Silver's livery stable called to ask me to check in and renew the monthly contract. When I get to their local branch, the staff don't quite know what to do, so the manager has to be summoned. She looks at the contract, and asks me what's going on. She thinks I've got a real good deal: the way she says it, I can tell she means it. It reminds me of what a good deal I got in return for puting Rozzie down.
Since I have to go to the library for contact with the virtual world, I have a scan round the Tutwiler Southern Heritage collection for bits of inspiration. My eyes light on a book about prohibition movements in Alabama at the turn of the (20th) century. And I think I might discover something about that mysterious phrase in Adamsville's local history book, the "Whiskey Gangs".
I think they must have been the "grassroots" of the liquor distributors and the politicians they owned. It was really about who could issue licences. "Local Option" was the liquor lobby's aim, since cities could (can) always be counted on to vote for boozing. The prohibitionists were out in a great alphabet soup of acronyms, including, of course, them women. The compromise position (the real pro oily politicians) was "Dispensaries", which was code for state monopoly (and therefore control), of liquor sales. You can see, and sympathise with, the inevitability of Prohibition only a decade later.
Later that night, I got into an argument about how you divide up the Irish. The likes of me do it on the basis of nominal, elected religion. She thought there were "black" and "red" Irish. Now I knew of "red" and "green" IRA. She thought catholics were "red" because she was a catholic, and had red hair (you can never tell what colour ladies hair really is, can you? Not unless you get really friendly, and the conversation was not heading in that direction). Anyway, as it turned out, her parents had named her after a tree. She said they claimed to have chosen between Karen and Stacey and: and they chose Myrtle.
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