The wet-dry wars in the Southern states continue to this day, according to a story in today’s New York Times.
It is called “local option.” Southern states, including Texas, leave the making of several kinds of law up to local precincts: a county, a city, even a precinct within a city. Alcohol laws are one such local option. In Texas, there are many “wet” counties, and many “dry” counties, where alcohol can’t be sold. Today’s story focused on East Texas, Angelina County, to be exact, which is dry. If a resident of Lufkin, in Angelina County, wants to buy a six-pack of beer, he or she has to cross into Nacogdoches County, which is wet, to buy it.
Texas liquor laws are the reason, after 35 years’ residency in California, I still get a craving for a warm beer. Abilene, my home town, was in Taylor County, which was dry until 1978. If we wanted a beer, we had to drive 35 miles north from Taylor County, across Jones County, and into Haskell County, where there was a liquor store not 50 feet across the county line. Haskell County was wet, but it was illegal to sell cold beer. We took a cooler with us, bought a case of beer off the floor display, and a bag of ice. In the car, we put several beers on ice and drank the first one warm, which tasted pretty good at the end of a long summer workday. By the time we finished the first one, the others were getting nice and cool. Yes, we drank in the car, which was legal in Texas in those days, but frowned upon: along the highways the highway department posted signs: “If you drive, don’t drink; if you drink, don’t drive.”
I have emailed the New York Times reporter with directions to information on Impact, Texas, one of the most interesting stories in the wet-dry lore. Abilene in the 1960s was dry, and with more than 160 churches in a city of 90,000, it was determined to stay that way. Before Haskell County, if an Abilenian wanted a beer, he had to drive to Breckenridge, over in Stephens County, which was about a 60-mile trip, one way. Bootleggers had prospered in Abilene since the 1930s; Abilene had the reputation of being “the wettest dry town in Texas.” But bootleggers didn’t cater to customers just wanting a six-pack, or even a fifth.
In the early ‘60s, an Abilenian named Dallas Perkins decided to do something about it. He owned 30 acres on the north side of town, not too far from Hardin-Simmons University, a Baptist institution. He bought more acreage to bring the total up to about 70 acres, with a population of 50 or 60, enough to vote on a proposal of incorporation. Papers were filed, the vote was taken, and Impact, Texas, was created, for the sole purpose, many believed, of selling alcohol. There was a court fight, of course, and it carried to the Texas Supreme Court before the incorporation and the intent to sell were both upheld in December, 1963.
I was there. Literally. As I recall, Impact opened for business a day or two before Christmas, 1963. I think Pinkie’s had already built a store and was ready for business, but on opening day, two 18-wheelers backed onto the property and sold booze right out of the backs of the trailers. Impact did a booming business for many years, until 1978, when the City of Abilene went wet. Impact still exists – Google “Impact, Texas” – but it’s just another place with a liquor store now. Makes me thirsty for a beer, if I can find a place in San Diego that sells it warm.
Love the Impact column! I remember cars lined down the street—was it Grape Street?—to get to Impact that day. Having lived on the base for several years at the time where alcohol could be bought by normal adults, we base people thought it was hilarious that the church-going Abilene folks who would not allow demon alcohol in our fine city, would line up for miles to buy booze—must of been the heathens in that line. Then when I moved to Dallas years ago, I discovered that only Precint One was wet in a town of over one million. But to make it easy for proper people outside Precinct One to have access to alcohol, the city fathers made Precint One look like the scribblings of a 2 year old with little offshoots of the precinct heading this way and that all over the city. And now I just moved into our brand new house in Tarrant County and I can go across the street to the Seven-11 and see beer and wine lined up on the shelves. For a guy who has never had a whole beer in his life and never been druck, I find the squabble over booze to be most amusing. Of course, Texas does not compare in liquor oddness to Utah. THAT is a strange state.
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