Big Blend Radio
Author Clay Shwab - Manny Shwab and the George Dickel Company
There was once a Tennessee whiskey that dwarfed Jack Daniel's, and a powerful man was behind it: V.E. "Manny" Shwab. Until now, virtually nothing has been written about either.
This shared episode of Big Blend Radio's EAT, DRINK & BE MERRY Show features Clay Shwab, who discusses his biography about his great-grandfather, "Manny Shwab and the George Dickel Company." This riveting read shares the untold story of a Tennessee whiskey tycoon who influenced society in Nashville’s gilded age.
Their story is one of a Jewish Alsatian immigrant's dream of finding community and prosperity in the New World and his son who rose to dominate Tennessee politics, whiskey, and finance for decades; of smuggling during the Civil War; of the raging, sometimes fatal, battle against Prohibition; and of the wild side of rapidly growing Nashville during the 19th and early 20th centuries. More: https://clayshwab.com/
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- Duration:
- 49m
- Broadcast on:
- 28 Jun 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
Welcome to Big Glenn Radio's Eat, Drink, and Be Merry Show, where we love to talk about food, drink, recipes, and techniques, and where to shop, taste, and play. Let's go. Welcome, everybody. Today, we're excited to have Clay Schwab join us to talk about his biography on a family member. It is called Manny Schwab and the George Dickle Company. And we're going to be talking about some Tennessee whiskey. In fact, Tennessee whiskey that they say dwarfed Jack Daniels. And apparently, Manny was quite a powerful man out in the Nashville region. So we're going to dig into this, but I encourage you to go get the book and go to the website mellow as moonlight.com. Who doesn't like that? So welcome. How are you, Clay? Oh, I'm doing fine. You just froze up there for a second. But I'm doing fine, doing great, and I really appreciate you being here today. And I'm very proud to be on your broadcast, because what you're all doing is pretty incredible. Well, thank you. I think it's pretty incredible what you did. I know digging into family history is no easy task. And yet it takes you down a lot of rabbit holes. Do you think that happened to you going into this family history? Oh, yeah. I mean, back then to it, I had no idea I was going to write a book. There were just some three or four different little touchstones that kind of propelled it into where it had a life all its own. And along the way, I mean, it was such a learning experience, but it was also a very overwhelming experience. I mean, I started looking into this probably 10 years ago, but really focused on it for the last four years, but it became a much more of an ordeal to publish something than I thought. But it's very much worth it. It's been quite a, quite a journey. Well, it's interesting because when I was starting the book and reading, you know, you've got people involved in it and seems like your family got involved, your sons got involved. This is not, you know, a solo task, but you were asking people like, well, why didn't anybody cover Manny Schwab? He did all these things. And everybody kept looking to you because no one stole the story. And that means you. So you kind of got, you know, pegged as it to do this. Well, because the more I looked into it, I mean, I was looking initially into the George Diffel company, the whiskey at Anglog. Because if it all got started with the New York Times declares as the dean of whiskey writers in America, Chuck Cowdery. He has a website that he said had like 30 years, but he's been writing about whiskey. And my son one day told me that he had done one on George Diffel, but really on the fact that distilleries weren't telling the real story of their history. So we're creating these Keebler elf type images of the of the originators and just make make believe stories. And Chuck said, surely there must be some swabs out there that would want to correct the record here, because I mean, Manny wasn't mentioned. But I mean, I started off looking at the whiskey angle. And the more I got into it, the more involved I became with who Manny was. Because he, it was so many things that he had touched on that I had no idea. I didn't know anything about the man or his father, who was an Alsatian immigrant, who came here in 1822. I mean, he was 22. And he had no contacts here whatsoever, but started some whiskey, imported champagne and brandy stores in four different cities. But the surprising part to my family was that he was burned on being an Orthodox Jew. And we had no idea that that was in advance. And he created the congregation, the first congregation, Jewish congregations in Youngstown, Ohio, Louisville, Kentucky, Nashville, Tennessee, and Knoxville, Tennessee. And so anyway, there were so many surprises along the way that they were delightful surprises. Well, with this, you know, because this is all Tennessee whiskey history, and then there's bourbon in Kentucky and do not get the two confused as far as I've been taught, do not, do not stand over, right? But one thing I wanted to touch on, Manny Schwab, right? And then there's George Dickens. So who? Dickel. So