Read Beat (...and repeat)
If you're like me, you like to know things but how much time to invest? That's the question. Here's the answer: Read Beat--Interviews with authors of new releases. These aren't book reviews but short (about 25-30 minutes on the average) chats with folks that usually have taken a lot of time to research a topic, enough to write a book about it. Hopefully, there's a topic or two that interests you. I try to come up with subjects that fascinate me or I need to know more about. Hopefully, listeners will agree. I'm Steve Tarter, former reporter for the Peoria Journal Star and a contributor to WCBU-FM, the Peoria public radio outlet, from 20202 to 2024. I post regularly on stevetarter.substack.com.
Read Beat (...and repeat)
"Mrs. Cook & the Klan" by Tom Chorneau
True crime accounts are all the rage these days. But Tom Chorneau didn’t want to just add another cold case to the national docket.
Instead, the unsolved murder of Myrtle Cook in 1925 is related to political forces flowing through the state of Iowa at the time, with Chorneau, a former reporter, explaining the state’s near-constant battle over temperance.
During the first half-century of statehood, Iowa lurched from wet to dry eight times before Prohibition was ratified in 1919. Cook was president of the local temperance union when she was shot through the heart.
Chorneau speculates that it might have been something she saw that cost the woman her life. In any event, the shooting made the front page of the New York Times. The next day her funeral made national news when a small army from the Klu Klux Klan gathered in town on her behalf.
Cook wasn’t just the head of a temperance union but an informant for the law. “Myrtle spent hours at her parlor window, which had a clear view of the Rock Island Railroad station and the dive café next door,” noted Chorneau, adding that “Myrtle kept good notes on the comings and goings of the bootleggers and their customers, who regularly conducted their business at the depot.”
Cook may have even realized that her life was in jeopardy. In a conversation with a friend shortly before her death, “Myrtle didn’t tell Marie what or whom she had seen but ended the conversation with a chilling remark: ‘I believe this work will be the end of me.’” related Chorneau.
Prohibition wasn’t the only force creating change in Iowa. You also had the women’s suffrage movement, the issue of slavery, and the railroad industry all moving across the state. In 1925, Al Capone took over as gang boss in Chicago, creating a ripple effect across the Midwest, especially when it came to bootlegging operations. Chorneau even raises the possibility that Capone himself may have had a hand in the Cook murder.
