I recently discovered online that a liquor store had opened for business in Flemingsburg, Kentucky. And there's a winery there, too! It's as if beer pong had been introduced at the Methodist fellowship meetings.
When I was growing up, Fleming County, of which Flemingsburg is the county seat, was one of 90 or so dry counties amid Kentucky’s 120.
That is to say that Fleming County was dry in a legal and theoretical sense. I knew as a lad that the bootleggers there didn’t distill their own stores, but simply imported bottles, commonly half-pints, easy to conceal, with a heavy markup, from the adjacent wet county. And I knew that it was possible to drive to a certain house on Fox Spring Avenue, park outside and tap the horn, after which someone would come to the door, ask what was wanted, and deliver the requested product curbside.
No local option question had never succeeded in the county because, I was told, if it came up the Baptists and bootleggers would flock to the polls to defeat it. There was an occasion, again I am told, that concerned churchgoing citizens were distressed at the open commerce in liquor in the town and prevailed upon the sheriff, Robert Stokley, to do something about it. (That was Bob Stokley's one term as sheriff. In Kentucky, sheriffs were constitutionally limited to one term in office, after which they had to make room at the trough for someone else. He went on to be county judge for many years.) On this occasion, he got in his squad car at the corner of Main Cross in downtown Flemingsburg, turned on the siren, and drove at a stately 20 miles an hour the mile and a half to the house on Fox Spring Avenue, where nothing was to be discovered.
There was an occasion one year when I had come home from college at Christmas to find the town all in excitement because the federal Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms people had raided the local American Legion post, which had been operating more or less as a package store. Had someone at the Legion not had the presence of mind to call the VFW post on the other side of town with a warning, it would have been a grim Christmastide all around.
I, like many of my fellows, enjoyed my first taste of bourbon on an occasion that was not strictly legal, and I remain loyal to a signature product of my native state after all these years as an expatriate Kentuckian. And I salute my fellow Fleming Countians for their acceptance of civilization.
