-> American Dreams
 BECOME A SPONSOR OF THE WORLD'S MAGAZINE.
WHY should you advertise here? We'll tell you.
VA LOAN INFORMATION and VETERANS' MORTGAGES  KATRINA & THE LOST CITY OF NEW ORLEANS by Rod Amis
New Orleans is the Lost City of America.A portion of the proceeds of this book will go to the New Orleans Hospitality Workers Fund. The cooks, servers and restaurant workers of New Orleans have provided fabulous times and memories for millions. Now we must remember them in their time of need.
Buy the book or get a downloadable PDF Copy now!
|
To read this article in Deutsch, Francaise, Italiano, Portuguese, Espanol, Korean, Japanese, Dutch, Greek, Chinese and Russian, copy and paste the complete URL("http://www.g21.net/amdream98.html") and enter it in the box after you click through.
SMOKE SIGNALS AMERICAN DREAMS DAY ONE G21 AFRICA G21 ASIA JOIN OUR MAILING LIST. It contains more jokes than not. HOT LINKS IRISH EYES NEW YORK STATE RECOMMENDED DAILY REQUIREMENT RECOMMENDED DAILY REQUIREMENT ARCHIVES SMOKE & MIRRORS VOX POPULI LAST WEEK's EDITION MEET THE G-CREW! These are the people behind this jam-band every week. HOME TABLE OF CONTENTS & BACK ISSUES BECOME A SPONSOR OF THE WORLD'S MAGAZINE.
WHY should you advertise here? We'll tell you. We know you're lazy. Here's a button for a quick translation of this page. Just click on the flag for your country. You're welcome! OR TRY THIS GOOGLE TRANSLATION SERVICE. |
Wendell, NC, USA - After World War II, as life was approaching what we thought was normal, the Attorney General of Wisconsin informed the authorities of Washington County, Wisconsin, that the drinking laws would have to be enforced or else. The local government, police and judiciary were fully informed with individualized mailings and with briefings by the young staff of the AG's office.
At that time, in northern Wisconsin, there were towns whose major industries were prostitution and moonshining, with a smattering of deer poaching and fish seining that is, industrialized poaching and seining, where one could buy frozen venison by the hundred weight and large flat crates of smoked fish, year 'round. But that was northern Wisconsin. Washington County is southern Wisconsin.
Frank Zimmer could have completed high school and beyond if he wished: he was bright, ambitious, physically strong and able. But at age sixteen he had quit. He went to work at the Kissel automobile plant. His supervisors advised him carefully: stay away from engines and the engine works and do not accept assignment to the electric and ignition shop, because those are all dead-end jobs. As long as there are automobiles, there will be a big demand for skilled fender rollers. Bend metal, young man, and yours will be a richly rewarded life.
And he did, until an accident mangled his left hand and he lost his thumb. There are some jobs one cannot do without a left thumb: shake or shingle roofing, playing a guitar, and rolling fenders -- to name only a few.
He studied accounting (by correspondence, a magazine ad). After three years of hard study, several hundred dollars and countless nights creating balance sheets and financial reports, Frank discovered that the correspondence school could offer him nothing in the way of certification or job prospects, and suddenly it was autumn 1929.
He bought a shoe repair shop, in the middle of town on Main Street, with a $400 down payment: his total inheritance (and then some). He re-heeled and re-soled shoes and boots, even the manure- covered boots the dairy farmers brought in, with a piece of belting they wanted sewn as sole material. And lady's strap shoes, and bags and purses. His stitching machine could even accommodate an occasional leather horse tack or ox harness.
When the position of Justice of the Peace came open, the folks at the town government asked Frank to run for the office. The rationale was very clear, if you thought about it. His shoe shop was next door to City Hall. (The mayor of the town, Tom Buckley, was a barber; his shop was across the street from City Hall.) When he was elected, the State of Wisconsin brought Frank to Madison and, in five short weeks, taught him all he would need to know to be a Justice of the Peace.
Bertholdt Brandt came from Hamburg, Germany, an orphan of thirteen. An agency in Hamburg paid for his passage and train fare to our town. He had information we know not whence that he had relatives in our town but when he arrived there were none to be found. Some thought that he had the town name wrong, or even the state. There are many settlements in America with the name of our town. His education, he was the oldest seventh and eighth grader at Southside Elementary School, was sufficient for him to get a job at Kisselkar Motorworks. He became a finisher. Where the paint shop had made a mistake -- a run, a slip, a scratch, a bare spot -- Bert fixed it with a bit of paint, an application of rouge or a fine buffing compound.
Bert lived above one of the stores on Main Street, as I recall above Gambles Department Store, where there were a dozen or sixteen sleeping rooms, arrayed on either side of a large central hallway, with a bathroom and bathtub at the end of the hall. He picked up jobs at stores and shops downtown, doing the cleaning, hauling, loading, unloading, occasional roof repair and window replacement. He married the lovely Missus Brandt, who cut quite a figure with her long, long black curly hair, her narrow waist, her full hips and thighs and that protruding busty apron: she the waitress, he the bartender. They worked, in the beginning, for Vogel's Bar and Restaurant (and lived upstairs). Later Bert and the Missus got their own place and lived above that.
Along with all the barkeeps and bartenders in town, Bert attended the special briefing by the AG's staff. Drinking laws were to be enforced, and now! Here is the law. Enforce it. No exceptions.
At first, Bert and the Missus had tough competition from the other bars in town. There were about a dozen or fifteen bars serving a population of a little over four thousand, slightly fewer in number than the average southern Wisconsin town on a per-capita basis. Then the Missus decided to put out there a Friday night fish fry: large chunks of crispy-covered french-fried fish, a mound of french-fried potatoes, a small pile of cole slaw -- all you can eat, ask for seconds -- for seventy-nine cents (later raised to eighty-nine cents, in the late '50s and in the '60s to ninety-nine cents). Friday evenings, Bert and the Missus did a land-office business.
