Cleo Epps: Queen and Great Mother of the Bootleggers

 

“Judeo-Christianity never did defeat paganism” (Sexual Personae xiii).

Over the half century since her death in 1970 and the half acre of newsprint spilled about her--parts of it now trickling into the internet--the character of Cleo Mae Epps, the so-called Queen of the Bootleggers, has never lost its fascination. In what follows I call her the Great Mother, but the word "Grandmother" also serves well, except that she had no grandchildren except her clients and neighbors. She was the grandmother of your nightmares.

Cleo Epps: Queen and Great Mother of the Bootleggers

“Judeo-Christianity never did defeat paganism” (Sexual Personae xiii).

Over the half century since her death in 1970 and the half acre of newsprint spilled about her--parts of it now trickling into the internet--the character of Cleo Mae Epps, the so-called Queen of the Bootleggers, has never lost its fascination. Descriptions of her always include a list of her contradictions. On the one hand, she was warm, gentle, motherly, and loved children; on the other, she was hard as nails, hung out with criminals, and had no children of her own. It was that combination that makes me hail her in her archetypal form as a 20th century Queen Mother of the bootleggers. “Queen” here implies no physical allure. Her shape was squared off like a boxcar or one of those lumber trucks she drove to carry illegal whiskey from Missouri and Arkansas into Tulsa. It was that combination also which made her  a friend of outlaws as well as lawmen and that eventually caused her death. Her brother, Thomas Gilbert, said that she wasn’t afraid of anybody, that she figured she could hold her own. That self-confidence was not misplaced, the evidence suggests, until the advent of the Dixie Mafia into the Tulsa bootleg-whiskey arena. Then it became something like the confidence of General George Armstrong Custer boasting in a telegram to Washington that the battle of the Little Big Horn had just turned the corner, and the Sioux were on the run. 

Epps with unidentified baby

Ghosts travel also across boundaries of time, and Cleo’s ghost has not yet been laid. A search of the database at newspapers.com for “Cleo Epps” between the half century since her death (1970-2020) gets 569 articles in the state of Oklahoma, and in the year 2029 a full-length book about her appeared. Of the five hundred plus articles in Oklahoma, 282 are for Tulsa County and 88 for Sapulpa. The woods we must penetrate are dark and deep, and the newsprint is the overabundance of undergrowth.

The contradictions of her character the news articles call attention to suggest that with Epps we are not dealing with an ordinary person but an archetype of the unconscious. The Jungians alert us that "every personification of the unconscious—the shadow, the anima, the animus, and the Self—has both a light and a dark aspect. ... the anima and animus have dual aspects: They can bring life-giving development and creativeness to the personality, or they can cause petrification and physical death." As an archetype Cleo’s “raw, brute, earth-power” should enroll her among the dark, chthonian female avatars listed in Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae (“Cancelled Preface” 105). It is Paglia who says of the femme fatale, “her cool unreachability beckons, fascinates, and destroys. She is not a neurotic but, if anything, a psychopath (Sexual Personae 15).

Some famous avatars from world mythology would include: Lilith of the Bible, said to be the first wife of Adam and the primordial she-demon. The King James Version bowdlerizes her name as “night owl” but other translations use her old name. She appears in the visions of Isaiah. Lilith and her sisters also have associations with forest wildlife to illustrate their demonic inclinations.

Perhaps older even than the Book of Genesis, a figure from 1800-1750 BC is preserved showing Ishtar or Inanna, who also appears in The Epic of Gilgamesh as  ki-sikil-lil-la-ke with her bird’s talons, flanked by owls, perched upon two lions. This ancient relief is now owned by the British Museum, which has renamed it the “Queen of the Night.”

Babylonian goddess of love and war, Ishtar or Lilith, 

originally painted red on a black background

A suggestive illustration appears on the cover of Erich Neumann’s classic The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype:

Erich Neumann’s The Great Mother (1955)

The cover shows three figures: the Venus of Willendorf, a Hittite goddess holding a child while standing on a lion, and an anorexic sister. Neumann offers a large collection of plates illustrating his theme, his examples drawn from prehistory and world mythology.

To quickly close the gap between prehistory and the modern world, the most famous criminal woman is Lady Macbeth, who pushes her husband to his bloody deeds, and leaves him wishing for some way to wash his hands clean:

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather

The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

Making the green one red.

Like Cleo Epps, Lady Macbeth had no children.

