Photo by Vasil Korzh on Unsplash
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports the keeper’s misfortune in finding yet another box of clippings and letters from his dim, dark journalistic past that covered the time he wrote “Drink, Drank, Drunk” for the Milwaukee Journal, a series of six articles exploring the detrimental choke hold that the alcohol industry wields on society and his own life.
The 1978 series was the most nerve-touching work of the keeper’s long career, generating thousands of responses and requests for the reprint pamphlet. It was, in the keeper’s immodest assessment, Pulitzer worthy, but in the town made famous by beer and Brewers, it was not even nominated by the Journal’s alcohol-industry-intimidated hierarchy
In the keeper’s recent detritus-unearthing, were some of the DDD pamphlet requests–400 copies from the Allen-Bradley Co. and among countless individual requests was one with $2 attached and another including a $3 money order.
The keeper has not yet decided whether to donate these dusty proceeds to AA or to buy himself a drink so he can cry in his beer over what he claims to be a long-lost professional slight: There obviously is no age or time limit on feeling put-upon.
(Copies of DDD are available from Amazon, and except for outdated stats, the content is as applicable today as it was back in 1978. The lead: “We are drowning now in a murky river of booze and beer…….”)
