One of San Antonio’s ironic twists of fate is that the century-old Schilo’s Delicatessen downtown and its wide selection of beers might not exist today had it not been for Prohibition.

Schilo’s started as a bar in the early 1900s in Beeville. Papa Fritz Schilo and Mama Laura Schilo moved the bar in 1914 to South Alamo Street in San Antonio.

Prohibition didn’t start until 1920, but in 1917 — 100 years ago — Laura Schilo started cooking food, turning the bar into a deli. Bars could not openly operate during Prohibition, but Schilo’s timely transformation into a deli/restaurant kept the Schilo family business going through 1933, when Prohibition ended, and beyond.

The restaurant has long claimed to be the oldest, continuously operating restaurant in San Antonio history.

Was Mama Schilo really that prescient? Schilo’s current owners have some ideas.

An attempt at a statewide prohibition failed before the national Prohibition started, said Schilo’s owner Bill Lyons.

“Prohibition might have been in the air” in 1917, added Lyons’ daughter, Elizabeth Lyons Houston, who is helping her father with the restaurant’s marketing during its centennial year.

“We don’t know if (Mama Schilo) was forward-thinking or if she just wanted to serve food. She cooked food on the weekends to serve during the week to business people,” Houston said.

In 1927, Schilo’s moved to Casino and Commerce streets, next door to the current location, a site now occupied by a city parking garage and downtown information center.

That was the deli’s location when Papa Schilo died in 1935. Before he died, Schilo’s Delicatessen had expanded its menu to include kosher foods, including a kosher potato salad, even as anti-Semitic tensions were on the rise in Europe.

“My guess is that there were a lot of Jewish businesses in downtown San Antonio. He was trying to cater to them before World War II,” Lyons said.

After Papa Schilo died, his son Edgar and daughter-in-law Dorothy operated the delicatessen for the next 23 years, a period that included a move to its current location at 424 E. Commerce St. in 1942. The Schilo family leased the building from the Guenther family of Pioneer Flour Mills.

Part of the building at 424 E. Commerce existed as far back as 1885 or earlier. Before becoming Schilo’s, it had been a currency exchange bank and a pet store. The building’s wood-and-limestone interior and its pressed-tin ceiling worked well with its new restaurant role. The bank’s vault eventually became a walk-in cooler.

Meanwhile, the Lyons family moved nearby. Lyons’ grandfather Alfred Beyer opened Casa Rio restaurant in October 1946 at 430 E. Commerce St. along the River Walk, next door to Schilo’s.

After Edgar Schilo died, his widow, Dorothy, and two of Edgar’s aunts, Nellie Rees and Elsa Krueger, operated Schilo’s. In 1971, Lyons’ father, Bill Lyons Sr., purchased the Schilo’s property from the Guenthers and continued to lease the restaurant to the Schilo family.

The decades passed. In 1980, Lyons said, “my mother, my sister and I bought Schilo’s.”

“We probably used my mother’s money,” he recalled with a laugh.

“We bought the business and the equipment. It was about $85,000. That’s the amount in the back of my mind,” Lyons said.

The kitchen and waitstaff continued under the new ownership and management. Some of them worked for several decades and into their 80s.

One of them was Ursula Currie, a “war bride” who had married a U.S. soldier and moved to the United States. As a Schilo’s waitress, Currie had a “tough” personality, Lyons recalled.

“She would tell our customers what to order,” he said. “One would say, ‘I’d like the chicken soup,’ and she’d say, ‘No, you don’t want that. You want the chicken salad.’”

It’s just possible that Currie was Adolf Hitler’s goddaughter. “She grew up in Austria. Her father and grandfather had befriended a young politician there,” Lyons said.

After Currie died, a neighbor and friend of hers found in Currie’s family bible the signature of Adolf Schicklgruber, who some people believe was the German ruler’s original name. (A 1990 New York Times letter to the editor disputes that, stating Schicklgruber was the last name of the woman who had given birth to Hitler’s father out of wedlock, and that her son started using the Hitler surname 12 years before Adolf Hitler was born.)

Other longtime waitresses left legacies, too. Rosamond Garrison worked 43 years, starting in 1946, retiring at age 72. She once served soup to John Wayne at the restaurant when the actor was in the area filming the 1960 movie “The Alamo.”

Ruby Thompson retired in 1992 at age 80 after serving on Schilo’s kitchen staff for nearly 50 years. She was known for her special split-pea soup recipe. Her daughter Rachel Maloy also was a longtime staffer.

Frank Munoz, longtime kitchen manager for Schilo’s and Casa Rio, recalled the mother-daughter team. “Ruby and Rachel had their roles,” Munoz said. “Ruby cooked the soups, and Rachel prepared the cheesecakes and the chicken salad.”

When Thompson retired, the kitchen was named “Miss Ruby’s Kitchen” in her honor.

Deli cook Belinda Castañeda is a 20-year employee. She’s the one with the spooky ghost stories. One October afternoon, she said, a small bowl sitting on the bar counter “out of nowhere” started moving. Another time, Castañeda and another witness heard a tapping noise coming from the dessert cabinet. “It was very close by,” Castañeda said. “Others heard it, too.” No one knows whose ghost it was. The popular opinion is that it was Papa Schilo’s.

History is literally carved into the restaurant furniture. One of the oak booths came from a late 1800s ice cream parlor that was a front for what Lyons calls “a bawdy house.” The words “Lillian the rat” are carved into the wood, indicating, Lyons said, a “dissatisfied customer” of the house of ill-repute’s madame. The parlor had operated in San Antonio’s once-notorious red-light district near what is now Milam Park, Lyons said.

The mirrored oak bar along the main dining room’s back wall is believed to have originated in Papa Schilo’s Beeville saloon, making it more than 100 years old.

Spirits may come and go, but the popular dishes at Schilo’s Delicatessen endure. The split-pea soup, the Reuben sandwich, the hot mustard, the frothy root beer, the streusel and other menu items define the ongoing appeal of Schilo’s Deli.

Customers from far and wide love the restaurant. One recent afternoon, Findlay Wallace from Seattle dined at Schilo’s with his wife, Mary Wallace, and daughter, Sarah Shannon, for lunch.

“Every time we come (to San Antonio) from Seattle, we make a point to come here,” Findlay Wallace said. “In 1953, my father (in the U.S. Army) introduced this place to me. I’m pretty sure I had my first draft beer here.

“The authenticity of the delicatessen fare has been consistent over the years,” Wallace said. “Everything is good. You can’t have it all the first time you come. It’s a friendly, comfortable place to visit. The atmosphere is great.”

Wallace’s favorite dish? “The pork shank. It’s an enormous plate,” he said.

The signature dishes and the German-and-Texan beer offerings are not going anywhere, But a few minor menu changes may be on the way, Houston said.

“Schilo’s has been known as a delicatessen forever, but delis are now seen as places with large sandwiches. We want to emphasize the German-Texan fare. That’s what we serve,” she said.

Shared plates of hot pretzels and deviled-egg platters would make Schilo’s more inviting for sit-down, after-work clientele, Houston said.

Schilo’s recently added Sunday brunch hours, 7:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.

“We are redoing the menu and the website,” Houston said. “We’ll use historic photos. We’ll use our roots to guide the future.”

dhendricks@express-news.net

COMING MONDAY: The old Hot Wells Resort.