I don't, why did I keep, because I'm thinking it's a Dickens story, see, no, it's a Dickel, but the Dickel Company. So can you give us an overview of the two people, like the George Dickel Company, that name, but yet Manny Schwab did so much. So tell us about that part. Okay, I'll try to give you a short version of it. Abraham's wab, Manny's dad, as I said, it started these stores that were really introducing fine whiskey and French champagne to the region, because he was, you know, come from now, say, France. And so he had all these connections. And so the family, his son-in-law and his son, and eventually his brother-in-law, a whole family got involved in this business. And then the Civil War happened, and the family began seriously smuggling through the Yankee lines, about Capyde Nashville. And to the extent that they were earning the equivalent of $50,000 a week, they had a fleet off-bottom wagons that they were going through the Yankee lines, going through Louisville, Kentucky, and into Atlanta, and again, earning about $50,000 a week throughout the war, her run, and they had like 10 wagons that were doing that. And to the point that the general who was in charge wrote a book, Fitch, it was his name, and I said that it was impossible to stop the Jewish smugglers that were coming through here. Even General Grant's order number 11 was that all Jews had to leave Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky, and could only take what possessions they could carry because the smuggling had gotten so bad. Lincoln found out about it two weeks later and was furious and presented the order. But anyway, so the family accumulated this huge amount of wealth. The war ended, and they needed to somehow legally get that money into the flow of things. And a close friend of Abraham's and Nashville was a shoemaker named George Dippel. And so they started this company, and I believe it was in addition to being a whiskey company, it was a laundry. That's what I was going to say. This sounds like, you know, kind of reminds me of that Netflix series, Ozarks, where they had to like launder a lot of money. I don't think a lot of people realize what was going on. We think about how NASCAR was started with moonshiners and with, you know, basically, you know, the cars racing and smuggling and all of that in North Carolina. But I didn't know that there were wagons, you know, and the Jewish folks of Tennessee. That was amazing to me. And, I mean, what it must have been like to be 22 years old Jewish coming to this country from Alsace, from France, I mean, talk about brave and jumping in that there's no community, no Jewish congregations, you know, Manny's dad started the congregations. But anyway, it was very much a family situation to the point where Manny and George Dickel married sisters, and they lived together for 30 years in Nashville. And Mrs. Dickel, Augusta Dickel, became very close with the family, actually lived with them until her death in 1919. But back to the, during the Civil War when they were starting that company, the George Dickel Company became the largest importer of anything in Nashville. And it became the most valuable, and this is coming from records, the most valuable distillery of its type in the country. And it was a cascade whiskey is what they founded. And that's a story within itself. But anyway, that's how that was the beginning of George Dickel Company. And George Dickel again, he was 30 years older than Manny. And he was a shoemaker, and he was injured in a horseback riding accident, and pulled out of the company. And Manny ended up 100% older until we sold the company. My family sold it in 1937 after prohibition. Wow, after prohibition. How did they handle prohibition? Oh, wow. Come on. Well, I don't, you can't give everything away because people need to get the book, right? But how did they handle that? Well, Manny was, he was known for as the owner of Tennessee Politics for 30 years. His adversaries called him that. He was called a one man, Tammany Hall. He was also called the Debossure of more young men in Tennessee than anyone else, because of his cascade whiskey, and he owned all these salins in Nashville. But it was all about, I mean, if you read the obituary of Manny, it was two columns front page in newspapers all over. And he was a director of four banks, director of three railroads. He was the owner of the electric company. He was the first one of the first car dealerships in Nashville. Wow. He bought the Centennial Park, which was, they had a Centennial Exposition 260 acres on the edge of Nashville. On the largest building in Nashville, a cast or not, a five-story whole block owned dozens of downtown businesses, but it had nothing to do with whiskey. But his reputation was dark when it came to Republicans, because the Republican Party became the anti-provisionist party, and the Democrats became the provisionist party, anti-provisionist party. But it was, I mean, that's a story within itself too. I mean, Manny in politics was constantly accused of robbing the governor, senators, mayors, the chief of police in order to avoid rates of his different establishment of city health, but also to try to stave off the oncoming