Midcoast Vintage wrote:We're still waiting for the story of how this beauty survived.
OK, here is the story. I just received the updated version and also got the OK for me to post it.
He is still looking for a photo which shows his grandfather along with the machine.
MY GRANDFATHERS WATLING OWL
By James Jaeger
Hugo “ Dutch” Hagenah began his working life at age eleven in a Vernon County Wisconsin logging camp as a cooks helper. At age fifteen he went to work in the Hillsboro WI grist mill. After three years he became the foreman of the mill. Several years later he married my grandmother Mattie Page. They met in downtown Hillsboro where she sold popcorn out of a wagon in the evenings. Soon after they married they had a son that they named Willie, and later my mother Etta. Unfortunately, Willie drowned in the grist mill pond when he was nine. The mill closed the following year and Dutch bought a building on Water Avenue and opened a pool hall.
My grandfather named the pool hall Bills’ Pool Hall after his son Willie. It had two pool tables and a bar upstairs and two duck pin alleys in the basement. He purchased several slot machines including his Watling Owl for the customers to play.
In 1928 slot machines were outlawed in WI and the Owl was saved from the revenuers by hiding it in a back corner of a back room. The rest of the machines were destroyed. Dutch kept the pool hall going until 1930. As the depression deepened people had no money to play pool or to bowl. While a cooks helper my grandfather had learned to butcher. After talking to Mattie he changed the pool hall into a butcher shop. Mattie went back to selling popcorn in the summers to help them survive.
Hagenahs Quality Market soon was a thriving business. In 1951 it was sold to my cousin and became Buds Meat and Grocery and the Owl waited to see the light of day. Shortly before my grandfathers death in 1963 he took me aside and showed me the key to the Owl. It was taped to the underside of a shelf in the medicine cabinet. He made me promise to tell no one about the machine because to own one was illegal.
Shortly after my grandfather died my best friend Bob Borsos and I took my dads’ Pontiac station wagon equipped with blankets to keep the owl safe and drove from Brookfield WI to Hillsboro. Wrapping blankets around the Owl we put it in the back of the station wagon where it looked, for all the world, like a blanket wrapped coffin! The Owl stayed in Brookfield until my mothers’ death in 1984. While in Brookfield the machine was played by her grandchildren.
I then brought the Owl to Sun Prairie WI where it was occasionally played by my grandchildren. It left my house for Denver CO on October 19th 2012.
It is a small miracle that Owl survived at all. Oh, the stories this Watling Owl could tell, and the story is far from over!
SOME NEW INFORMATION ON MY GRANDFATHERS OWL
I called my cousin, who bought my Grandfathers market in Hillsboro. He offered some new information concerning the Owl slot machine. I knew it had been hidden away in the false basement under the basement floor and had subsequently been brought up to the main basement by my cousin, Edward O Hofmeister, who still resides in Hillsboro, WI.
It seems that when my Grandfather asked him to go into the subbasement to lift out the Owl. My cousin said, “Uncle Dutch there is a still down here!” My Grandfather replied, “You mean to tell me I never took that still out of there!”
Looking back now, it seems to make sense that there was a still there. Since my Grandfather ran a pool hall and bowling alley during the depression and prohibition that selling booze, moonshine, was a natural thing.
I loved my Grandfather with all my heart and I can imagine that he might feel being a moonshiner might taint my image of him. I think it was neat that my Grandpa Dutch was moonshiner. The OWL just keeps coming up with new information. If only the OWL would tell us all the other stories of the last 100 years of its existence.