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Posted by David Sherman on Saturday, May 17, 2008 at 13:33:58 :
In Reply to: Re: Wrecking yard help posted by Keith in Washington on Saturday, May 17, 2008 at 11:14:50 :
Used to be the red light district for I-90 west of Chicago too. I've met a lot of old truckers get almost misty-eyed recollecting Wallace "back in its day". One younger fellow remembered riding with his grandpa who had a job delivering clocks all over Montana. The kid was too young to drive, but he just liked going along for the ride. One the way back west, grandpa would stop at the Old Montana Bar in Saltese and get good and drunk to prepare him for the drive over Lookout Pass via the old highway. Once safely into Wallace on the west side, he'd make his usual stop at one of the Cedar Street cat houses. The ladies who weren't working at the moment would keep the boy busy while grandpa enjoyed his R&R. A guy who grew up in Spokane told me that it was customary in his school for a guy's buddies to take him up to Wallace to lose his virginity as soon as he was of legal age. He said "the gals weren't much to look at but they were sure real nice."
The interesting thing is that the cat houses were wide open, with the blessing of all the local officials as late as 1989. The FBI raid, which was about gambling rather than prostitution, was what finally shut them down. It's kind of strange that in the Mormon state of Idaho, where adultery and fornication are still on the books as offenses punishable by prison terms, the authorities down south never noticed one of their county seats had two entire blocks of cat houses. Maybe the tax revenues from a billion ounces of silver, 10 million tons of lead, and half a million ounces of gold tempered their moral outrage.
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