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Rumrunner: The Life and Times of Johnny Schnarr
REVUOCNAV IS NOT A RUSSIAN seaport. It's simply Vancouver spelled backwards...During the Prohibition B.C.'s most successful 'rumrunner', Johnny Schnarr, christened his fifth boat 'Revuocnav' so that anyone spotting his 56-footer would have difficulty remembering his boat's name. It was one of the few tricks he ever needed. At full speed the Revuocnav's twin 860-horsepower airplane engines sucked back 120 gallons an hour at 45 knots twice as fast as the U.S. patrol boats that never caught him during 600 trips south of the border to over 40 locations, including Ensenada, Mexico. "In looking back on it," says Schnarr, 93, "I'd have to say that that challenge of staying out of reach of the authorities meant as much to me as anything else. I certainly wasn't in the business just for the money."
Marion Parker and Robert Tyrrell's B.C. bestseller, Rumrunner: The Life and Times of Johnny Schnarr (Orca $24.95), recounts the extraordinarily lucky years between 1920 and 1933 when Schnarr was a courier for over 60,000 cases of booze mostly whiskey, not rum -into the "dry" U. S.
"People liked the liquor and I would freight it for them," says Schnarr, "1 thought it was perfectly okay. I wasn't buying and selling any liquor. "If you consider an average of about one hundred and fifty cases per trip, that amounted to over four million dollars of revenue that I brought into Canada. And that was no small sum in the Thirties!";
Schnarr was run aground by an incompetent employer on his first run. American cutters once put 17 bullet holes in Schnarr's boat with a machine gun. A $25,000 reward was offered for its capture.
It sounds harrowing and dramatic. But Schnarr says by far the toughest part of the job was simply coping with very little sleep. He never drank on the job. And he claims the rum trade was at least as honest as most businesses.
"During the time I was rum running I had four or five different people come to me -all from the American side -and ask me to run dope for them. They made offers as high as $25,000 to take a suitcase full of dope and land it on the other side. I wanted nothing to do with that."
Schnarr made his final run on April 2, 1933, two days before Prohibition was lifted. He had only $10,000 in the bank, having spent about $75,000 customizing his boats. "In those days that was a lot of money. But maybe that was what kept me out of jail!" He went on to work as a logger near Ladysmith and Nitinat Lake, then spent 25 years as a commercial fisherman out of Bamfield in Barkley Sound.
[Autumn / BCBW 1988]
Marion Parker and Robert Tyrrell's B.C. bestseller, Rumrunner: The Life and Times of Johnny Schnarr (Orca $24.95), recounts the extraordinarily lucky years between 1920 and 1933 when Schnarr was a courier for over 60,000 cases of booze mostly whiskey, not rum -into the "dry" U. S.
"People liked the liquor and I would freight it for them," says Schnarr, "1 thought it was perfectly okay. I wasn't buying and selling any liquor. "If you consider an average of about one hundred and fifty cases per trip, that amounted to over four million dollars of revenue that I brought into Canada. And that was no small sum in the Thirties!";
Schnarr was run aground by an incompetent employer on his first run. American cutters once put 17 bullet holes in Schnarr's boat with a machine gun. A $25,000 reward was offered for its capture.
It sounds harrowing and dramatic. But Schnarr says by far the toughest part of the job was simply coping with very little sleep. He never drank on the job. And he claims the rum trade was at least as honest as most businesses.
"During the time I was rum running I had four or five different people come to me -all from the American side -and ask me to run dope for them. They made offers as high as $25,000 to take a suitcase full of dope and land it on the other side. I wanted nothing to do with that."
Schnarr made his final run on April 2, 1933, two days before Prohibition was lifted. He had only $10,000 in the bank, having spent about $75,000 customizing his boats. "In those days that was a lot of money. But maybe that was what kept me out of jail!" He went on to work as a logger near Ladysmith and Nitinat Lake, then spent 25 years as a commercial fisherman out of Bamfield in Barkley Sound.
[Autumn / BCBW 1988]
Submitted on December 13, 2003 in By David.
