retail licenses between 1909 and 1915
Whether due to general controversy over the sale of alcohol, perennial issues like selling to minors, or more specific scandals involving bribes and gambling, the fate of alcohol licenses in area hotels was certainly up for grabs. In Sunbury, in the winter of 1914, saloon keepers barred all women from their establishments in order to protect themselves from the charge that they sold beer to “women of questionable character,” as the Mount Carmel Item put it. Such a move symbolized the defensive posture of licensees, people who knew that the high license system was vulnerable to local grassroots campaigns. Even the wettest of counties could become drier under enough pressure from voters. The twelve licenses approved in Snyder County in 1915 represented a decrease of twenty licenses in just three years. Let’s use 1915 as a snapshot of the politics of alcohol in Snyder County before Prohibition.
1915 Snyder County Licenses
BLUE markers represent the approved licenses. RED markers represent the denied or delayed licenses. CLICK on each marker for more details. Also CLICK on surrounding counties to see their “wet” or “dry” status.
One month later, in March 1915, the two associate judges on the licensing panel—including Frank Keller—voted to approve the four delayed applications. Marion Schoch, the editor of the Selinsgrove Times was incensed and openly attacked Keller and the other associate judge, Joseph Hendricks. Hendricks, Schoch explained, had betrayed those who had voted him into the position in 1909. He’d pledged to go along with the opinion of the President Judge. Now, he had been hoodwinked into believing that popular will was on the side of the license applicants. Keller, meanwhile, was “regarded safe by the liquor interests.” Schoch claimed that Keller had received “assistance from the liquor people” back in 1913.
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