Message in a bottle

Bryce Bauer grew up hearing stories of Templeton Rye, the Prohibition-era bootleg whiskey that, according to legend, was a favored drink of famed gangster Al Capone.

Such stories helped fuel the modern rise of a legal version of Templeton Rye, which started hitting store shelves in 2006 and has since surged in popularity.

Growing up in Audubon, Iowa, just down the road from Templeton, the town that gave the liquor its name, Bauer knew the history of the whiskey was integral to the community.

'I'd heard of Templeton Rye since I was a child,” he said. 'One of our friends was a great storyteller and a robust drinker. He knew a lot about Templeton Rye and told stories.”

Bauer wanted to dive into those stories and find the truth behind them. When he and family friend Dan Manatt decided to research the liquor, he wasn't sure how much verifiable fact they'd be able to find. He was pleasantly surprised.

'In 2005, we started collecting oral histories of people around Templeton,” he said. 'At the time we were told there wasn't much.”

So Bauer headed to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and stumbled on a treasure trove of Prohibition-era case files, which led to newspaper clippings and other archived materials.

Together they painted a picture of a town of less than 500 people who banded together to produce quality whiskey. By 2012, as Bauer was finishing his masters in fine arts in creative non-fiction at Sarah Lawrence College, what had started out as a documentary project had grown to include a book proposal.

The book, 'Gentlemen Bootleggers: The True Story of Templeton Rye, Prohibition, and a Small Town in Cahoots” was released by Chicago Review Press on July 1. The companion documentary, 'Whiskey Cookers: The Amazing Story of the Bootleggers of Templeton, Iowa” will premiere Aug. 21 to Aug. 24 at Iowa City's Landlocked Film Festival.

Attending the film festival will be a homecoming of sorts for Bauer, 27, who graduated from the University of Iowa. (Editor's note: He also spent time as a Gazette intern in 2008.) He now lives in New York City, where he teaches writing at Manhattan Community College.

In 'Gentlemen Bootleggers,” Bauer contrasts the big city experience of bootlegging and the 'Roaring 20s” and what the Prohibition-era looked like in a small Midwestern town.

'One of the things I really hope people take away from it is how unique the Templeton Rye story is. You have cities like Chicago, New York, Kansas City, Detroit, New Orleans, where Prohibition gang violence really ran roughshod over civil society,” he said.

In Templeton there were no gangs. Instead, almost everyone in town was involved, from the local Catholic priest and the Justice of the Peace to shop owners, farmers, bakers and telephone operators.

In return, the bootleggers kept the town financially afloat.

'They were breaking the law but they were breaking the law in a way that helped a lot of their neighbors,” Bauer said. 'The money these bootleggers earned helped keep a lot of farms afloat and helped pay off a lot of mortgages.”

Those and other stories pepper the book, from the federal agent from a nearby town who pursued the lawbreakers to anti-German sentiment in the county after World War I to the role of the Ku Klux Klan in enforcing Prohibition laws.

'It's stories like that I didn't expect to find,” Bauer said.