prohibition. And he single-handedly almost moved the final prohibition in Tennessee by about a decade. He was able to slow it down. That's what they were trying to do throughout his tenure as owner of Tennessee politics. But on the other hand, when you read that obituary, you would think he was the hot most highly esteemed person in Nashville. I mean, they said he was the wealthiest citizen in Nashville, one of the three wealthiest in the south. And all of this came from the start of smuggling to the Civil War. When he was able to leverage, obviously, he was brilliant when it came to marketing. He almost single-handedly placed Tennessee whiskey on the map. Tennessee whiskey was considered inferior to bourbon, just the rot gut that you would buy if you couldn't afford to Kentucky bourbon. But he took Cascade whiskey to DRC advertising company. And he and one of the company were their first two clients, and they took them both internationally. The other client was Coca-Cola. So Manny was very forward-thinking, but he saw he knew that prohibition was coming. And that's why he diversified so much. Well, I think, yeah, diversified. So he was really, you know, I was talking to you before we recorded going, "Well, I know this will be on our way back when history show, because of the family history and the history of Nashville's connected." Well, now I'm thinking it's definitely on our Eat, Drink, Be, Merry show, because we cover food and drink. And now I'm going, this has got to go in our business podcast, because it is, you know, it's interesting because people like Manny, they know to build relationships and to connect with people to keep your business going. You know, you have to have those relationships and you have to show up. You can't just be in a relationship and use. You have to, it's a two-way street, and it seems like he understood the value of showing up and being present, and then also being aware of what is going on in politics, whether you like it or not, to deal with it. You can't just put your head in the sand. So he seems like a very thoughtful, he's a visionary, pretty much. Very much, I mean, think about back then, I mean, to be director of three different railroads, including Pullman, four banks, but then the electric company, and the automotive industry. I mean, he was head of Spingers, and almost everything. And again, no one had ever heard of it, and that was driving me crazy, because the more I found out about him, it was like, how in the world is he not part of, I mean, in the Tennessee archives, state archives, the Library of Congress, and all my research, I mean, I've had hundreds and hundreds of newspaper articles that mentioned Manny, but he never was interviewed. He would not step out of the shadows. And reading all those, that's a whole another story about the newspapers in general. I mean, that's where I got most of my information, but that's also where I would diverge from my research, because I would start reading a newspaper, and I couldn't put it down. The way that people look back then was so different than the journalism today. I mean, they actually used shutter adjectives when they wrote. The journalists would inject themselves in the stories, and they would bring it to life. And so, as I was doing my research, the just the era came to life. And I began bemoaning the fact that Hemingway murdered the adjective in 1920s, because it's the iceberg theory, right? Yeah, journalism was never the same after that. But finding all this out and knowing that, I mean, the largest federal seizure of any kind was when the Republicans took as soon as prohibition went into play in Tennessee, they seized Manny's cascade distillery. And at the time, it was the largest federal seizure of any kind whatsoever. And the newspaper stated that to emphasize the significance of cascade to Tennessee from 1905 and 1908, they paid in today's dollars over $30 million in taxes, which was 25% of the taxes paid by all distilleries in middle and west Tennessee combined. That's why. And if you ever heard of Pappy Van Winkle? Yes. Okay, where he's, I mean, his whiskey today sells for over $1,000 a month. And when Tennessee, when prohibition happened in Tennessee, we had to move the distilling out. And because Kentucky still had legal distilling, and we moved it to Louisville, Kentucky, and to Stisel company there. And Pappy Van Winkle was the president of it. And, but not two of my great uncles moved with it to manage the distilling of cascade. And in 1963, Pappy Van Winkle, very old, Pappy Van Winkle said, yes, we did have the great cascade whiskey. It's like it's not been seen since prohibition. And I can attest to that because my cousin, George Sephora, let me have a tasting of a 109 year old cascade whiskey. And it was my sister who claims to only drink middle light, because everything else makes her misbehave. That's what she says. So we were at George's house, George Schwab's house, and we took a little sip of it, and our eyes just lit up. She went to a little sip and I could drink this all day. There was no kit of bite. Now it was middle light is what it was. Wow. And the moonlight part is really cool because that's when, you know, the moonshineers used