There is a deeply treasured delusion among the local populace that there exists a Cincinnati “type.” We imagine ourselves as unfailingly polite, conservative in the old-fashioned sense of that word, and reverential toward our Germanic roots so long as that heritage includes Macedonian chili and French-pot ice cream. We tend to downplay our scoundrels, scofflaws, and poltroons as exceptions.
For the past decade in my Cincinnati Curiosities blog, which is shared on the web through Cincinnati Magazine, I have attempted to expose the inconsistencies in our mythology and the shoddy underpinnings of our mythologies. It’s a labor of love. In my research, I’ve uncovered a number of real rascals who, whether we like it or not, have helped define Cincinnati. We need not be embarrassed by them; in fact, I think of them as contributing to the “authenticity” we all profess to admire about our city.
Any list on any topic is bound to be incomplete and controversial, and this roundup is no different. It’s apparent I have ignored some obvious reprobates (a tip of the cap to Pete Rose), but I do so because they’re obvious. Obvious bores me. These are the infamous and notorious folks I find most fascinating. Each one materialized from a bottomless rabbit hole of legends, tall tales, and newspaper clippings.
For the first century or more of Cincinnati’s history, the local population swelled as fanatics, swindlers, connivers, and visionaries bolted the constraints of Europe and uppity East Coast America for what was then the Wild West. Face it, the Cincinnati “type” was half-bonkers from the very beginning.
ILLUSTRATION BY LARS LEETARU
The BODY SNATCHER
William “Old Cunny” Cunningham (c. 1820–1871)
While he was alive, Cincinnati mothers called William Cunningham “Old Man Dead” and invoked his name to frighten naughty children. At a time when the city boasted five medical schools, all clamoring for anatomy specimens while laws prohibited body donations, the assistance of a “resurrectionist” was very much in demand.
Over a career of 25 or 30 years, it’s been estimated that Cunningham “resurrected” 100 or more buried corpses every year and sold them for between $20 and $30 each. Doctors as far afield as Michigan and Kansas subscribed to “Old Cunny’s” anatomical supply service. He was a regular at the American Express office, shipping bodies out of town in crates labeled “Glass. Handle With Care.”
Grave-robbing was rampant in the Queen City in the mid-1800s, and the cops and nightwatchmen had itchy trigger fingers. Old Cunny carried a load of buckshot in one leg for most of his life. His encounters with the law were rare and his escapades legendary. On at least one occasion, Cunny propped his latest acquisition next to him on the seat of his wagon. Whenever someone approached, Cunny loudly chastised his “passenger” for drinking too much.
It was a heart condition that eventually brought William Cunningham to his doom, but the old ghoul didn’t rest in any graveyard. He sold his own earthly remains to the Medical College of Ohio, where his skeleton was displayed for decades. The students set his bones atop a tombstone and stuck a spade in his hand and a pipe in his eternally grinning mouth.
The MAD SCIENTIST
Roberts Bartholow (1831–1904)
Like a scene in some madman’s laboratory right out of a classic horror movie, a Cincinnati doctor stabbed several electrified needles into a patient’s brain in 1874. Although this experiment inspired new avenues for neurological research, Roberts Bartholow succumbed to public pressure and publicly apologized, opening a new chapter in the evolution of medical ethics.
Generally admired as a brilliant physician, Bartholow had a huge ego that precipitated feuds with many of his colleagues. After being driven out of Cincinnati’s Commercial Hospital, he landed at Good Samaritan Hospital, where he built the region’s first electrical medical laboratory. Claiming that electricity could cure anything from hemorrhoids to nasal polyps to cysts caused by tapeworms, he used the apparatus housed in his high-voltage facility to instruct students convened in the operating theater next door.
One day Mary Rafferty, a 30-year-old Irish immigrant with a hole in her skull caused by an eroding cancerous ulcer, walked into this laboratory looking for help. Over the course of a few days, Bartholow repeatedly inserted electrically charged needles into her exposed brain. The probing usually elicited little more than tingling and giggles but did precipitate seizures, convulsions, and weeping.
Eventually Rafferty’s condition worsened, the experiments were terminated, and she died. Other doctors were horrified by Bartholow’s treatment of his “patient,” so he felt compelled to publish a detailed apology in the British Medical Journal. His reputation didn’t suffer at all, and he enjoyed a prestigious career. Bartholow’s death followed a debilitating nervous breakdown.
The VOODOO DOCTOR
King Prince Dawson (c. 1840–1907)
King Prince Dawson said he was a Voodoo Doctor, and who in Cincinnati was going to prove him wrong? Back in 1888, all sorts of spiritualists, theosophists, agnostics, cultists, and philosophers set up in the Queen City—some even (sort of) authentic. But Dawson had the voodoo market all to himself, inspiring an incredulous judge to conjecture that maybe Dawson really did have some mystical power.
The Voodoo Doctor had been hauled into court on charges he’d effected an abortion by supplying herbal concoctions to a pregnant woman. Dawson testified he knew nothing about abortions and, in any event, was in Xenia on the evening in question. With alibi witnesses from both locations, the judge could only hypothesize that Dawson could clone himself. The jury was certainly impressed; Dawson was acquitted.
