Lips That Touch Liquor Will Never Touch Mine...

My grandmother, Lenora Norris, was a “temperance” woman. Lips that touched liquor would never touch hers…

?I had known of her intolerance for anything alcohol my entire life. She would reluctantly go to church with us. She disapproved of serving wine in our communion service.

I very uncomfortably and fully discovered her deep aversion of alcohol when my dad opened a private club for alcohol sales in Montague County, Texas. She was beyond hysterical, something I was not prepared to witness or experience.

Having resigned from his sales job as a detail man for a pharmaceutical company, my parents went into the motel and restaurant business in Nocona, Texas in 1969.

Nocona is in Montague County, Texas, and was a dry county and had been forever.

In 1973, Dad saw an opportunity to take one of the restaurants he had come to own in town and make it a private club and sell alcohol. He applied for the proper licenses, did everything according to regulations of the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission. Approved.

And as we all know, just because something is legal, it doesn’t mean that people won’t completely lose their minds over something. The editor of the local bi-weekly newspaper wrote blistering articles about my dad. Preachers decried him from their pulpits.

Not only did some of the townspeople go absolutely batshit crazy when he did that, his mother, my grandmother, had a complete meltdown.

I had graduated high school in May 1972. I was home for the summer from TAMU between freshman and sophomore years when Dad opened his club.

I was helping him clean the place, paint, etc., when he told Grandmother. She was so extremely upset that Dad sent me to visit her and try to calm her down.

It was not until I actually visited with her did I grasp the severity to which she was upset, mortified, and horrified, that he had done this. There was much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Dad should not have sent me to her. I should not have gone there. I had never ever seen my grandmother so outside of herself.

The fact that her beloved son, of whom she was still extremely proud, had opened a bar for the purpose of selling alcohol to people was devastating to her as an upright, moral, Christian woman.

She was certain he would go to hell for this and perhaps she might even go to hell because in her mind she had failed to instill the virtues of sobriety and temperance into him.

The club opened. It did OK. Better than what the restaurant alone did.

Time went on as it always does. All was forgiven but never forgotten. It was not mentioned or talked about again.

That is until Dad told me a story of a similar incident with my grandmother involving my Aunt Sue’s husband, Ken Young.

Ken was a character. Funny and fun loving, and the consummate salesman. He made his fortune buying, selling, and trading oilfield equipment such as drilling rigs, pumps, and valves.

Ken and my Aunt Sue were up from Austin, Texas, visiting her parents, my grandparents. Lenora and LD Norris lived just outside of Wilson, Oklahoma, and a quarter mile north of the Healdton Y.

My grandfather, LD Norris was down with a bad cold which was highly unusual for him. I never really knew him to ever have a cold or the flu.

Anyway, Ken goes out to his car and brings back into my grandmother’s home a bottle of Seagram’s Crown Royal Canadian Whiskey.

When Grandmother sees that bottle she bolts up out of her chair, goes full battle mode, points at Ken with as adamant and demanding voice as she could muster “How dare you bring that evil spirit into this house!” and demands that he immediately take that bottle back outside the house, off their property, and pour it out.

Only Ken Young was capable of what happened next. He immediately went into his sales mode with “Now, Lenora, my good woman, please allow me a moment to extol the heavenly virtues of this fine elixir, though made by man, divinely inspired by God to rid the human mind, body, and soul of the evils of influenza, pneumonia, rheumatism, arthritis, and the common cold.”

OK. He really didn’t say it that way however he did put on quite the professional, deal making, wheeler dealer show.

Grandmother fell for his pitch and like I said, he is the only person on this Earth that could pull that off.

According to my Dad, Grandmother relented and allowed Ken to fix my grandfather, a hot toddy…for the explicit purpose of medicinal use only.

I had heard the story. On my next visit to my grandparents, I questioned my grandmother about this and asked if it was true? Did she really allow Ken to fix my grandfather a hot toddy to cure his cold?

She answered affirmatively. It was true. She had allowed whiskey in her house for medicinal purposes only, to cure my grandfather’s cold.

She went on to say that she now felt really bad about not allowing it sooner because she did not realize how severe Granddaddy’s cold was.

I looked at her puzzled and asked how so, what do you mean?

She said, “I feel awful because I did not realize your granddaddy’s cold was so bad. It took that whole bottle of whiskey to cure it.”

I let that sink in for a moment. Looked at Granddaddy. He smiles. OK. The subject never came up again.

…..

Montague County, Texas is a wet county today with liquor stores everywhere and a brewery in the old Nocona Boots factory.

My parents divorced in 1976. Dad closed the private club in 1977 having previously sold the other restaurant and the motel. He and his wife Betty moved to Wichita Falls and he became a petroleum land man with Burke Royalty Company.

My grandfather LD Norris did not become an alcoholic. He died of a cancer in 1987. Grandmother Lenora passed away in 2002.