Closer to ourselves is the world of fairy tales, which unlike the prehistoric remain current in the memories of present-day readers. Famously in Grimm, a step-mother witch tries to bake Hansel and Gretel in her oven, but nothing in the news about Cleo Epps suggests she had an oven. Closer to Epps may be the Slavic folk tale of Baba Yaga who is described as a ferocious-looking old woman who fries and eats children, while in others she is a nice old woman, who helps out the hero. The distinctive traits of Baba Yaga are flying around in a mortar, wielding a pestle, and dwelling deep in the forest in a hut standing on chicken legs.

To close this short cento, the reader might recall a contemporary rewriting of the fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood,” in which hidden in the basket the girl is carrying to grandma’s house is a .45 automatic. When the big bad wolf threatens to eat her, the young feminist pulls out her pistol and shoots him dead. No woodman-to-the-rescue required.

Though at the close of the present essay I will discuss some famous women of crime in North America, even such a brief interlude as this one would be incomplete if it did not notice other good-bad women famous as bootleggers in 20th century. Rocco Perri was the Al Capone of Canada. It is said that without him, the American market of alcohol would have rattled dry. Rocco is frequently cited as the most successful bootlegger of Canada, however, for one important reason: his wife, Bessie Perri. “If Rocco was the King of Bootlegging, Bessie was the obvious queen,” we read online, but I can’t go beyond the online reference because since my retirement I no longer have a research fund to buy books with.

A famous female bootlegger who makes an even larger splash online than Bessie is

Gertrude “Cleo” Lythgoe. Fred Minnick, author of Whiskey Women: The Untold Story of How Women Saved Bourbon, Scotch, and Irish Whiskey, makes a preliminary comment that sheds a light over the life of Cleo Epps:

When writing Whiskey Women, I concluded women bootleggers were more effective than men, because many states had laws that made it illegal for male police officers to search women. Back then, it was considered insulting to accuse a woman of such a dastardly crime.

Women bootleggers would hide flasks, even cases, on their persons and taunt male police officers. “A painted-up doll was sitting in a corner . . . . She had her arms folded and at our command she stood up. But then came the rub. She laughed at us . . . then defiantly declared to bring suit against anyone who touched her,” an unnamed Ohio “Dry Agent” told the Hamilton Evening Journal in 1924.

It seems as though the court system and politicians just didn’t have the stomach for putting mothers and grandmothers behind bars. 

The alcohol smuggling syndicates took advantage of these legal loopholes, recruiting women into their ranks. Even if the gangs didn’t hire women bootleggers, they hired them for ride-alongs to reduce searches and robberies. “No self-respecting federal agent likes to hold up an automobile containing women,” according to the Boston Daily Globe. The government feared women bootleggers outnumbered men five to one. . . . 

These profiteer bootlegging women had cool  nicknames, such as the Henhouse Bootlegger, Esther Clark, who stored liquor in her Kansas chicken coop; Moonshine Mary, who was convicted of murder for killing a man with bad liquor; Texas Guinan, aka Queen of the Night Clubs . . . .  In 1921, federal authorities found $5,000 in bootlegging cash on Mary White, a stout woman with a “swarthy” complexion and missing front teeth. After sentencing, the press asked her if she was indeed the Queen of the Bootleggers, to which she replied: “I wish the hell I was.”

Gertrude Lythgoe, our second Cleo, is a more seductive figure (more archetypal) than Epps, and one deserving  more space here than we can give her. Minnick reports online:

However, the greatest female bootlegger was Gertrude “Cleo” Lythgoe, a legitimate licensed liquor wholesaler in Nassau, Bahamas. A majestic-looking woman, Cleo was mistaken for Russian, French and Spanish, but she was American with ties to a British liquor distributor.

When Prohibition became law, she moved to the Bahamas and used her Scotland connections to import the best Scotch. In the Bahamas, this liquor was loaded on the boats of The Real Bill McCoy (who now has a rum named after him) and brought into the U.S. liquor supply. But, Cleo eventually moved into commissioning her own boats – that’s where the money was, after all. Bootlegging also came with greater risk. Cleo became a target of the U.S. authorities and was even stripped searched by a female officer at a port. But, unlike the other so-called Queen of the Bootleggers, Cleo loved the limelight and became a true media darling with newspapers from Jamaica to New York publishing her photo. Men fell in love with her and sent “love letters” to the newspapers. The Wall Street Journal estimated she was worth more than $1 million, but nobody really knows. Cleo was cryptic and never incriminated herself about her illegal dealings. That’s the thing about women bootleggers. While the men were brash and loud, killing whoever got in their way, most women were swift and rarely talked. It just goes to show: Women can keep secrets better than men.