It would have been difficult to misidentify our own Voodoo Doctor. He was extraordinarily tall for the time and wore his snow-white hair in a long Mohawk. His mustaches—they were always referred to in the plural—hung down to his chest. Although clearly Black, he claimed descent from Cherokee royalty, Tartar royalty, Zulu royalty, or whatever noble lineage would impress his clients or the law.
Dawson most certainly did induce abortions, but he found himself on trial more often on account of missing poultry. When he was run over by a train, his body lay unclaimed for some weeks before a daughter traveled down from Dayton to claim it and to give our Voodoo Doctor his true name: Dawson Brock, freed slave and Civil War cook.
ILLUSTRATION BY LARS LEETARU
The SLUMLORD
William Devou Jr. (1855–1937)
It’s difficult to imagine the psychological machinations at work in transforming a pampered rich boy into a slovenly slumlord. The historian searches in vain for any hint of trauma in William P. Devou Jr.’s upbringing. His father made a lot of money crafting hats for Cincinnati’s society dames, and William was educated at the finest Eastern finishing schools and sent to Europe for college.
On his return to the U.S., Devou clerked in his father’s millinery on Pearl Street and began investing in real estate, particularly very cheap real estate in the West End. Occupants of his many tenements recall him riding around the neighborhood on a swaybacked white nag come the first of the month, carrying a book of rent receipts with eviction notices printed on the back for those who couldn’t pay. Devou slept on a cot at the back of his office next door to a brothel, cooked his own meals, and never spent a dime to hire a repairman, insisting on doing all work himself.
Devou’s neglected buildings earned a deserved reputation as Cincinnati’s worst slums. He was constantly in court paying fines for ignoring complaints from his impoverished tenants. After his parents died, Devou donated their farm to the city of Covington for use as a park. When he joined them in the cemetery, it took years for the courts to sell all his real estate, while the rents from whorehouses, speakeasies, and gambling dens paid for lots of flowers in scenic Devou Park.
The ABORTIONIST
Annie Florein (c. 1860–1927)
Around 1900, Cincinnati offered a half-dozen maternity hospitals at a time when women overwhelmingly preferred to give birth at home. In general, these hospitals offered services to women who could not give birth at home because their families didn’t know they were pregnant, whose families knew they were pregnant and threw them out, or who had no family at all.
Most maternity hospitals were legitimate. A couple were not. “Doctor” Annie Florein’s Sanitarium was firmly in the “not” category.
Although she claimed to have earned a medical degree at the age of 16 in India, Florein made sure that physicians with more authentic credentials signed all medical documents at her facility.
Florein’s special skill was discretion. She took in women facing social ruin and made their problems disappear, sometimes through adoption but just as often through abortion. She was convicted only once, but was cleared on appeal. Ohio’s anti-abortion laws at the time, in the interest of delicacy, were so vaguely worded that they couldn’t be enforced.
Her activities were exposed by a highly publicized case in 1914 in which she was accused of helping a phony spiritualist procure “spirit children” for a gullible politician whose mistress had died. Despite the revelations, Florein operated her sanitarium and its discreet services until just before her death in 1927. As she shuffled off this mortal coil, it was discovered that her name wasn’t Florein: Annie had been preceded in death by her husband, Orange Flowers.
The RADICAL
Lotta Burke (1869–1960)
It appears that Lotta Burke emerged from her mother’s womb already fighting for justice. Born to Irish immigrants of extremely modest means, she was forced to work as soon as she was capable, most often as a seamstress or dressmaker. That work led her into union organizing and Socialist politics.
Burke befriended the leading lights of the international Socialist movement as well as Irish nationalists on the run from British agents. She had some role in every Labor Day celebration, mostly through her activity in the Women’s Union Label League, which promoted “equal pay for equal work, regardless of sex.”
When the U.S. entered World War I in 1917, a dozen Cincinnati Socialists, including Burke, were arrested on charges of sedition for distributing leaflets advising men to avoid the draft. The case dragged on for years and was finally dismissed by the U.S. Supreme Court. While under indictment, Burke ramped up her radicalism by organizing an office of the Communist Labor Party in Cincinnati. That effort landed her on the front page again when members of a local American Legion post broke into her offices, demolished the furniture and carried piles of literature into a bonfire in the middle of the street.
Burke sued the American Legion for damages but lost, the jury no doubt swayed by her unapologetic commitment to the Bolshevik cause.
The KONJOLA KING
Gilbert Mosby (1887–1944)
As the 1920s dawned and the sober clamps of Prohibition tightened on Americans’ throats, a young man slaving away in the sweaty bowels of a Cincinnati patent-medicine factory had a brilliant idea. The slop is mostly flavored alcohol, Gilbert Mosby reasoned, and as long as it won’t kill you it can be legally sold as medicine.
