BEECHER BITES

"I was witnessing a thirty-nine-year-old woman whose secret dam of past sorrows collapsed from the emotional quake triggered by the passing of the man at the center of it all."

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"No city in the United States had a drinking culture more deep-seated than Milwaukee, home to nine breweries and over 2,000 saloons when the 1920s began. In the previous decade during World War I, Milwaukee’s culture faced anti-German sentiment. America’s Anti-Saloon League called Milwaukee and its many breweries “the worst of all our German enemies,” labeling Milwaukee beer as “Kaiser Brew.” For decades, the American Temperance Movement viewed Milwaukee as a shameful den of iniquity. Carrie Nation, the movement’s longtime icon, famed for attacking alcohol-serving establishments with a hatchet, once said, “If there is any place that is hell on earth, it is Milwaukee.”

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"The only thing more fun than drinking in those days was helping people drink against the law."

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"Here, on a sunny, ice cold Saturday in January 1925, fate intersected with destiny at the corner of 12th and Grand."

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“Oh, I got the best pro skirt damn near every screwin’-eh day of the week. You can pluck Rose on Tuesdays and Hazel on Hump Day. Friday’s our payday special; I got Fanny and Franny. Give ‘em each an extra fin and they’ll do ya’ at the same time … Saturdays, well, that might be out of the price range for a couple of Waukegan Jack Tars.”

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"She melted into a kitchen chair, sautéed by confirmed suspicion. Her spirit liquified to the rhythm of twelve-hundred second-hand ticks."

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"Her words came with the deliberate plainness of a woman under the spell of a Bela Lugosi trance."

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“Look, you Swedish meatball! I don’t give a damn if the new guy has a stick up his ass all the way to Dublin.”

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         “First one’s on me, my boy. What’s your pleasure?”

         “Old Fitz.”

         Wap went the glass onto the bar. Glug, glug, glug went bourbon into the glass. “Here you go, kid. Breakfast of champions.”

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"(She) was on their bed, reclined with her back against the headboard. She bore the smile of a masochist as smoke gently rose from the Lucky Strike between her fingers."

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"A tender sprinkle of bird tweets and the flutter of tree frogs blended with the sound of the water’s gentle flow. A sense of calm cascaded through them, from skin to soul. Without getting wet, two city girls found themselves rebaptized into new lives and womanhood."

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“I know you can’t help yourself. You don’t know any better.” Ching went the heated lighter, punctuating his words. Crackle went his cellophaned pack of Kool’s as he raised it from pocket  to mouth, shaking one loose to clasp between his lips. He lit his cigarette, popped the lighter back in its home and turned up the radio volume. Surrealness enveloped their ride. For the next hour, the blare of a radio station broadcast squelched conversation. He cracked the driver door window open periodically, venting some of the smoke but none of the tension.

 

"Mothers are the strongest branches in every family tree

All their love and sacrifice, you never truly see

They live inside your heart and there they will always be."

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“We never talked about the past anymore. Neither did your mother, or her sisters and brothers. It was too dark there. Better to embrace the sun than inherit the wind.”

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