Monday, April 2, 2018

Monday, 4/2


How was your Easter? Mine was fine; I even got to spend part of the day thinking about drunks.

Don't worry; nothing untoward happened. I took advantage of the crap Mother Nature dumped on us Saturday and went skiing on the Fit Strip Sunday morning. I wasn't the only person thinking that way; before I got there (and I got there early) someone had, from the looks of it, strapped on their skis in a back yard on Magnetic Street, cut through the woods, and skied a lap around the strip. So I didn't even have to break a trail. Then I headed back to our place where Loraine and I hosted my niece Mallory and her boyfriend for brunch, where a grand time was had by all.

It wasn't until after they were long gone that I started thinking about drunks.

Now, there is a reason for it. As you may recall, I'm hosting the History Center's “100 Questions” trivia contest a week from Wednesday, and I received a note from the person putting it together asking a simple question—seeing as how I seem to be the “expert” on the seedy side of Marquette, could I come up with a few (specifically, six) questions about bars and other forms of nightlife?

Of course I can. Does a cow moo? Does a fish swim? Does a bar-goer occasionally wake up and wonder where their underwear has gone?

So I sat in our (quiet) living room for a moment, and pondered some of the stories I've been told over the years. Within 2 minutes I had the six questions jotted down, and in another two minutes had an extra ten, just in case. It was after I convinced myself to finally stop writing down all these questions flowing out of me that I was struck by a funny thought—

For someone who never went to any bars up here, I sure do know a lot about them.

As you may know, the same goes with hookers and bootleggers and killers. I've never been involved with any of them (at least as far as I know), yet I can sprout off story after story about them. But because I know what questions to ask and of whom to ask them, I've collected all these great tales about Marquette nightlife over the years. I can tell you which bar was the easiest for 60s teenagers to get served in, and I can tell you which bar would occasionally have a motorcyclist ride through. I can tell you which bar used to have bowling bars flying through it, and which 70s bar had the greatest amount of nudity in it during any given night. I never saw any of this for myself—in some instances, the stories occurred before I was born—but because I have a curious nature and a VERY warped sense of the absurd, I wanted to find out.

And so I did.

Therefore, I was able to come up with the questions for the trivia contest in that span of just a few minutes. I will share those questions with you guys next week—Thursday, the 11th, the day AFTER the trivia contest, to be specific—and see if you know any of the answers. If you were around Marquette during a certain era, or if you've attended certain History Center programs I've done over the years, you might be able to say “I know”. If not, maybe you'll learn something. Maybe it'll be something you never thought you'd know, or would even want to know, but maybe you'll learn something.

A something gleaned from me spending a few moments on Easter Sunday thinking about drunks.


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