So, of course, they chose a Friday evening, when families descended on Bert's place in large numbers with empty stomachs for their special service. The liquor control agents cited eleven children with partially consumed glasses of beer, they closed the premises.
They put the three or four pages of paperwork on the bar and they padlocked the front door with one of those huge, five and a half inch brass padlocks with a sign threatening dire consequences if the lock were to be removed by anyone except the Wisconsin State Liquor Control agent. The citation required that Bert and the Missus be in the Court of the Justice of the Peace on Tuesday evening, 7:00 pm.
Bert put a sign on the front door, directing his regular patrons to use the alley entrance. He changed the light bulbs over the front entrance to two one hundred watt units, to show off the bright shiny five and a half inch brass padlock. The bust had occurred at 7:45 pm. By 9:00 pm everyone who was ambulatory and was not deaf heard about the big bust. (No, I take that back: Bert's brother-in-law, Hank, found out at 8:15 pm that evening and he is stone deaf.)
By 9:30 pm, the bar was filled with regulars and they were busy plotting their legal strategy. They drank and analyzed through the night, among the advisors my own father. By 1:00 am they had arrived at their full strategy, and Bert was to be his own litigator.
By 6:00 pm on Tuesday, it was obvious that the second-floor, twelve by fourteen courtroom would not suffice for the events of the evening. Out front, the Assistant Police Chief (also Bert's brother-in-law) put up the sign directing the citizenry to the auditorium at the rear of the first floor. It was a gymnasium, with basketball hoops on each end and with a stage behind the north side backboard.
People took a chair from the stacks on either side of the door, carried to it their place, set it up and sat down. And there they were, in perfectly formed rows. These were the dependable, sturdy second- and third-generation German Americans of the old Northwest: when people sit in folding chairs, they sit in rows with the chairs a uniform twelve inches apart.
A large meeting table was centered on the stage, the stage lights were on, the house lights were off and a lectern stood there on the floor with a spotlight on it. Frank entered the stage from the east, fastening the long black robe around himself. He approached the table, sat down, smoothed the hair on his temples (he was bald as an egg), opened the folder with his copy of the citation and the text of the Revised Statutes of Wisconsin that the AG's office had supplied everyone who had been briefed by his staff.
The crowd had now filled most of the auditorium, there were no more chairs, and the final attendees stood three or four deep at the far end of the auditorium.
The bailiff called the court to order, and Frank asked Bert to take his place at the lectern. Frank advised his old friend that if he (Frank) thought that Bert was getting into needless problems, he would appoint an attorney for him from the two or three local lawyers who were in attendance. The troops from the AG's office sat in the front row, on the far left, three of them in white shirts and ties, the only ties visible in the crowd that evening. Frank recited the charges and asked how Bert would plead, and the barkeep replied, of course, "Innocent."
The Wisconsin State Liquor Control agent stood next to Bert and read directly from the citation, quoted the law, indicated that Bert was guilty as sin itself, and sat down. The entire performance was less than thirty seconds in length.
For his first line of defense, Bert noted the fact that he only served children who were accompanied by their parents, not some high-schooler ruffians who wanted to get beered up on a weekend night.
Frank pointed out that the presence or absence of the parents was irrelevant; the point neither aided nor hindered his case.
For his second line of defense, Bert noted that the children he served only received a maximum of four ounces of beer; for children Bert used only that small chaser glass, the one the gentlemen used when they had a shot and a beer. Beside that, the children each got only one four-ounce glass (with the head, mind you, cannot contain more than three or three and a half ounces.) He never served refills to youngsters, Bert concluded.
Frank pointed out that the size of the glass was irrelevant. Even if he served the beer in the smallest shotglass in the bar, it was still illegal.
For his third line of defense, Bert pointed out that he did not charge for the beer. For the children of his regular patrons -- not some strangers that might come in once, nor people he did not know, nor children he did not know with adults that he did know -- he served a tiny glass of beer with their fish fry and he did not charge for the beer.
Frank pointed out that it was illegal to serve the beer. Whether Bert charged for it or not was his business. The illegalit y consisted in serving the beer, not charging for the beer.
Bert stood silently.
Frank stared at him silently.
It was a long, long pause, and no one in the audience so much as coughed or sneezed or cleared his throat.
Frank said, the fine is $200 and you will need to pay that amount to the Clerk within twenty-four hours; your bar's license is to be revoked for one working day and since you were padlocked since Friday night, I am going to count Saturday, Sunday and Monday, so the State of Wisconsin Liquor Control Agent can remove the lock after these proceedings. Then Frank turned menacingly to Bert: "This is your first violation. The next one will cost you $1,000 minimum for your fine, and your bar will be padlocked for a month; a third violation will cost you $5,000 and you will lose your license permanently. Do you understand that?"
Bert stood silently for a bit, then raised his head. Each word out of his mouth betrayed the increasing anger and rage pent up in this man, who came penniless to our town many years ago, managed to put together a successful business, faithfully married to one of the town's beauties and now being told what he can do and what he cannot do by a shoe repairman.
"I understand," he said at first.
Then Frank said, "You understand what?"
Bert replied, "I understand the fine, the suspension, the second offense, the third offense." The tears in his eyes were welling, then spilling over his cheeks. "Goddammit! Listen here, Frank, you just see if I ever serve your children a beer in my bar again! "
It was the best that he could do.
© 2005 - GENERATOR 21.
E-mail your comments. We always like to hear from you. Send your kudos, brickbats and suggestions to rod@g21.net.