to do it out by moonshine. So it's kind of cool to kind of have that tag in there of, you know, where the tag came from was the distiller Key Davis, who worked for my great grandfather, and his son married a great grandfather daughter. But he was the distiller, and he was a master. He was a craftsman and artist. There's been stuff written about it that he insisted on cooling the whiskey mash at night under the moonlight. And he said that gave it it's melanous. And that's where mellow's moonlight came from. Oh, wow. I love that. You see, but those stories are priceless, right? That just, I mean, for advertising too, you know that that's a good story, right? For PR. That's a good PR story. What I've tried to convince the distillery is carrying my book. They've really embraced this whole whole thing. And they, I've been trying to get them to actually use that quote from Papi. I mean, they should put on a bottle of whiskey. It's cascade. It's like it's not been seen as gold edition. Happy Van Winkle. You could sell their $100 bottles of whiskey, but easier that way, I think. Wow. Wow. Doing this though, I mean, really getting into your family history. And at least you live in the region where your family was. Did you go and do like DNA and do that kind of ancestry.com kind of research as well to to really kind of get some clear, you know, because stories get handed down on our families and then we go, well, that's not true later. We find out and then we'll find the real story. We go, well, maybe we wanted to believe the other one. I don't know. They were kind of the reverse in my family growing up. I knew that we had owned George Dickel Company. And I knew that we owned a lot of buildings downtown Nashville still. And there was some really imposing old swab homes throughout Nashville. But no one ever talked about where the money came from or who made the money because it certainly won my dad or any of the swabs I knew, none of them worked. They had that much money and no incentive to go out and work for some reason. But so that's a whole nother story. But the Jewish part was never mentioned either. And so all of this was brand new to me and to my family. But they're all very happy now to have this happen. You know, this is who we are. And this is the story because it didn't exist. And when it dawned on me that Manny just wasn't in the history books. And he was not recorded that the impact that he had for 40 years in Nashville. I sought out the sage of Nashville, Ridley Wells, who wrote a Ford for the book. He's written over 30 books on Nashville. And he now became close friends and had long talks about all this. And I asked him, I said, how in the world is this possible? Did nobody's ever heard of him? I mean, there's a book called Bill Carey. It's called Ortons Fiddles and Fried Chicken. And it's the history of business in Nashville. No mention of Manny. And I said, how is that possible? And he pointed at me and said, because you have to tell a story. So I went to Mount Iowa. Family plot is from George Dippel is buried right there next to Manny Swell. And I promised Manny that I would write the book and that may be finishing because it became overwhelming at some points. And I said, well, I promised him, I got to do it. Well, I mean, you're reading the newspapers and you get it. I mean, number one, where don't we kind of miss newspapers? Like just in general? I mean, we used to be a print magazine, you know, and now it's digital, which is great in a lot of ways. But I kind of miss the old school, turn the page, you know, in my hands, you know, that would happen all the time. And again, there's 225 newspapers citations in the book that I've read hundreds more articles because I'd be reading about Manny. And there'd be something about a fire next to that. And then next to that, it's something about a horse and buggy wreck. And I ended up just fascinating to read it. Well, isn't it? It's great to get the history of a place, a sense of place. And it's awesome that those newspapers have been saved, you know. But with this, with you writing this, because it is, it is a lot of work to not only do the research, but then put it into story form that is something palatable for people to read. And obviously you've got that down, you've got it, you know, how to write and get us in there. And very honestly, very candid, you know, yeah, and for people to grab hold of it, do you think it's like, okay, you know, we need to show as much more history of Nashville than, you know, just country music? Because, you know, I think people have like a one tunnel vision of Nashville sometimes. Absolutely. And Nashville, I mean, from the 1850s through the gay 90s up to prohibition, it was very much like the Wild West in Nashville. Nashville, how many people know that the very first city and all of the Americas to have legalized prostitution was Nashville? I don't think many people know that. But you had a legal prostitute in your book. It was not legal. That was my great aunt. Well, you know, I just say, but it wasn't legal. It wasn't legal. It was by choice. It was legal for her. But doing the Civil War in Nashville, they experimented with legalized prostitution and it was a enormous