Minnick’s last statement gets our attention, for as will be seen Cleo Epps’s undoing was her inability to keep secret her appearance as a grand jury witness. Not that she talked, but she allowed herself to be photographed and the Dixie Mafia saw through the disguise she wore. (See photo below, “Epps at Grand Jury.”)

For an archetype to come to life requires a local habitation and a name, so it comes as a relief to turn now to the censuses, which report only the vital statistics, and these are few and simple. The Queen of the Tulsa Bootleggers was born Cleo Mae Gilbert in 1909 in Logan County, Arkansas, between the neighboring villages of Magazine and Blue Mountain. In the 2010 census Blue Mountain had a population of 124 while Magazine soared at 847. Magazine Mountain is a flat-topped mesa capped by hard rock and rimmed by precipitous cliffs. There are two summits atop the mountain: Signal Hill, which reaches 2,753 feet, and Mossback Ridge, which reaches 2,700 feet. Mount Magazine is often called "the highest point between the Alleghenies and the Rockies," though this remains debatable. Any way you rotate the compass, it is clear that Cleo Mae Gilbert was born deep in the forest, the first hint of the archetype she would come to embody. Deep forests are places of darkness, and the Puritan ancestors of Nathaniel Hawthorne believed that the Indians who inhabited them were demons. Baby Cleo too may have had a touch of the demonic. Though the birth of an archetypal figure is usually accompanied by a miracle, it is not reported that Cleo’s mother dreamt of a white elephant entering her side. Cleo was born with the usual travail predicted for the woman when Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden.  

Both Cleo’s father and grandfather, the two of them buried at Magazine, carried the middle name Moseby, a spelling variation of Mosby, a name made famous by 

John Singleton Mosby (1833–1916), also known by his nickname "Gray Ghost," a Confederate cavalry commander in the Civil War. His command, the 43rd Battalion, Virginia Cavalry, known as Mosby's Rangers or Mosby's Raiders, was a partisan ranger unit 

noted for its lightning-quick raids and its ability to elude Union Army pursuers and disappear, blending in with local farmers and townsmen, a talent akin to Cleo’s remarkable ability to ingratiate herself with common people. Though Capt. Moseby came from Powhatan VA, nothing else connects him to Indians, while Cleo’s ancestors came from Alabama, not Virginia. Names, however, are ghosts and can easily travel across state lines.

Before we enter the underbrush of news articles, let us take one more Pisgah view from the mountain top, this time concentrating on the name Epps. Admittedly, it was not Cleo’s birth name, but of her four husbands he was the one she married twice; the surname she chose to keep, to live by and be buried by; and certainly the phonetics of the name, ending with a doubled labial stop and a sibilant, calls attention to its. (If we wonder how a woman whose archetypal character was defined by her childlessness could have attracted so many husbands, her voice may have been full of money.)

Family trees at FamilySearch, the mammoth Mormon database, show four times as many people named Epps in the U.S.A. (12, 238) as in England (3,520). Epps is a shortened form of Van Epps, a name of Dutch origin, and America obviously has more Dutch emigrants than England. The database also reports:

From Middle English (h)apse, (h)aspe ‘aspen tree, white poplar’ (Old English æpse, æspe). Generally, this was a topographic name for someone who lived by an aspen tree or a habitational name from a place called with this word, for example Apps in Surrey, Apse Manor on the Isle of Wight, or The Asps in Warwickshire. https://www.familysearch.org/en/surname?surname=Epps&print=true

Let us now grab a machete and chop our way through the undergrowth of news articles. Given their excessive quantity as described above, what I propose to do is work from the one book which offers a survey of their content--The Life and Murder of Cleo Epps” by Kirk McCracken (independently published, 2019). This is not a well written book but for our purposes it is a useful one. The writer is a newspaper scavenger who knows the Tulsa and Sapulpa papers, where since her death a tribute to Epps has appeared about every five years, and he saves the present author (also a scavenger) a lot of trouble. In what follows, the parenthetical page numbers refer to McCracken’s book.

Cleo Epps moved to Oklahoma from Arkansas in the 1920s. Her family claims she

graduated high school at age 16 and attended Northeastern State Teachers College, earning a teaching degree at age 18. She reportedly earned a college education in a time when dropping out of high school around the eighth grade was more likely. However, Northeastern State University has no record of Epps every attending college there (25).

