KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Turn-of-the-century teetotaler Carry A. Nation began her campaign against drinking by busting up saloons in Kansas, which to this day has some of the strictest liquor laws in the country. But even in the town where her legacy is enshrined, the influence of the crusader is waning.
Residents in Medicine Lodge, where Nation lived for about a decade in the late 1800s and early 1900s and the site of the Carry Nation Home Museum, approved a measure last week to allow Sunday liquor sales for the first time at least since Prohibition.
The vote, which the county certified Friday, allows the sale of beer and liquor on all Sundays except Easter. Last November, voters in Barber County, where Medicine Lodge is located, also voted to legalize liquor by the drink in bars and restaurants.
Some see the moves to make liquor more accessible as progress in a state that has yet to ratify the Constitutional Amendment ending Prohibition.
Others think the changes would have enraged the town’s famous but long-dead resident.
“I suspect that Carry Nation is turning over in her grave,’’ said Ann Bell, a Medicine Lodge resident and a member of the board of directors of the museum. “Oh yeah. I’m sure she is. She would not have appreciated the people of Medicine Lodge passing that vote that way because she was definitely not for the sale of alcohol any way, any day, any time.’’
Medicine Lodge, a town of about 2,000 residents, now has two liquor stores, Bell said. When the Sunday sales begin - probably on Dec. 11 - Nation “would make a trail between the two of them trying to close those liquor stores down.’’
“She’d probably be out there Sunday making sure nobody went in there,’’ Bell said. “She would be saying, ‘Well, I did all this work and now what’s happened? All of that has gone for naught. Now look at what you people have done!’’
Kansas has a history of arcane liquor laws. Prohibition ended in 1933, but the state didn’t repeal statewide prohibition until 1948 and still hasn’t yet formally ratified the 21st Amendment that ended it.
Nation was born Carrie A. Nation but as a temperance group leader changed the spelling of her first name because she liked the slogan it created. As part of her crusade, she would storm bars in Kansas with followers and break liquor bottles.
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"Man accused of killing his ex-wife" Associated Press / December 12, 2011
A former rural Missouri sheriff’s deputy is suspected of killing his ex-wife and her new boyfriend before leading officers on a chase that ended with a shootout at an upscale hotel hosting a Christmas party for hundreds of doctors, nurses and their families, authorities said Sunday.
None of the hotel’s guests, which also included members of a youth hockey team, were injured in the Saturday night shootout just two blocks from Missouri’s capitol.
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That's all I was going to give you anyway.
I've had enough Boston Globe and need to get cut off.
