Compiled and written by David R. Schleper, 2021
Joe Jenn was orphaned as a child.
He worked on road construction crews and for Union Carbide before he took charge of maintenance for the K-12 Shakopee school.
He lived in Shakopee for 66 years.
Clifford Thibodeau remembered, “Joe was a great guy! I remember being in 5th grade, if I remember right. Me and some other boys were asking him about his job. I don’t know if he was supposed to, but he showed us areas of the school that may have normally been off limits to students, like the boiler room, and the pretty big basement the school had. In all the years I went to that school, he was always such a good humored guy!”
Barb Stein also remembered Joe. “He was so cool, he would let us play with his retractable key chain, zing, zing, zing, the patience of a saint.”
“When we talk about Joe I always smile. I remember when we moved to Shakopee my sophomore year, my parents just had me walk to school and register myself. Joe was out cleaning the sidewalk and could tell I was lost. He took the time to walk me to the office,” said Marilyn Rein.
Joe Jenn recalled growing up in Shakopee. “Shakopee was really a community by itself, cut off by the Minnesota River and the river bottoms. Back in the 1930s, the town was a little Las Vegas!”
“We had 33 beer joints at one time and notorious nightclubs like Rock Springs and the Riviera. People, including gangsters, came here for booze, women, and gambling; the mayor, sheriff, and city councilmen went along with it all.
“Then Luther Youngdahl became governor of the state, and told the sheriff to clean up his town.”
Joe said, “A garage was established on Lewis Street. In the rear door of the alley was a receiving depot for boxes of liquor.”
Joe Jenn noted, “There was also a bottling works in town; they delivered bottles of pop to St. Paul and return with bottles of whiskey,” according to an interview in Midwest Highways and Bywaysby Alice M. Vollmar in the Summer of 1999. Rufus Jarman, in the Saturday Evening Post, noted in 1947, “In the Twin Cities region, Governor Youngdahl’s law enforcement is felt most emphatically at Shakopee, a small town about twenty miles away, where residents of Minneapolis and St. Paul used to go for their Sunday cocktails, which they couldn’t buy at home, and to dine at one of several restaurants that featured thick steaks and slot machines.”
Deputy Sheriff J.P. Wermerskirchen was appointed acting sheriff and for a time the slot machines all disappeared. Sheriff Wermerskirchen and W. B. Rip Schroeder had a raid on October 1941
But over time, they found their way back.
By 1951, eighteen years after the end of Prohibition, Shakopee’s reputation as Little Chicago finally came to an end.
Joe Jenn died in 1999.
Bibliography
Vollmar, Alice M. Midwest Highways and Byways, Summer 1999.
Jarman, Rufus. Saturday Evening Post, 1947.