success. The disease rate of the union's soldiers went from 70 percent down to 10. Wow. And it was a very successful experiment. And I think that's why Nashville, during the gay 90s, Nashville and my grandmother explained that to me as well. It became not acceptable, but understood prostitution down in the men's quarter, which was from Church Street to Second Avenue. And it was just peppered with dance halls, sporting houses, brothels, really, and saloons, but many only at least four of them, and the most elaborate dancing one, the climax. But my grandmother said that all the wives knew, never walk into the men's quarter, because you're going to see everybody's husband that you know. And they were just hanging out at these places. And they were gambling halls. They were, but they were incredibly elaborate architecturally. They're beautiful. I mean, the silver dollar saloon is down in the part of music a row in Nashville right now. That was owned by Maddy. And that one would architect, I mean, it had thousands of silver dollars embedded in the tables, and the two brown windows that are still there that had a giant silver dollars in them. And the sister remembers seeing them, actually, before they tore it all up. The hard rock cafe owns it now. But yes, I mean, to your point, Nashville was, I mean, it was called the Athens of the South before it was music city. And that's because of Parthenon, because of the Centennial Exposition that they had there, 17, I mean, 1894, I think it was a year after it should have been. But those pieces, everybody is just focused out so much on the music, there's so much more to the history of Nashville, the three dates, the music car. It's interesting too, because when you think about how prohibition came to be, it was, you know, men were drinking too much, coming home drunk, not being good to their wives. And then it's like, okay, now we're going to, you know, take the take the bottle away from you. And, you know, it's, so it's kind of interesting. And then Nashville later goes, you know, watch this. We're taking it all back and we're raising you some, you know, it just seems like that's interesting. A very interesting little story was in the, well, what had happened with Mandy was the chief strategist and field general for the Wets, Wets and drives, that's what they call the anti-pro-business and innovation. And Nashville was a political war zone from 1890 to 1915, really. And it exploded the Tennessee politics to the point where the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, each of them split in half, reformed the Wets and the drives. And with Mandy charging down, trying to push prohibition off into the future. In 1911, the state, the Republican state legislators were treated to Decatur, Alabama, and refused to come back to Tennessee to keep them, to deny a quorum for a vote of a bill that Mandy had secured enough votes for to pass that would have pushed prohibition off into the future. I mean, it was just, the divisiveness was astounding. And we think it's divisive now. But I mean, prohibition was the, the divisive topic of the day because of exactly what you would say or what you were saying. Because we forget about that part. And recently, we were with friends and, you know, I was like, you know, prohibition, la la la. And, you know, just kind of going off. And like, that was a stupid idea, you know. But then everybody focuses on is what it was like during the party with that leading up to it is fascinating of what what the battles that were going on. And what it did to the country in general, but certainly to Tennessee was, I mean, Edward Carmack, Senator, US Senator, was shot dead in the men's court on Seventh Avenue and Union by an opponent's son. The opponent was there too. If we shot Carmack's shot at them first, they were handed, of course, as a friend to editors of competing newspapers. And he was shot and killed downtown. And that that was the issue. And Mandy said that his quote is quoted as saying that Cooper killed Carmack and Whiskey with that shot because that gave enough impetus to the anti prohibition has surpassed the right now. It's like, you can't behave yourselves now. You know, it is interesting because it is like, you know, you can't behave yourself. So we're going to it's like, you know, it's like we were being treated like children is human, you know, human beings back then. But at the same time, what's interesting when you talk about that decisiveness and what was what's going on now, this is really showcasing how history repeats itself. Yes. You know, yes, the divide got so big that the politics didn't work anymore. And we're right there again. Oh, I was going to say, yeah, it sounds like now, but, you know, well, thank goodness for Whiskey, right? He did it at the end of the day. We're all right. Whiskey. Whiskey. But but I love this, you know, this family history. So for you, you know, obviously you can go see, you know, the the resting place of Mandy and George Dickel. I won't call him Dickens again. I don't know why I've got Charles Dickens is sitting there going, okay, give me some whiskey. But do you do you have any, you know, are you able to see any of his writing? Like, did