Mosby resigned from the factory and incorporated his own tonic manufactory, the Mosby Medicine Company, to produce an elixir sold as “Konjola.” With not the slightest shred of evidence, Mosby claimed Konjola would cure anything from acne to zygomycosis. The people who bought it—and they bought lots of it—cared not a whit. It was legal, readily available, and saved them the inconvenience of trying to locate an honest bootlegger.
Within six years, Mosby hauled in enough sales revenue to erect a Hyde Park mansion. Konjola was a national triumph. Mosby installed a spectacular 84-by-32-foot neon sign advertising Konjola on the central pier of the Atlantic City boardwalk. His advertisements filled newspapers from coast to coast. And then it all collapsed.
Both Mosby and his wife had wandering eyes, multiple love affairs, and expensive tastes. They ended up in divorce court just as Prohibition faded away and, with it, the thirst for vegetable nostrums. A couple of divorces later, Mosby found himself bankrupt and trying to convince George Remus, King of the Bootleggers, to invest in his latest elixir scam.
ILLUSTRATION BY LARS LEETARU
The KILLER CLOWN
William Shewmaker (1890–1961)
The Eighth and State neighborhood in Lower Price Hill has had a tough reputation since the old Incline landed there, but killer clowns? Seriously? As William Shewmaker testified, he and a couple of friends were walking along State Street to a party on Halloween night in 1921. They were all dressed as clowns when a group of strangers hassled them about their costumes. One of the strangers tried to grab someone’s mask, and a fracas erupted.
The assailants, Robert and William Cahill and four of their friends, outnumbered the clowns and were getting the best of the motley crew when Shewmaker whipped out a revolver and fired several shots. When the shooting stopped, an innocent passerby was dead and Robert Cahill was fatally wounded. The clowns split the scene.
It took almost a year to locate suspects and witnesses so the case could be tried. Despite the prosecution’s efforts to paint Shewmaker as the perpetrator, witnesses testified that Shewmaker’s first shots were aimed at the ground and failed to deter the Cahills, who thought he was shooting blanks. Only then did he aim at his attackers.
The defense paraded Shewmaker’s sympathetic wife and tiny children for the benefit of the courtroom artists. The jury failed to reach a verdict on a charge of second-degree murder or on a charge of manslaughter. When they couldn’t even agree on an assault charge, they threw in the judicial towel and the Killer Clown of Price Hill walked free.
The NEWPORT GANGSTER BOSS
Frank J. “Screw” Andrews (1911–1973)
No one is born with a name like “Screw.” You have to fight for a moniker of that caliber.
Over the course of a decidedly checkered career, Frank Joseph Andriola certainly earned his bones. Born into the “Little Italy” neighborhood clinging to the fringe of Walnut Hills, he found a lucrative hustle shuttling bootleg hootch in the West End, where he learned the numbers racket. Cincinnati cops were too honest at the time, so he relocated to Newport.
The law in Northern Kentucky mostly looked the other way, but competition in the underworld there was ferocious, with the Cleveland mob muscling in and homegrown operatives reluctant to welcome a newcomer. Unleashing a brutal repertoire of shakedowns, buyouts, and rubouts, Andrews put the screws on his mostly African American rivals and soon had a tidy little sinecure as a numbers king.
It’s been estimated that Andrews’s Sportsman’s Club on Central Avenue raked in as much as $2 million in 1959 alone. Tough guys and made men didn’t bother Frank, but the taxman was another matter. Shady bookkeeping landed him in jail for years at a time, and declining health sent him into lengthy hospitalizations.
Newport legend claims that some thugs in trench coats tossed Andrews out a hospital window. The coroner ruled that the befuddled old man fell to his death accidentally.
The YIPPIE and the YUPPIE
Jerry Rubin (1938–1994)
Cincinnati was first introduced to the self-promotional skills of Jerry Clyde Rubin in 1955, when he and a Walnut Hills High School colleague wrangled a slot at The Cincinnati Post reporting local basketball scores. A few years later, as a UC student, Rubin moved on to reporting campus news for The Post’s society columns.
This early immersion in the media machine might suggest why some people, including Rubin himself, suspect that his later infamy was based more on Groucho Marx than Karl Marx. Rubin’s life was a trail of public spectacles and humorous high jinks. Testifying at the House Un-American Activities Committee dressed as Santa Claus? Attempting to levitate the Pentagon? Nominating a pig for President? Paralyzing the New York Stock Exchange by tossing dollar bills onto the trading floor? Guerilla theater while on trial with the Chicago Seven? Pure Rubin.
Throughout the 1960s, Rubin’s political schtick sent conservative nabobs into apoplexy while goosing an addiction to fame for fame’s sake. When the hippie zeitgeist cooled, he took a sabbatical to explore the human potential movement, emerging as a socially conscious entrepreneur. His new persona confused (and often outraged) his left-wing comrades as he appeared to embrace the establishment he’d once tried to incinerate. While everyone else debated, Rubin banked millions from investments.
True to form, he was breaking the law—jaywalking—when a motorist ran him over in Los Angeles in 1994.
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