Milan Jackson

 Happy Birthday Gayle Marquardt !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Helen Nicolaysen (Thompson)

 Victor, is it Piken or Pekin?  Don't know where Piken is!

Victor Jackson

Thats because they moved it. I can not be held responsible for the things my fingers do on there own

Jack Habich

Victor, I researched it.  They were called Pikin, until they were forced to give up the name "The Chinks".  After that, hesitant to entirely give up their Chinese connection, they determined to call themselves Pekin.

Helen Nicolaysen (Thompson)

Victor and Jack, thanks for clearing things up.  Should we now hyphenate the name as Piken-Pekin?  Only kidding!.

Ed Stanfield

Great discussion over the past few days..

The first meal i had in Bloomington ( fall 19630 was at the Wishing Well) Step father wanted to celebrate finding a house for us to live in ...was on Vail St.. and asked me if I wanted a glass of wine to celebrate. The waitress had a fit... seems as tho you had to be 21 to drink in Illinois.. whoever heard of such a thing?

I just got home from my Civil War trip... great time, good friends, interesting sights and sites, bourbon consumed, cigars smoked, lies told and believed for the most part, and so we said goodbye and came home.

Jack, on the way home we had lunch on |The Hill in St.Louis... went to see the homes of Yogi Berra and Joe Garogiola ( directly accross the street from each other) and Jack Buck, down on the corner... Three Hall of Famers in one block..

Jack Habich

Ed,

I see you made it back and actually remember some of the things you did.

Just saw an interesting series on Prohibition.  Just be glad you were born when you were.  Your beloved Alabama was one of the early, though not earliest, states to sign up for Prohibition.  You would have been in some deep %!*&.

I love eating on The Hill.  Maybe you ate in the same restaurant where when the waiter once asked Yogi how many pieces he wanted his pizza cut into, Yogi said "You better make it 4, I don't think I could eat 8".

Milan Jackson

I heard Joe Garogiola talk about the old days living near Yogi. He said that most major-leaugers where the best players in their high school and probably the best in college. Joe said he wasn't even the best in his block. :)

Ed Stanfield

Jack,

We went to an All Italian neighborhood and ate at an IRISH PUB... go figure.. the food was good, but not Irish... The Guiness was good, and so was the seafood gumbo and then a Salami sandwich to top it off.... multiculturism gone wild..

I watched the prohibition program and actually lived with it until the mid 1980's. Alabama has a dry/wet local county option and most of Northwest Alabama was 'dry" and kept that way by a coalition of little old ladies, preachers and bootleggers... Had to go to "the line (Tennessee State Line) to get booze and God help you if you got caught with it... You could always tell where "the line" was because as soon as you crossed it, there were about a half dozen beer joints out in the middle of nowhere... and if you were big enough to stand on tiptoe and shove money accross the bar, then you were of legal drinkin age.

Lots of people got killed over keepin likker out of town.

Judith (Judy) McLean (Wilder)

I remember after I was married and we moved to Normal...if we wanted to get alcohol we had to cross Division Street to the Super Liquors. It was a busy place.  It was still dry when I left town in 1972.  Now it seems that every vacant building in Normal is a Liquor Store.  Boy, how times change!! 

Terry (Max) Maxwell

I definitely remember Bloomington being dry on Sunday.  When I was at ISU, we spent quite a few Sundays in Kappa.  Tried to get snowed in one snowy winter night, but the bartender told us that we'd better leave pretty soon because we'd be out in the cold when he locked the door.

This past July my wife and I took a week trip to TN and KY to see a few places... a couple of them on my bucket list.  One of those was the Jack Daniels distillary... I figure if you drink it, then you should visit where it's made.  During the tour they told us that that the county is dry, so you can visit, but you can't sample it.  You'd think they'd have enough clout to get that changed.  Other counties were wet, but not that one.  BTW... if you are ever there, make a reservation and go at Ms. Mary Bobo's.  Great family style place to eat!   

Jack Habich

"Everything in moderation, including moderation."  Mark Twain

On the Prohibition series, a historian said something like "here we had Christians that would have handcuffed Jesus for making wine out of water".

Ed, I remember being in Alabama in the '60's or 70's and asking for a beer.  I believe I was told I had tyo go to the next county and/or go to a special store.  I also remember driving in KY where one county would be wet, the next dry.  As soon as you got out of the wet county, they would have a DUI stop.....the dry county was trying to get it's lost tax revenue back.

I remember the Kappa on Sunday scenario, and that Normal was dry.  Both silly holdovers from the Prohibition days.

Jack Habich

And, you don't have to be a genius to figure this one out:

"The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this."

Albert Einstein

Marilyn Evans (Tate)

Some places I like to visit. Jonesboro, AR ( home of the Razorbacks) Not a bar on every corner or anywhere else. Dry as a creek bed in August. Another place I like to visit,  Rapid City, SD, Not even a sign of graffiti anywhere.

Ed.

Have you been to Mill Springs Battlefield in Kentucky.  I took part in a practice run of firing the cannons. My job was to pull the firing pin. It's a good thing I wasn't in on the actual firing.  If I had been someone would have been missing a thumb....three of them before I got it right.  Man, those things make some noise! They echoed off the hills for a long time. 

