Jubilee Hitchhiker by William Hjortsberg Page B

daughter, Elizabeth Cordelia (called “Bessie”), born in Woodville, Illinois, on September 30, 1881, became Richard Brautigan’s grandmother. Mary Lou described her mother as a “big Spaniard woman, six foot two, dark eyes, and dark hair . . . quite a stature about her.”
    Life on the Ashlock farm found its way into Brautigan’s fiction. The episode when Madora plucked a flock of drunken geese reverberated for a hundred years through family legend until it came to rest in “Revenge of the Lawn.” Knowing his great-grandfather, William Ashlock, signed up with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency may have inspired Brautigan to write Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942 .
    Not much is known about William Ashlock’s career as a shamus. Late nights in low-life taverns disguised as somebody else led the dark-haired detective into the company of loose women. It nearly killed Madora Lenora when she discovered her husband’s philandering. She sued for divorce, not a common practice in the nineteenth century. Dora Ashlock was the first in her devout Catholic family to take such a drastic step. Like modern single mothers, Madora went off to raise her large brood on her own.
    Her daughter Bessie Cordelia Ashlock first married Michael Joseph Kehoe, a Boston Irishman who listed his occupation as “peddler.” The couple settled in St. Louis, Missouri. With Kehoe, she had two daughters, Eveline Elaine, born in 1909, and two years later, on April 7, 1911, Lulu (baptized with the middle name Mary), who was called “Tootie” as a child and “Mary Lou” later in life. Beginning a lifelong habit of reinventing herself, Bessie shed a year from her age on the her second daughter’s birth certificate.
    Things didn’t take with Kehoe. Like her mother, Bessie divorced her husband. She soon remarried. Jesse George Dixon was a carpenter from Kentucky. On July 21, 1914, Bessie had a son by Dixon, naming him Jesse Woodrow, known to the family as “Sone.” This time, Bessie was
three years younger on the certificate. Two years later, the day before her thirty-fifth birthday in September 1916, another son, Edward Martin, followed. Bessie stated her age as thirty-one.
    When Mary Lou was six years old, the Dixon family moved to the Pacific Northwest, settling in Tacoma, Washington. By 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment made Prohibition the law of the land. Before the “Jazz Age” was a month old, Congress passed the Volstead Act, and the twenties began to roar. Bootleg booze provided an opportunity for those with ambition and vision. Bessie Dixon, a natural-born business woman, had ample amounts of both. By decade’s end, she was known as “Moonshine Bess.”
    In 1921, Mary Lou’s mother worked at Manning’s Coffee Shop on Converse Street in Tacoma. A regular customer, an Italian named Frank Campana, spoke broken English and had been a machine gunner during the world war. Mary Lou remembered him as an insulting man, “very crude and insolent.” Her mother left Jesse Dixon and after an “ugly divorce battle,” began a relationship with Campana that lasted for the rest of her life.
    Bessie Dixon never married her bootlegger Italian lover. Frank Campana sold illegal hooch out of a place a couple doors down the street from Manning’s. Bessie became his business partner. They opened a restaurant on Pacific Avenue and Twenty-fifth Street, housing a “blind pig” in the rear. In league with several other Italians, Frank and Bessie maintained a still hidden in the woods, cooking moonshine under the towering fir trees. They brought the booze into town in gallon jugs and hid it under the sawdust in a woodshed potato bin behind Bessie’s place on 813 East Sixty-fifth Street.
    Along with their speakeasy behind the restaurant on Twenty-fifth Street, Moonshine Bess and her Italian cohorts operated another joint known as