Word: arounders
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...that moment Sam was just a pensioned pumper driver from the Bayonne (N.J.) fire department, and Sam's bar & grill was like any neighborhood joint around St. Mark's Place on the Lower East Side. Its only distinctive touch was Sam's cousin, "Bottle Sam" Hock, who amused the trade by whacking tunes out of whisky bottles with a suds-scraper. But the customers got a joyful jolt when Sam opened up one morning last week...
...around the walls, even over the bar mirror, tasteful, powder-blue signs proclaimed in red letters: "Spring is here and so is the 5? beer." The early birds drank and took their change in mild disbelief. The nickel wasn't obsolescent after all. The word spread. Sam's bar & grill started to bulge like Madison Square Garden on fight night. People drank, shook hands with strangers and sang...
Then something went sour. The two breweries that supplied Sam cut him off, and an electrician came around and took the neon beer sign out of the flyspecked windows. Somehow, it seemed, Sam had betrayed free enterprise. An organization of restaurant owners muttered that Sam might not be cutting his beer, but he was cutting his throat. The Bartenders Union threw a picket line in front of the place because it was nonunion...
...Around the village of Bazouges-du-Désert, in Brittany, the apples grow big and sweet, and the Calvados (apple brandy) is a potable that is more in demand than the local water. In the town one morning last week the biggest bell in the church tower began to peal. It was a familiar but urgent tocsin of alarm. Government tax collectors had been sighted. The revenuers were looking for illegal Calvados and unlicensed stills...
...prisoners down to the church courtyard, where some 200 glowering men of the district had gathered to defy the revenuers. The prisoners were put into one of the police cars, which cruised about until two harassed men in city clothes stepped from a doorway. "We had hardly begun asking around about alcohol," said one of the revenuers, "when the bell sounded." In the end the revenuers got nothing and the bell-ringing prisoners were freed, after a long and fatherly lecture from Lieut. Leroux...