Retrospect: Semrow opens Sussex Beer Depot

A home once stood on the triangle of land formed by the intersection of Main Street and Silver Spring.

Its backyard was dominated by a sawmill, with logs ready to saw and the finished product waiting for its owner to pick it up. In time, that backyard, stretching from Silver Spring to Main Street, became a building lot.

Ultimately, that backyard sawmill house and its sheds wound up next to Sussex Community Hall (today's Sussex-area Outreach Services, more commonly called the food pantry).

That house became the Lisbon Telephone Co. Central Office, and the sheds behind it became storage areas for telephone maintenance supplies and equipment.

In 1946, an enterprising man, George "Red" Semrow, bought if for a home for his new bride. He used the back sheds for his side business: raising lots of rabbits.

In late 1949, though, he decided that, as good as the rabbit-raising business was, World War II was over and the taste for rabbits was waning. He needed new business to supplement his growing family. Besides, his wife was against continuing the rabbit business.

So, while keeping his regular job, he started the first-ever Sussex Beer Depot. Thirty years later, he sold the house and business to Pat and Dave Bartlett, who would call it Olde Country Spirits. Pat ran the business during the day, Dave in the evenings.

Pat became a Sussex village trustee and served multiple terms as village president before resigning when she moved out of Sussex as this century began.

The Bartletts sold the business when they moved. The property at N63 W23635 Silver Spring Road is now called J's Liquor under its fourth proprietor.

(Many years earlier, the sawmill house was moved to a new site on Maple Avenue across from St. Alban's Cemetery. Jim Heck's Citgo station occupies that location today.)

Semrow's Sussex Beer Depot, the village's first, is now 58 years old. From 1949 to 1979, it was one of the pillars of Sussex and had no competition. Since then, a second beer depot has opened in Sussex, and both of the village's major grocery stores have full-service beer-liquor licenses.

Semrow, the third of 13 children, was born on a farm near Whiskey Corners, up east on Mill Road. (Today, the majority of that farm is part of the Silver Spring Country Club golf course.)

Young Red had a hardscrabble childhood. He told me in 1979 that back in the Depression, his family had very little money and was into making booze.

"My family made moonshine on the farm," he said. "Never sold any. The relatives drank it all up."

I went to his brother, Ray, the eldest of the 13 children, to find out about the booze-making. His story was a little different:

"Yeah, we made it, and we sold it. It was during the Depression and Prohibition, and the family needed the money. I delivered to four taverns in Butler for $7 a gallon.

"I was only 12 years old when I started driving. I drove a truck, with my mother going along. I didn't need a license to drive in those days.

"We got into trouble because, instead of waiting for us to deliver it, guys started to come to the farm to pick it up. With all the traffic coming out to this lonely farm in the dark, a jealous neighbor figured out what was happening and reported us.

"One day, Sheriff Redford came around and told my family to clean the place up, as the Feds were coming to raid the place."

Red and Ray helped the family dismantle the still, burying the copper boiler deep in the center of the farm's manure pile. The rest of the equipment was hidden in the haymow.

When the Feds came, Ray told me, they snooped around but didn't find anything of consequence. They finally left, admitting defeat, and excused themselves, saying that someone must have given them the wrong information.

The visit by the Feds put the fear of the law into the family, and they never made any more booze. Shortly thereafter, Congress repealed Prohibition, ending the bootleg booze business.

The original George "Red" Semrow's Beer Depot is now, 59 years after it first opened for business, under its fourth owner as J's Liquor. Semrow had no competition in 1949 when he started, but there's plenty today, including two supermarket franchises.

Red was born in 1916 and only attended grade school, the nearby Willow Spring Grade School.

The U.S. entered World War II in 1941 when he was 25 years old, but he was not inducted. He was too old for the first 18- to 21-year-old callup.

Then he was exempted as a farmboy, and later because he worked at the Wauwatosa Liberty (Grede) Foundry, an essential war production job. He continued to get older, too, reaching 29 by the time the war ended.

He raised rabbits during the war years in a house close to Willow Spring Mobile Home Park. Most meats were strictly rationed during the war, but rabbit meat wasn't one of them.

In 1946, a year after the war ended, he married Dorothy Janke, a Granville woman, but not before she extracted a promise from him to get rid of the rabbits.

"I sold most of the rabbits," Red recalled recently, "but I fooled her. Gradually I got the number back up. You know how rabbits multiply."

Soon after they married, Red found out that the Lisbon Telephone Co. central office and its attached sheds were for sale. Dorothy was interested in the Main Street house that housed the telephone office, but Red was intrigued by the back shed, where he could really get his rabbit business going.

Before then, Bell Telephone had not extended its reach into rural communities such as Sussex, which had Lisbon Telephone Co., but now the big, nationwide telephone company started to acquire such rural phone businesses.

Red bought the property for $5,500. The deal included a kicker allowing Lisbon Telephone Co. to rent the front room for its central office for $25 a month, effectively eliminating Semrow's mortgage payment for the first three years, after which the telephone company left.

Red retained his foundry job while his rabbit livestock boomed, but by now Dorothy saw the profit potential and started feeding and watering the animals and helping out as needed. Red favored New Zealand white rabbits.

He had about 1,000 rabbits in the sheds behind his downtown Sussex home. Red sold 200 rabbits per week to Soden's Market in Milwaukee - most of them alive. He also brokered stock raised by other rabbit farmers.

Besides selling live rabbits, Red also butchered a lot of them, including any brokered rabbits that showed some color, because he only sold the "white" New Zealand variety.

While Soden's Market took 90 percent of his stock, Ray Raddenback at the Sussex Brook Hotel and later Marian Donkle, who took over the hotel and renamed it Donkle's Tap, bought most of the rest.

(All that remains of the old hotel is the clock in Sussex Square Park.)

By 1949, however, it was time to get out of the rabbit-raising business as Red's customers could now get nonrationed beef and pork. It was time to find a new part-time job, and just before Christmas he hit upon the beer depot idea.

He cleaned out the sheds and remodeled them. Dorothy tended the business during the day while minding their growing family. (They ultimately had four children.)

It was all new to Red, determining what to order and how much. He started with a case of gin because it was Christmastime. "My money was limited," Red said.

He also had a little problem with a local church group that wanted to shut it down. Taverns were bad enough - Sussex already had three of them, and Whiskey Corners was only a long mile away - the church people thought.

Red went to see Village President Charles Busse about the opposition, but no one followed through to stop him.

Semrow also kept his full-time job for 12 more years before he went full time at the beer depot.

Right next to the beer depot was the Sussex Fire Department garage, and in March 1953 Red joined up. Because he lived next door, he was often the first one there and would have the doors open as the other volunteer firemen arrived.

He remained a valued and active member for more than 20 years. His fellow volunteers elected him their steward (providing food and beverages after a practice or a fire call, conveniently from his business right next door), and he served in that position for many years.

Red and Dorothy sold their home and business to Pat and Dave Bartlett in May 1979. They retired to a summer property on Green Lake and to winter digs in Florida. He returned often to make the annual Fire Department Founders party for retired firefighters in February.

Red is buried in the front row of St. James Catholic Cemetery on Town Line Road.