“A hearse once drew up near customs in Champlain with a flat tire. Two nuns got out of the vehicle and an officer, listening from within the building, heard one of them say in a bass voice, ‘Ain’t this a hell of a place to have a flat tire.’ “
– Allan S. Everest in Rum Across the Border: The Prohibition Era in Northern New York (1978)
One of my favorite John Held Jr. engravings, from My Pious Friends and Drunken Companions (1927) by Frank Shay and John Held Jr.
“There is one other thing I know I shall never get enough of — champagne. I cannot say when I drank my first prickly, delicious glass of it. I was raised in Prohibition, which meant that my father was very careful about his bootleggers, but the general adult drinking stayed about pinch-bottle Scotch as safest in those days, and I think I probably started my lifelong affair with Dom Perignon’s discovery in 1929, when I first went to France. It does not matter. I would gladly ask for the same end as a poor peasant’s there, who is given a glass of champagne on his deathbed to cheer him on his way.”
– M.F.K. Fisher in “Once a Tramp, Always…”
