Episode Transcript
Danielle Grandinetti: [00:00:00] Welcome to A Spot of Story with Danielle Grandinetti. Cozy up with your favorite beverage as we chat about sweet romance, thrilling suspense, and fascinating history. Perhaps you'll find your next read in one of these stories.
On this episode of A Spot of Story — Echoes through History, we're stepping back into the 1930s to explore the history behind my novella, His Boss’s Little Sister.
His Boss’s Little Sister is a 1930s fairytale retelling with a touch of mystery and suspense.
Broken hearts, underground smuggling, and a meddling family. One Wisconsin tea house offers a love of more than sweet treats. In November of 1931, needing a new start, Samantha Martins escapes the happily ever afters of her [00:01:00] hometown to take a waitressing position at a German tea house, but all is not as it appears beneath the pretty trappings.
When she discovers illegal oleomargarine on the premises, which could shut down the café and thus cost her job, she goes searching for a source. Samantha’s old beau, Kyle Duckery, returns to Crow’s Nest a changed man, both inside and out. An apology burning in his heart, he finds she’s left home, however, with trouble on her trail.
Samantha’s brother hires Kyle to be her bodyguard, but will she even speak to him? If not, will she at least allow him to protect her, even without the arm he lost in a logging accident? When the breadcrumbs lead them into a trap, putting Kyle’s life in danger, Samantha faces an impossible choice. Listen to Kyle and run for help, or stay a captive and outwit a criminal—if only the ticking bomb were on their side.
A touch of fairytale, a spoonful of [00:02:00] history, and a teacup of hope, His Boss’s Little Sister is a standalone novella in the Apron Strings Tea Tale multi-author series and is a 1930s historical romance retelling of Hansel and Gretel.
On today’s episode, I want to dig into the history behind the crime in this particular story—the illegal smuggling of oleomargarine.
Oleomargarine is margarine. It is a common product that people use, found in grocery stores. It tends to be cheaper than butter a lot of times. But in Wisconsin, margarine is seen a bit differently than perhaps other states.
As I was searching for the crime that I wanted my “witch,” the bad guy, to participate in, I knew I wanted to do some type of smuggling. But you know, it’s Prohibition in 1931, and [00:03:00] I’d already covered Prohibition-type smuggling in some of my other books. So I wanted something new, something fresh, something that tied a little closer to the German tea house.
And that’s when I discovered the oleomargarine smuggling. Yes, smuggling. Housewives would cross the border into Illinois or Minnesota and smuggle illegally bootlegged oleomargarine, especially yellow oleomargarine, into Wisconsin. This might sound completely ridiculous—why in the world would you smuggle margarine like this?
So let me explain. While it seems ridiculous, Wisconsin’s dairy and beer industries are its economy, and still, even today, dairy in particular. I read a stat recently that said that the dairy industry in Wisconsin brings in revenue that is more than Florida’s citrus industry and more than Idaho’s potato [00:04:00] industry.
So dairy in Wisconsin is a major deal still, even today. During Prohibition, with the beer industry being significantly hampered, the beer industry turned to help the dairy industry in Wisconsin. In fact, Pabst is a beer company that is in Wisconsin, and they actually made cheese during Prohibition.
It’s quite fascinating. Across the country, other beer industries turned to making ice cream and other dairy products. But in Wisconsin, that was one of the big deals. Because the beer industry was such a significant industry in Wisconsin, Wisconsin lawmakers were behind the repeal of Prohibition.
Anyway, this episode is not about Prohibition—it’s about smuggling margarine. But in order to understand why smuggling margarine was such a big deal, you had to understand how Prohibition affected these things. Also part of Prohibition—one [00:05:00] of the reasons for the cause of the Great Depression—was the drought that had been happening through the 1920s and was affecting crop and crop prices.
Well, milk is considered a crop, and so dairy prices, especially into the 1930s, were dropping significantly, and they hit rock bottom during 1933. So it’s on its downward path at this particular point. The dairy industry being Wisconsin’s primary industry, they wanted to help.
And one of the ways they helped was by prohibiting the sale—well, prohibiting margarine in general. The sale, the production, all of it—margarine was not allowed in the state of Wisconsin. However, it being the Great Depression and money being as tight as it was for housewives—to use that term, that was the term that was used then—if you weren’t on a dairy farm where you could make your [00:06:00] own, they would cross state lines to smuggle the cheaper margarine in. Sometimes they would even sell it, too.
And here’s the catch: if you colored it yellow, it looked like butter, and so they could pass it off as butter. But it was a cheap substitute. It wasn’t butter, and it wasn’t supporting the dairy industry. So legislation was put in place to prohibit its use.
In my story, I created a character who was smuggling the margarine. However, why is it such a big deal with a tea house? Because if you served it in a restaurant, the second offense meant jail time. Yes—selling margarine in a restaurant could send you to jail. [00:07:00] That’s how big of a deal it was. And I really tried to express this in my telling of His Boss’s Little Sister, because outside of Wisconsin that seems completely ridiculous. But in Wisconsin, during that time, it very much was not. It was about supporting the farmers who were not making enough—to the point where they actually went on strike in 1933. And if you’d like to learn more about that, I have a whole trilogy about that particular year, called The Unexpected Protectors.
So, little tag there. Margarine—was it just because of the Great Depression? Well, in the sixties, there was a general repeal of the anti-oleomargarine sentiment. A lot of the laws were pulled back, and it was much more allowed. Wisconsin was not one of those states. It dug its heels in. It was one of the last to [00:08:00] adopt the pressure to at least allow margarine in the state.
To the point where I actually went in and read some of the legislation—today’s legislation in Wisconsin, current day, at least at the recording of this particular episode—that margarine is not allowed to be offered in a restaurant unless the customer specifically asks for it. So even today, the dairy industry in Wisconsin is protected because it is the major industry. Like I had said earlier, compared to Florida and Idaho’s major industries, it is protected. So margarine is not allowed to be just placed on a table at a restaurant—that’s butter. But if a customer asks for it, it can be provided. It has very specific packaging details about how much can be offered at a time and sold, how it’s packaged, how it’s labeled. It’s very, very interesting to understand how the economy of a [00:09:00] state can dictate these specifics.
So that was one of the fascinating aspects of history to dive into in His Boss’s Little Sister that I thoroughly enjoyed—exploring potential ramifications, which, when you’re dealing with crime and criminal behavior, adds a layer of mystery and suspense, which I love to add into my stories. So that is the history behind the major crime that is found in His Boss’s Little Sister.
If you would like to read a copy, you can find all the details on my website, of course. And if you want to dive into more about where Wisconsin went from there, it’s kind of a natural bridge that I created between my Harbored in Crow’s Nest series and my Unexpected Protectors series, since the main characters in His Boss’s Little Sister are from the Crow’s Nest series.
So thank you for [00:10:00] tuning into this journey into the past. Again, you can find the additional notes and some of the research links—I’ll provide all of that in the show notes on the episode page on my website.
Danielle Grandinetti: Thank you for listening to A Spot of Story with Danielle Grandinetti. We hope you enjoyed today’s conversation. Let us know by leaving a comment below and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. Discover more information about today’s book by visiting A Spot of Story online at daniellegrandinetti.com/podcast.
Happy reading.