She started her professional career as a schoolteacher and taught in Oklahoma's Wagoner and Creek Counties. She first taught at Stoney Point, an elementary school in Wagoner County, near Yonkers, Oklahoma, and neither the school nor the town exist anymore, for the most part. The area was flooded to make Ft. Gibson Lake, and Stoney Point is now under water (25).

Warm and kind to others, she was a school teacher earlier in life. Wanted to

take care of people, especially children, having none of her own (6).

Her love of children can never be in dispute. From a very young age, Epps knew she wanted to be a mother, but ovarian cancer took that away from her. She decided teaching children would be the best alternative, and she became a teacher (230).

Cleo may have made a Faustian pact with the Devil about the time of her subsequent remarriage to Cecil Epps, who seems to be the most dedicated bootlegger among her husbands. By Faustian pact I mean the agreement she makes with the devil to sell her soul in exchange for wealth and power --power “striving against God and nature.” This represents “dominance, aggression, the will-to-power, all the imperial ambitions of paganism that Christianity has never been able to defeat” (Paglia Personae 253). (Did Cleo ever attend church? Evidently not, since the newspapers never mention it.)

The number of times Epps was married is disputed within her family. Several family

members have different versions of how many times she tied the knot. The most popular version is that Epps was married four times to three different men, with illegal whiskey seeming to play a big part of those marriages. And, she might have been married a fifth (6).

According to her family, Epps was married four or five times, twice to the same man, Cecil Epps, a bootlegger. Cleo Epps and Cecil Epps had their marriage annulled after only a few days when her father found out. Actually, her father had the marriage annulled, and Cleo Epps started learning about the bootlegging business around that same time.

Bootleggers couldn't just drive around with cases of whiskey in a flat-bed truck covered with a canvas tarp like in the movies. They had to get creative, and Epps would haul lumber with parts of the wood hollowed out to stash the cases of whiskey. Epps even had a semi-truck and a dump truck that she used to deliver large amounts of product (29).

Four years after her 1955 conviction, prohibition was repealed in the United States in

1959, and grain alcohol was legal again, but that didn't mean Epps was out of business. She kept ties with the Dixie Mafia and still had customers that bought her illegal hooch. However, Epps expanded her other operations and became a fence for thieves and robbers (38).

Partnered with underworld criminals like Thomas Lester Pugh, Albert "Big Al" McDonald, and Kirksey Nix Jr. who were associates in the Dixie Mafia. They dealt mainly in theft, robberies, arson-for-hire, and the occasional murder. However, in the latter 1960s and early 1970s, bombings were all the rage for criminal organizations. A lot of bad people, and good people, wound up on the receiving end of a few sticks of dynamite.

Albert McDonald was a tall white man, standing at around 6-foot-2. He had jet-black wavy hair that was sometimes curly. He was a strong man that had a slight belly, and he was mean. He was mean and didn't try to pretend not to be.

Lester Pugh was nearly a direct contrast to McDonald. He was short at about 5-foot-6 with straight blondish-brown hair, parted to the side. Pugh often put on the persona of being a nice and lovable guy, but he could turn around and kill the person to which he was showing affection. The criminal team of McDonald and Pugh was deadly. They were killers, plain and simple (7-9).

Epps wasn't afraid to get her hands dirty in the illegal whiskey business and made runs all of the time, driving to different states to either deliver or pick up truckloads of hooch. She mainly drove to Missouri and Arkansas, bought the whiskey, and drove it back to Oklahoma. She once said, "When I invest $10,000 in a load of whiskey, I'll be doing the driving myself." Despite being well-respected, liked, and adored, she committed the only unforgivable sin in the criminal underworld. Cleo Epps, the queen of the bootleggers, was a rat (9).

Epps in disguise at grand jury summons (Tulsa World archive)

Bootleggers as Folk Heroes. In the south, bootleggers are folk heroes. Some are real and some aren't, but America holds a special place in its heart for the men and women that provided grain alcohol to people in a time when they couldn't get it otherwise. One of the greatest college football coaches of all time was a bootlegger's boy. Former University of Oklahoma head coach, Barry Switzer, was raised in the home of an Arkansas bootlegger, his father, Frank Switzer, and Barry eventually found his way to Oklahoma where he won college football national championships in 1974, 1975, and 1985. . . . 

