The "Drunk Men" in Jail

We lived in Coos Bay 1948-1953, moving away just before I turned six years old. A pair of bachelor brothers, old Finns, lived at the end of Minnesota Street, up the hill beyond Eli and Sofia's house.  I, and all the other kids in the neighborhood, knew that they were "the drunk men." One of them walked up to the mailboxes near where kids were playing one day, and Curtis Reed asked him, "Are you the drunk man?" The man denied it, and obviously his feelings were hurt.But at one time, it would have been fair to call him that. Vake explained:
     During the depression, the men were heavy drinkers, and  had been caught moonshining. They were locked up in the Coos Bay jail. It was a room on the second floor of a wooden structure, and there was a knothole in the floor boards, through which they could see clerks laboring in the office below. They caught lice, so began picking the lice off their bodies and dropping them through the knothole onto the people below.  When enough people were scratching and picking, the men got to clean up. One sobered up and never drank again, and looked down on his drunken brother.
     That was Vake's story, and I'm stickin' to it!