he have any, you know, diaries or journals or business notes that you can get that, that, that feeling from that the only thing I have found was a letter made head of spingers and everything. And the Tennessee exposition, the Tennessee centennial exposition was enormous. McKinley, President McKinley launched it, got it going and stuff, but they had a huge home that they had built in Centennial Park, 268th Centennial Park, downtown Nashville or the western edge of downtown Nashville. And Mandy wrote a letter to the, to the club that was going to run it, saying that he would manage the restaurant there in the very best, highest quality, possible, I mean, white tablecloths and everything else. And he promised not to sell whiskey if they would let him run it. And they did, he got it, he ran it, it was very successful. And then at the end, the city sued him for making profits off of whiskey and cigars, even though he didn't sell there, all those people had come into it to Nashville area, millions of people to see the exposition. And they sued him for making all that money off of it. And his point was, well, if it was illegal, then you can't tax it, because you can't tax illegal money. And so they knew, they lost, he won. Wow, I love this. Well, this is, you know, this is interesting too, because, well, see that, that's, that he's cool. He's smart. He's definitely a smart man, right? But when it comes to having all of these businesses, you think about nowadays, right, we have all this digital communications, I know you've been in communications in your career. Look at how communication has changed. You know, we're talking about the newspapers and using adjectives and setting the scene, right, the newspaper, the journalists really set the scene and told a story. And now we've got opinions and arguing and talking heads on TV. And we've got cell phone technology, internet, we've got so much compared to when Manning was alive, how did he manage to do, run all these businesses? It seems like he had to put the right people in the right place and trust that. A lot of it he did with family. Okay. There were seven members of the family in the George deco company. And, but that was part of it. But, I really don't understand how he, how it was possible to accomplish what he, he read the book, you just shake your head, each chapter, and all of a sudden there's something else that this guy's getting into, where he's making tons of money doing it. And he's making contacts with people, the movers and shakers of Nashville. Like I told you about that book, Fortune's Fiddles and Fried Chicken. It had all these old millionaires in there, none, obviously, nothing about Manny. But they were all his Paul Bearers. We died. Oh, wow. But, it was his connections to those people. And they, people would say that he had this wonderful sense of humor, that he dressed really well, but he was always making jokes. You know, so, I mean, he was a delightful character. But, for some reason, he told each other away from, I mean, I can't tell you how many mentions and stories about him or in the newspapers, but not one quote from him. Oh, so he kind of just kept going and going and going, but in different areas. What was his attraction to making money? Was it in his stability, family stability? Or was it just that he really had this brain of, oh, I could do this? It seems like he doesn't understand the world word no, and had the confidence and self belief to be able to fulfill, like, just go, oh, I can do this, and I'm going to go and do it now. Well, I think, I think that came from his dad. I mean, you think about how he tripped it, you don't have to be, again, to be Jew, 22 years old, from France, coming to this country, all by yourself, and just establishing congregations and businesses in each of those places, and constantly being, because he was arrested for selling to a slave, selling alcohol to a slave, and he took it all the way to Tennessee Supreme Court, lost three times with 12 men juries, and he was clearly innocent. He had the business in downtown Knoxville on Gay Street, and the police arrested him for selling alcohol to a slave. The sleeve had been sent with a note from the hotel saying, please, sell two banks for liquor to let Johnny bring the liquor up here to Mr. Solomon, and here's the money for it. He had the hotel said, yes, we sent our slave down there to pick up the whiskey, but he was arrested and lost, and I believe it's because of the fact that it was a slave getting the alcohol, but also that it was a Jew, and a Jew in Oxford, Tennessee, at that time was unheard of. There were seven, please, I think, of Jews in Knoxville at the time. Well, a lot of times everyone thinks Tennessee and any of this Smoky Mountains region, right? Appalachia is more Scottish, Irish, English descent, right? Not as much Jewish descent. Not at all Jewish descent. Yeah, I was thinking that because that was kind of a surprise to me, I think the attitude of I can get anything done came from that. His older brother was the first Jew buried in Knoxville, but he died in the civil orders in federal. He signed up for to be a soldier immediately after Tennessee succeeded in Nashville, and I just