What’s an editor to do when the biggest scandal of the young century drops on his desk?

This one had it all: Prohibition-era booze, a fancy neighborhood, crooked cops, hookers, a cover-up and a list of willing participants that reached into the highest echelons of Winston-Salem society. Allegedly.

It was the biggest story the city had seen since Santford Martin took over the editor’s desk of the Winston-Salem Journal, the city’s morning paper, in 1912 — just two years after taking a job as a reporter there.

And it came to him through reporting both solid and kind of sketchy, teasing out a short exchange that occurred during a trial about a completely separate matter. Martin honed in on it, began gathering facts and employed a little bit of journalistic gamesmanship to bring this one to light.

Momentum gathered on the front pages of the morning Journal for more than a week, when the story inexplicably vanished from the newspaper of record.

It’s likely that Martin didn’t know exactly what kind of tiger he had by the tail on the night of Saturday, Sept. 19, 1925, when he laid in copy for the next day’s paper with a juicy detail from the trial of Mrs. Grace Renner, who had been arrested for stealing a hat.

DAY 1

Sunday, Sept. 20, 1925

Woman’s Hint of Night Ride With Cops Stirs Court

Policemen’s Names are Linked With Ardmore ‘Parties’

Mayor and Chief in Secret Parley

Winston-Salem’s 12-Day Scandal began with a Sunday morning off-lead news piece, running on the left side of the broadsheet above the fold.

Following the three-line headline, just two columns across, were a series of subheaders in the newspaper style of the day.

It certainly sounds pretty juicy.

The story recounts a trial the day before in municipal court involving Mrs. Grace Renner, who had been convicted for stealing a hat, fined $25 and given a six-month suspended sentence.

But the nut paragraph concerned testimony from Mrs. Charles Johnson, Renner’s sister. While she was on the stand, Martin reported:

chiefthomas

Judge Watson stated that he had received a number of complaints charging that dances and liquor parties were being held in the home of Mrs. Johnson; and that many people, “both married and single,” were frequently seen at the place.

Now here’s where a little context comes into play. In 1925, the United States was six years into the grand experiment known as Prohibition, making it illegal to sell, manufacture or transport “intoxicating liquors” anywhere in the country.

We all know how that played out. But it would be eight more years before Prohibition was repealed. And though cops all over the nation turned a blind eye to the black-market liquor business, the idea of it happening in Ardmore was just too much for a guy like Santford Martin to take.

It’s important to note that Martin was what could be described as an “ardent prohibitionist.” And that North Carolina had been dry since 1909, 10 years before the rest of the country.

By 1925, Martin had already graduated with a law degree from Wake Forest University, worked as private secretary to Gov. Thomas W. Bickett, been named president of the NC Press Association, served on the state fisheries commission and sold war bonds during the Great War. And by that year, North Carolina had perhaps more illegal stills than any other state in the union.

It must have galled a man like Martin, whose editorship at the Journal marked a period of repressive politics — including segregation, which he hoped “negroes” would settle into “voluntarily.”

His feelings on alcohol are best illustrated by an anecdote about Martin and Marshall Kurfees, who served as mayor of Winston-Salem from 1949 to 1961 and was solidly on the “wet” side of the issue.

As the story goes, years before he became mayor Kurfees told Martin that he could throw three rocks from the Journal’s offices and with each hit a place where he could buy a drink.

Martin then had Kurfees subpoenaed; he found himself before a judge that very day with orders to disclose the speakeasies.

Kurfees unflappingly named the Robert E. Lee Hotel, the Twin City Club and the bus station, and then named three prominent political and business figures who routinely drank there.

As the story goes, Kurfees left the name of the reigning mayor off of the list. None of the names made it into Martin’s story in the Journal the next day.

Now, about those “parties”….

Suffice it to say that an editor like Santford Martin could never bring himself to put the word “whorehouse” in his newspaper.

The Sunday newspaper piece had Mrs. Charles Johnson — as she would be referred to in the Journal every single time throughout the scandal; we never learn her first name — in a car late Friday night with two Winston-Salem police officers. Riding around in cars had connotations of its own in those days.

And according to the piece, it was municipal court Judge TW Watson who addressed the parties after they were brought up during cross-examination. Martin quoted him as saying:

It is a question as to whether or not it is best to aggregate these people and have them where the police can watch them all the time, or to have them in the best hotels and the best residential sections of the city.

Martin must have learned about an emergency meeting between Mayor Thomas Barber and police Chief James Thomas, because he began questioning them about it. The mayor had no comment. Chief Thomas dropped a great quote:

What investigation? I haven’t heard anything about any investigation. You must have heard some rumor that hasn’t reached me.

The story could have died there, but Martin, empowered by the Sunday A-1 piece, began doing some digging. Things started to move quickly after Martin spent the rest of Sunday pestering the mayor and police chief.

One final piece of context: Winston-Salem, like most US cities, was a two-newspaper town in 1925. The Journal, which had not yet merged with the Sentinel, came out in the morning. The Sentinel was an evening paper. And they wouldn’t bite on the story for days.

DAY 2

Monday, Sept. 21, 1925

Woman’s Story of Night Ride Brings Suspension of Cop

Monday morning’s Journal ran the story as the lead in the upper-right corner, a follow-up to the previous day’s big scoop. Now Martin had a name: Sgt. WM Cofer, who had been suspended, and another, “plain-clothes officer” Gregory, who had not. Martin figured both had been along on the night ride with Mrs. Charles Johnson.

Both the mayor and the chief still were not talking, so Martin mined the testimony from the previous week’s trial, naming Miss Evona Allred as the one who brought initial charges against Mrs. Renner for stealing the hat. And he wraps the piece with a bit of editorializing — not necessarily inappropriate considering the journalistic standards of the day.

While the case is considered by some as small within itself, it is believed to have brought to a head an intolerable situation in the city which must be cleaned up. On the particular street where these ‘goingons’ were testified in court to have taken place, many people are said to have declined to rent apartments because of the moral situation.

And because of his dearth of material, Martin penned a gut-wrenching, flag-waving A-1 editorial under the headline, “Turn on the Light.” Among the highlights:

Instead of attempting to shield officers, if they are guilty, the responsible executive
authorities of WinstonSalem should be anxious to turn on all the light through the channel of publicity….

This is not Russia under the Czar or Germany under the Kaiser. Under our system of government, the people have a right to the fullest information possible concerning all public officials….

Secret government is the vilest fruit of autocracy and is opposed to the very genius of American institutions.

Santford Martin could really blow it up once he got going.

Downtown Winston-Salem in 1925

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