NASCAR was born out of bootlegging, where runners transported moonshine under the cover of night during prohibition’s 15-year ban on alcohol. Spirits were outlawed thanks to the Eighteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution which established the prohibition of intoxicating liquors by declaring it illegal to produce, transport, or sell. Bootleggers needed to outrun the law, and, sometimes, they needed to outrun each other. The "moonrunners" began modifying the engines of their coupes to make them faster. (Ch. 6, pp. 77ff.)

The Great Tulsa Liquor Conspiracy. In early 1957, a liquor conspiracy investigation rocked the Tulsa area, and the Tulsa Police Commissioner, the Tulsa Police Chief, and a journalist that was well-versed in the illegal liquor racket were among 20 people indicted on allegations of conspiracy to violate U.S. liquor laws (81). It was alleged that [Nolen] Bulloch the Tulsa reporter met with Cleo Epps at Bill's Truck Stop just east of Tulsa on State Highway 33 during the summer of 1953, and that Bulloch met with bootlegger Archie Moore, James F. O'Brien, and former chief of detectives Harold Haus in September of 1953. Some of the allegations were that certain officers were promoted or demoted according to how they treated certain bootleggers, pimps, and gamblers (81, 83).

Crime and the Great Depression.  Cleo Epps obviously turned to a life of crime out of necessity just like Pretty Boy Floyd, Ma Barker, Bonnie and Clyde, and Machine Gun Kelly . . .  She made her money selling illegal booze and turned that money into a legitimate real estate business. Epps eventually became a businesswoman, owning a motel, numerous houses, and property. However, the motel often housed criminals on the run or on the mend, and the property often hid illegal liquor. But Cleo Epps never killed anyone, and the majority of depression-era criminals left a sea of bodies in their wakes that included, local law enforcement officers, federal agents, and civilians (111ff.).

Epps would buy land and build houses to sell or rent. She would also help with the

construction of those houses, overseeing the work, even swinging a hammer herself. Epps was strong and wasn't afraid of hard work. There was an Epps road and even an Epps housing addition that had several houses on a dead-end street.  . . . She would build a house and live in it until it sold, or she rented it out. Epps would often stay in a mobile trailer until a house was built, and she would then move into the house after it was completed. Sometimes, the houses were sold immediately, and she would start on a new one. She helped build every single one (40). 

The Dixie Mafia. The Avalon Steakhouse was the Tulsa headquarters for the Dixie Mafia. The organization has even made it to the big and small screens over the years. The Dixie Mafia was featured in the FX Channel TV series "Justified" staring actor Timothy Olyphant, and the 1973 movie "Walking Tall" was based on the life of Tennessee Sheriff Buford Pusser, whose wife was allegedly killed by the Dixie Mafia or State Line Gang. . . . Cleo Epps was considered a crime boss, specializing in illegal whiskey. In total control of several eastern Oklahoma counties in the 1940s and 1950s, and linked to several members of the "Dixie Mafia," a loosely organized crime syndicate that committed crimes in Oklahoma and every state that surrounded it, and some that didn't (5, 167).

When earlier McCracken called Epps a rat (9), he’d already given away the end game as it played out on the chess board of Cleo’s life. She’d allowed herself to be called as a witness in a grand jury investigation (see photo “Epps in disguise” above) of a murder involving the Dixie Mafia. She was a leak and the crooked police informed their criminal associates. Cleo was driven out of town a ways, shot in the back of the had, and her remains dumped into a septic tank where they were not found until three months later. 

Before however we make our final visit to the septic pit where the corpse was tossed, a final tribute requires to be noted here. A Tulsa figure whose career ran sufficiently parallel to Epps to make him her consort is Wayne Padgett. His son, the New York City poet Ron Padgett, wrote a book-length biography called Oklahoma Tough: My Father, King of the Tulsa Bootleggers (2003). 

The parallels between Cleo and Daddy are many. Nolen Bulloch, the Tulsa reporter who gave Daddy the title of King of the Bootleggers, had earlier bestowed the title of Queen on Cleo. Some years older than Daddy, she was something of a role model for him (167-68). 

Padgett goes on to quote from the newspaper accounts of Epps’s life which we have already heard from McKracken. As King and Queen, neither of them liked their titles.

The news reports with their gothic photos were sufficient to prompt other fond farewells to Cleo Epps, of which I will limit myself to one. It is surely among the most tender  and was written by Windsor Ridenour, appearing in the Tribune in June 1974. 