think that the attitude of let's go get it was kind of the smuggling, like, we can do that, we can outthink these people. And I think that he saw that happen and realized that if you put your head to it, his head to it anyway, he was just going to get it done. And that seemed happening. Fighting the politics of Tennessee like he did takes a lot of, you know, what? Wow, this is fascinating. So it's available online, everyone. You can go get the book online, like Amazon, all those places, but also go to your website. So that's something mellow as moonlight.com is the website. And we all remember that story now, right? So go get it. It's again, it's called Manny Schwab and the George Dickle Company, not Dickens. Though I didn't want to put George, I want to put Charles Dickens in this story. I think he would love this. But are you glad you did this? I mean, this is like a huge endeavor. How does it feel to finish this book? To finish it is wonderful. Okay. But I had no idea that I would learn what I've learned. And understanding the era as well as my family has been a delight. And you know, I don't I don't have it in me to start something like this again. But are you finding stuff now? Are you finding things now that it's published and going darn it? I wish I put that in the book to you. I wish I had known. Yeah, yeah. It keeps happening. I had a feeling about that. It's never done. It's almost nothing about George Dickle himself, though. And that really, I guess that's because of the you know, he was a shoemaker for 30 years and then he was living next door to these people, had all this money. And you know, it's the very first the second year that he had the business, he was arrested for rectifying liquor without license. He had no idea what he's doing. You know, so anyway, but he was a beloved member of the family. And we had several family members named after him and his wife Augusta. Oh, wow. So and he wasn't Jewish though. No, he was German immigrant German. Okay, so there that's something interesting to think of in modern time history, you know, in the World War II here it is a German and you know, Jewish from France. That's amazing. The history. And the newspaper obituary pointed out that Manny was almost single handedly responsible for the war bonds that were raised during World War I in metal Tennessee. And that's with with he married Emma Banser, Augusta Dickle's Banser sister. And they were all hit family in Germany. So he sent tons of money to the family in Germany during World War I and raised the war bonds, you know, to fight Germany. So wow, he did a lot of work with Fannie Battle too. I don't know if you know who that is, what that is. There was a charitable organization back then. And so he did do his part. Hmm. Seems like he had his hand in everything. How old was he when he died? He was 60, you know, he was 72. That's yeah. Another interesting anecdote is as they were burying him, the cascade is still reburnt to the ground. What? Yeah, while they were burying him. It was just coincidental. There was wildfires. But and throughout the newspapers throughout Canada, throughout America, talked about the great cascade whiskey and how ironic it was that, you know, it burned down when Fannie was being buried. That's weird. I'm sorry, but it's weird. That's a, you know, talk about spirits, you know, that's that is, I you can't look at that and not go that's odd. It's still like when I think about, you know, Fourth of July weekend, Thomas Jefferson and Adams dying on the same day. To me, that's odd. That to me will never go down without me just going something. Something was at, you know, where's Adam's last words? Jefferson lives. Yeah, no, it's it's amazing that, you know, those things that happen in history and it just makes you go, there's more to at play than we know at this point, I believe, you know, and I love that kind of mystical and you know, when in the south, that's the thing I love Southern fiction because there's always this era of mysticism that goes around it. And this is a biography. It's not fiction. It's not fiction, but you've got it in there, right? You have to have the nonfiction to make the fiction. And you don't need, you don't need fiction on this story at all. With the characters that are in the book, from his sister to Meijer, Saul Scott, I mean, there's some fascinating characters and stories in it. I really think that there's enough here for a movie or about, you know, his story of biography or something because I mean, it's just so many interesting things and it's exciting, exciting things, not just a bunch of numbers in a guy that made it rich. Yeah, and it goes beyond the Jack Daniels, you know, I think that's also some of the history, you know, for people to understand some of the real history of, you know, where whiskey was coming from and how and why. But what a story. I mean, just the bootlegging, not necessarily bootlegging, but yeah, they were smugly. I mean, that is, but with wagons and then to be loaded with the ground, loaded with the ground so you could be. There's only four inches of fake bottom and they got arrested for making the wagons after a while, but the Jack Daniels thing, George did pursue Jack