In 1956 I opened a bar at 217 North Federal, it was called, The Maisonette. We had the largest draft beer account in North Iowa and Southern Minnesota; we sold three barrels of beer a day Monday through Thursday… on Friday and Saturday we did five barrels a day. That totals twenty-two barrels a week. From each barrel we yielded 350 glasses of beer which came to 7,700 glasses a week. Seeing we ran the bar from 1956 to 1959 and there are 52 weeks in a year it means we sold beer in a glass for over 152 weeks which it would be safe to say totaled 1,201,200 glasses. This is a conservative estimate. For a large glass we charged .15 cents and for a small glass, (6 ounces) we charged . 10 cents.
I think I am in a position to know a lot about glasses that are half full or one fourth or three fourths full or totally empty. My references today are directed to my favorite columnist, John Skipper. I always look forward to his Monday offering, it sort of sets the tone for the week.
He writes about pessimism and optimism, about going to the ball game and bringing your mitt in hopes of catching a ball.  That’s real apple pie in the sky stuff; but John is a wordsmith and somewhere in some drawer in his house there is probably a college degree in journalism which is sort of a license to dispense that sort of rhetoric; I myself am not licensed in that area. He alludes to someone who might sit at home and write nasty notes instead of sitting in church working on charitable causes. Turnquist sits in church every week, probably sits next to John, then gets out and lies to his constituents.  He denies he lied but was caught on camera in regards to closing the Human Rights Office here in town.  If I were to address all the hypocrisy committed by church goers this would turn into a novel. John says he likes to hang out with people who bring their mitts to the ball game; how does he feel about sitting in the office, with the door closed with someone who wanted to shove down the throats of this community a chemical process that was unproven….now that could be nasty.
What needs to be defined more clearly is what exactly defines “nasty.” I suspect to many…. a great many, the truth could serve easily as something deemed nasty…real nasty; this could be yet another book. I think you’ll agree the word “nasty” has a very broad definition. To show prejudice towards some and slant the news could be deemed nasty as well, but I am not accusing anyone of that, not me. I am a Christian and my faith prohibits that sort of thing…
Peter Children
