He was drunk on Sixth Street in Austin? Whoa, that's never happened to anyone before...

He sounds like presidential material.

Nobody expects the Texas Alchoholic Beverage Commission...

And other headlines of the recent past:

Al Gore's son is stopped for excessive speed in North Carolina during the 2000 Democratic Convention.

Howard Dean's son is arrested for breaking and entering in order to steal beer from a store in Vermont.

You do remember these blazing headlines, don't you? Well, don't you???

Texas's public alcohol laws are what's weird. When I worked there you could drink in the bar and in your car, but not on the way from one to the other. Of course, there were no bars in Scurry County, which is dry, but there were "clubs" you could join for the night. The three hour beer run was always especially alcohol soaked since everyone but the driver could drink while you were driving.

And there I thught he was the first 21 year old boy to ever be aerested for drunk and disorderly

Posted by: Robert Schwartz at September 17, 2005 5:42 PM

Allen - He needs to come to Jesus first. And reach age 35.

All in due time, pj, all in due time.

OJ --

The Scurry County beer run is shorter now, at least as of the last 15 years. It's a 20-mile drive south on Texas 208 to the beer stores in Mitchell County, near Colorado City (I had a friend who lived in Snyder for a while in the 1990s, and Texas 208 was known for being the highway of weekend teen DWI crashes).

The county laws can get even more bizzare, as individual precincts within counties can vote themselves "wet" (regular mixed drink bars) or "partially wet" (clubs requiring at least one-day membership fees) once alcohol sales are allowed. And you could usually look at a county-by-county wet/dry map in Texas and tell which counties were preominently Southern Baptist, and which ones were predominently Catholic.

During my senior-year stint as president of Texas A&M's student geographical society (yes, Aggies do grant B.S. degrees in Geography), we made up t-shirts with a color-coded map of Texas' counties. The accompanying legend noted which were wet, which were dry, and which were "local option". This t-shirt saved my life on several separate occasions. I only wished I had had them printed upside-down so they would have been easier to read while actually wearing them.

Did anyone doubt that Aggies grant BS degrees in geography?

Times change but I've been in Austin during the wee hours of the morning and I'd be amazed if they could sort a drunk out of the typical crowd there. They/we all were.

"Al Gore's son is stopped for excessive speed in North Carolina during the 2000 Democratic Convention."

The WaPost did run a very short (AP?) story but buried it deep in the paper about 10 days later, well after the convention had ended.

About a week before the election the Post ran a big puff piece about the kid's high school football career and how daddy tried hard to attend every game, even in the midst of his campaign. I don't remember but the speeding incident (c. 97 mph) might not even have been mentioned.