Jamaican Rum
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Contributed by Ralph Parrott rrparrott2@juno.com
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Jamaican Rum/Jamaican Ginger
by Terre Haute Newspaper Man C.B. Buchanan

The Seminole Producer-Tuesday, November 16, 1982


Finally under pressure from local authorities that
believed things were getting out of hand, the bars
were eliminated. you then bought your chips to dance
over the counter, and your bootleg bottle under the
counter.
There were three drug stores in Seminole. In addition
to their pharmacy business, they had soda fountains
that sold a very small glass of Coca-Cola for ten cents
and a two-ounce bottle of Jamaica Ginger became so widely
used that bootleggers began making their own to supply
the market, and to garner the larger margin of profit.
Bad, home-made Jamaica Ginger became the horror of Seminole.
Men became cripples because of bootleg Jamaica Ginger or
"Jake" as it was called. They nicknamed these cripples
"Jake Legs."
The new and suddenly rich of the oil fields were the land-
holding Indians, and farmers with oil beneath their land.
They acted like children turned loose in a candy store.
The Cadillac car dealer in Seminole was reaping an unbeliev-
able harvest. One day a farmer walked under his display 
shelter, bought a new Cadillac and paid cash-he then walked
over-stood and looked at it for a moment, then turned, went
back to the dealer and bought five more Cadillacs-one for 
each of his five children.
Another day, a full-blooded Indian walked under the Cadillac 
shelter with a girl on each arm. He purchased a new Cadillac,
but didn't know how to drive it. In those days it wasn't 
necessary to have a driver's license. The dealer spent about
thirty minutes giving him under-the-shed instructions, and 
after many jerky stops and starts, the Indian and his two
girl friends drove away. After weaving all over the road, 
he made it almost a quarter-mile before leaving the road and
nosing it down a deep ditch. Unperturbed, he climbed out of
the car, and with the two girls, came back and bought another
Cadillac.
Today, Oklahoma is a very important state in the union, but 
it wasn't the intellectuals that did it-it was the rough and
ready wildcatters of the oil fields, the roughnecks, the roust-
abouts-men with guts and gusto. Men that didn't know what a 
seismograph, or the modern drilling tecnique was all about.
I beleive these were the type of men that made Oklahoma.