Скачать или смотреть History's Headlines: The great Limeport raid of 1925

“I’ve got a feeling you’re foolin.’

I’ve got a feeling you’re having fun.

I’ve got a feeling you’re foolin.’”

-- 1920s song from the movie, Singing in the Rain

There could not have been a more down-to-earth family man than Allentown’s late Erwin Braker. He and his wife Mava raised a family of three, Dorothy, Ruth and Erwin Jr., on Washington Street. Braker had a long career with the Prudential Insurance Company, was active in Dubbs Memorial Church and a member of several service clubs. But on Braker’s 80th birthday celebration when someone mentioned a recent newspaper article recounting the infamous 1925 raid by the Lehigh County sheriff in Limeport where an illegal “girlie show” was being held, he surprised his family members. “I know,” he said with a sly smile. “I was there.” This statement tickled his grandson Bob Wittman, who found it more amusing than shocking coming from his normally reticent granddad.

Once upon a time in the mid-1920s, the Lehigh Valley was on a roll. It had shaken off the effects of the decade’s earlier recession and was about to take off. Bethlehem Steel was turning out steel H beams that were rising in an Art Deco skyline over New York. Closer to home, Allentown’s PPL tower was using them to create the tallest building ever seen in the Lehigh Valley. Other businesses on Hamilton Street were equally thriving. And streetcar and automobile suburbs were stretching Allentown’s city limits far beyond anything William Allen’s little street grid could have contained.

Read historian Frank Whelan's full story at WFMZ.com:
https://www.wfmz.com/features/history...

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