Rod.

Some of my favorite places on Rt 66 are Oatman, AZ and a place called Devil's Elbow, MO  that looks like it got stuck in a time warp.

Jack Habich

Marilyn,

Marilyn Evans (Tate)

Yes,  Jack, they sure do have place you can get a drink. I believe one is called the 501 Club and the Holiday Inn also has a bar/restaurant.  If you take the road toward Harrisburg it is less than 10 minutes to the line.   Altho, I am not a drinker I have family there so I know the town pretty well.

Ed Stanfield

Marilyn,

I haven't been there yet... I am still staying pretty close to home. maybe next year..

Jack Habich

Marilyn, I've never actually been to Jonesboro, but Illinois played Arkansas State in the (football) home opener, and I remember this subject came up with somebody who went to school there.

Marilyn Evans (Tate)

You can see how much of a sports fan I am. I got the state right anyway!

Rodney (Rod) Hayes

Ya'll have been talking about drinking, prohibition, and the South.    I think maybe Ed will be with me on this.  In the early days of NASCAR, why were most of the good, hard driving drivers Southern boys.  Cause they learned from runnin rum.  Fill that tank with booze and get it on.  Prohibition was just an excuse to see who could drive the fastest and take the most chances.  Good old JFK's dad made all his money that way.  But he was a crook anyway.   Now, as far as Normal being dry.  Prohibition wasn't really the driving force.  When Jesse Fell donated land for the college, a stipulation was that Normal would be dry.  His daughter married a Stevenson, so they had a lot of political pull.  It took a large percent to vote the city wet.  And as some of you will remember, Normal didn't grow very fast, and most of those that were there liked it just the way it was.  Several polls were taken until it was a pretty sure thing that a vote would pass.  Eventually, it got on the ballot and passed.  I just wish I would have owned a bunch of property on North Street.

Now Terry, if you go to Jack's Distillary and can't even get a taste, that is just wrong.  Jack and I used to be really good friends.  Then Gentleman Jack came along and he became even better friend.

Rodney (Rod) Hayes

Marilyn,

Oatman, AZ. doesn't ring any bells, but Devil's Elbow, MO. does.  It seems at one time there was a road sign about Devil's Elbow.  I do remember how Albuquerqe, NM used to advertise how it was the longest city in the US.  Just in the past week I have gotten a box of old, old pictures that was in my parents house.  It has a lot of pics from that vacation along Rt. 66.  I must get them out and post some of  them. 
 

Ed Stanfield

Rod,

NASCAR did indeed have its roots in bootleggin. Several of the early drivers got vacations in various jails after bein caught with "white Likker" Those boys ran "shine" every night and on the weekends raced their "shine" cars. Thunder Road was a highway from the hills of South Carolina to Atlanta that was extensively used in the Likker Bidness.

the whole concept of the TV series "The Dukes of Hazard" was the moonshine business.

In the real world, moonshine will cause you to go blind (permanently) if the shine (called Wildcat in my neck o the woods) comes into contact with iron during the distilling process .. why they use copper ... It can be very nasty stuff that can and will kill... Dealin with bootleggers meant shine, or outrageously priced brand named whisky or beer... or trips to the line where you would be stopped by the State patrol upon reentering the dry state. If caught transporting liqour, you were really in trouble... fines, jail time, loss of the vehicle... I had a cousin killed on a motorcycle runnin from the Alabama hiway patrol... His offense?... He bought a 6 pack of beer and had it on his motorcycle...He was 23 at the time..

In addition to all that, if you accidentaly get to close to a still... someone is watchin it and they will shoot your butt!... That still goes on..

A fairly decent treatment of the issue of moonshine is the original Walkin Tall. Sheriff Buford Pusser did most of the things portrayed in the movie, and he was in fact killed under very unusual circumstances. McNairy county, Tennessee is the county just west a few miles from Shiloh and is pretty close to my stompin grounds when I was a boy..

Cheryl Turner (Hitzner)

My father was from Thomkinsville, KY and was born in 1903.  He used to tell me stories about making moonshine.  They would put it in crocks and bury it.  Don't know for sure if he and family sold the stuff, just probably for their own use?

Marilyn Evans (Tate)

Rod

Oatman, Arizona is not too far from Kingman. I think it is on an older part of  Rt 66. Not too many people take the time and effort to go there. There are only about  a dozen buildings in the whole town.  It was at one time a gold mining town.  When the mines played out the miners left and they left their burros behind. The burros have the run of the town.  If a business leaves their door open the burros just walk right in and nobody bothers them.  The town does stage a gunfight for the tourists who drive through.  The fun part of Oatman is getting there.  Rough, narrow (almost one lane) roads with hairpin turns and no such thing as a guard rail. It's a long long way down if you have the nerve to look.

Marilyn Evans (Tate)

My uncle was also a moonshiner. They were from Grayson County, KY  My mother always like to tell us about the time she found the copper coil to his still and took it to her dad and asked him what it was. She was only 6 or 7 years old at the time.  Grayson County is still dry.  My uncle ran liquor for a lot of years. He was still running it in the fifties.