Back to the future

Dear Editor,

This smoking ban kind of reminds me of the situation in Lincoln in the '50s and '60s when on-sale liquor was banned.

If you wanted a steak and a legal drink, you went to Omaha. The problem was solved by the creation of private clubs in Lincoln. One could join a club and keep a bottle in a private locker.

Problem was, there were no hour controls over private clubs -- and some pretty rough clubs developed in Lancaster County, keeping deputies on overtime. Oklahoma and Kansas were also dry, or at least parts of them in those days, and membership clubs abounded.

I once attended a business meeting in Topeka with some associates. Our hotel had an off-sale license, where you could buy a bottle, then take the bottle into the hotel restaurant, pay $5 for membership, and the waiter would serve you a drink from your bottle. In OK City in the '60s, membership clubs abounded on every block.

Booze was flowing everywhere and all it took was a buck for membership. Today in one small town in Kansas, you can get into a restaurant from the front or back door. If you go in the back door, you're a "member" and can get a drink. If you go in the front door, you're "public" and dry.

Such privatization even extended to the old USSR. I stayed in a hotel in old Leningrad at the time the communists were still running things, more or less, and U.S. currency was illegal to buy things with. I says in my best Russian to Svetlana at the desk "ya nooshna vodka." She directed me to the top floor of the hotel where a "western" bar abounded with all flavors and U.S. dollars and Swedish crowns were highly desired.

Maybe that's the solution. No doubt the day will come when yield-grade 4 rib-eye steaks will be banned from public restaurants. You'll buy your steak (and cigar) from an off-sale street vendor, put it in a paper bag and take it to the chef at your private club.

Of course, there'll be the occasional raid where rib eye aficionados will be hauled off to jail or given an option to attend Beefeaters Anonymous meetings.

Bob Linderholm,

Cambridge