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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