Daniels for the man because he was coming into to Manny's saloons and trying to get people to drink his whiskey and which was tiny compared to Cascade at the time. But when I was in London before I started really earnestly writing the book and there was the Uber driver that picked me up was from Slovakia and he had just come to America to England and he asked me where you're from after Tennessee and he went Elvis and Jack Daniels and I go, God, that could have been George Dickel, you know. I know, I know, right? Well, my family, my family sold the business in 1937 after prohibition and my grandmother, my grandmother's home in Nashville and she said that they all talked about it and said it just wasn't socially prominent enough to keep it, we ought to sell it. If they had to sell it, it's reputation if you have to ban wrinkles this kind of term about it. I really believe it would have been Jack Daniels taking his place. Jack Daniels was unheard of at the time. Wow. But look, look at how he's going into the saloons and trying to get, you know, Manny's saloons, the audacity to do that, right? You know, so now, but you kind of have to have respect for that too. It's kind of like, oh, you're going for it. He was very little. He was very little. I think he was five, two or five, three. But yeah, I mean, he, and, and uncle nearest. I don't know if you know about that story. I mean, that was the black slave who was a distiller for Jack Daniels. His name is now on a whiskey that's very prominent. Anyway, I think the whole industry is fascinating and Chuck Calgary was absolutely right. These companies need to really delve into their histories. And I'm very proud of the Cascade Hollow. Now that's the George Dickle Company. They're embracing, this is the history. You know, explain what the history was. And it's not just George Dickle. It's Manny Swalman, Microsoft, fire, all the different things that are in the book. It's an interesting. That's fantastic. That's fantastic. Well, you know, it, you know, when you go through cities like Nashville, you see the skyscrapers, you know, and you think about the story, you're telling me now and you're going, wow, like, this is completely changed, hasn't it? Like, and your family has witnessed that change of Nashville. Seven generations of grandmothers, my grandmother's side, but five generations on the other side. And yes, it's night and day. I mean, I would ride my bicycle up and down the busiest street in Nashville, going to Montgomery Bell Academy, where I went to high school. And if you did that today, I don't think you'd make it 20 feet, you know, they're horrible. It's just way different way. Why? If that might drive through Nashville, I think of the story of when Willie Nelson was so drunk one night after, you know, playing in some saloon or something, right downtown, you know, music row area. And he was so drunk, he lay down in the middle of the road and never got run over. He just passed out in the middle of the road. And I'm like, how did you do that? He's got some, you know, there's that mystical thing. It's Willie, you can't bump him. You can't. A story similar to that was my grandfather, Pius, was one of many children. He had seven. Wasn't that interested in working. And Manny bought him Broadway and West End of the major, major artery right through Nashville. And it splits to 21st Avenue. And Manny bought the corner building there for him. It was a tire store. My grandmother said that he went in there to sell tires. His dad told him he had to go in there. And nobody was coming in there by a tire. So he started drinking and about one o'clock in the afternoon, he was drunk. And he went out in the middle of the road, the busiest road there, selling people. Getting here by some damn tires, the police came and brought him to his dad. He said, you know, your son is making the idiot of himself. He's directing traffic. You cannot stand out that that relevant today. I promise you, exactly. Willie Nelson couldn't do what he did. No, no. And I don't think he drinks now, but he does something else. He's got all other empire going on. Yes, he does. And he makes no qualms about it. No, he's happy. He's happy. That's for sure. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Clay. It's been a true pleasure and congratulations on the book release. And I can't wait to see more about many around Nashville and and through Tennessee, because it's not just Nashville, it's Tennessee history. So thank you so much. Thank you. And keep doing the work you all do it because it's really important. Thank you. Appreciate that. Everyone again, the website is mellow as mckinlight.com. You can get it from your, you know, get the book Manish Wobb and the George Dickle Company by Clay Schwab. You can get that, you know, in your favorite bookstore. Try to get it in your local bookstore online, of course. But if you go to the website, he will send you a signed copy when you purchase it there. So thank you so much again. Everyone, take care and cheers. Cheers. Thank you. Bye bye. Thanks for joining us here on Big Blend Radio's Eat Drink and Be Merry Show. Keep up with our podcasts at bigblendradio.com and our magazines at bigblendmagazines.com.