She was, as one friend described her, "as tough as nails.” Yet she could be gentle, a warm haven for nieces and nephews and neighborhood children who swarmed to her Sapulpa home. She was a shrewd business woman and expert carpenter, building with her own hands houses that she sold for large profits, amassing more than $500,000 in property. Yet she was a soft touch for panhandlers or persons down in their luck, easily giving without expecting anything in return.

She harbored criminals, then cried over what they had done. She sold whisky illegally, but never drank it herself: It was during the early 1950s she earned the name "'Queen of the Bootleggers," title bestowed be the late Tribune reporter Nolen Bulloch during his exposes of prohibition liquor runners. She never liked the title. And many of her friends never believed she deserved it.

To return to the septic tank now for a final farewell, three months were enough time for Cleo’s corpse to putrefy, creating a stench appropriate to the gothic darkness of the pit as revealed in the news photos below. 

The Septic Tank where Epps’s body was found

Little Tommy Gilbert, Epps’s grand nephew, explores the septic tank. Tulsa World, 25 Feb. 1971

To salute the career of Cleo Epps by rounding out the archetype of American criminal women, the career of a few others should be recalled:

Marry Surrat: boarding house owner in Washington, D.C., convicted of taking part in the conspiracy which led to the assassination of President Lincoln in 1865. Hanged, becoming the first woman executed by the U.S. federal government. She maintained her innocence until her death, and the case against her was and remains controversial. 

The Bender Family: better known as the Bloody Benders, a family of serial killers in Labette County, Kansas, from May 1871 to December 1872 consisting of John Bender, his wife Elvira (or Almira), their son John Jr., and their daughter Kate. John and Kate possibly husband and wife by a common-law marriage. Estimated to have killed a dozen travelers, perhaps as many as twenty. The family's fate remains unknown, with theories ranging from a lynching to a successful escape.

Zerelda Cole James: acknowledged but never indicted head of the James-Younger gangs, followers of Jesse and Frank James and their cousin Cole Younger, who began their careers as Missouri guerrillas following the end of the Civil War. Their careers have become legendary in print, film, and song. 

Belle Starr: associated with the James–Younger gangs and other outlaws. Convicted of horse theft in 1883, and in 1889 fatally shot in a case that is still officially unsolved. Her story was popularized by Richard K. Fox — editor and publisher of the National Police Gazette — and she later became a popular character in television and films.

Ma Barker: mother of several American criminal, ran the Barker–Karpis Gang during the "public enemy era" (the 1930s) when the exploits of gangs of criminals in the Midwestern United States gripped the American people and press. Traveled with her sons during their criminal careers.

Bonnie Parker: Coupled with Clyde Barrow, the two were known for their bank robberies, although they preferred to rob small stores or rural funeral homes. Exploits captured the attention of the American press and its readership during the "public enemy era." Ambushed by police and shot to death in Bienville Parish, Louisiana. Believed to have murdered at least nine police officers and four civilians.

“The paths of glory lead but to the grave,” as Thomas Gray said in his classic “Elegy in a Country Churchyard.” Cleo Epps awaits a director like Martin Scorsese who will take his talent from Osage County, Oklahoma, to Tulsa and lead her down the path of cinematic glory warranted by her role as the Queen and Great Mother of booleggers.

Thomas Henry Huxley,  the evolutionist and agnostic, often called "Darwin's Bulldog," had a grandson named Aldous Huxley, a novelist and philosopher, who stated: “For Paleolithic man, every day was Mother’s Day.”

Sources 

Print 

Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel.  Revised Edition. New York: Stein & Day, 1966.

McCracken, Kirk. The Life and Murder of Cleo Epps. Kindle Books: Independently published, 2019.

Padgett, Ron. Oklahoma Tough: My Father, King of the Tulsa Bootleggers. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003.

Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. 

_____. “Sexual Personae: The Cancelled Preface.” Sex, Art, and American Culture. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.

Von Franz,  M.-L.  "The Process of Individuation" in Carl Jung ed., Man and his Symbols. London: Picador, 1978.

Digital

Ling, Sally J. “Gertrude Lythgoe--Fascinating Women of Prohibition.” Florida’s History Detective https://sallyjling.org/2011/06/28/gertrude-lythgoe-fascinating-women-of-prohibition/. Posted June 2022. Accessed November 2023. 

Minnick, Fred. “How Women Bootleggers Dominated Prohibition.” https://www.bourbonplus.com/how-women-bootleggers-dominated-prohibition/. Accessed October 2023.