Sundays (The Way They Were--- & Are Again)

     The first night I slept in my Birmingham-area apartment when I moved to Alabama in 1976 (they're now called Elevation Hoover Apartments) , I went to dinner at a restaurant nearby on top of the hill where I-65 and Hwy 31 intersect. (I-65 was unfinished at that point.)

     I knew almost no one, and was eating alone. I ordered and asked for a glass of red wine.

    "Today's Sunday," the waitress sweetly told me, introducing me to "Blue Laws".

     Those were the religious laws enforced by cities and towns in the Deep South back then. No liquor on Sundays, was one of them. I had moved from New York City, where liquor was regulated, but only mildly.

     Meanwhile in Alabama, except for drug stores and grocery stores, everything was closed on Sundays....just as it is this afternoon here in Montgomery, thanks to Coroavirus.

     All of the blue laws gradually changed, as a good story in The Cullman Times noted. 
     But today may as well be March 29, 1976, considering the widespread closings.

Here are the bars and restaurants and shops lining Cloverdale Road in Montgomery at 2:00PM today.

     Not a car parked anywhere. We're not shopping, except at grocery and drug stores (which now at least now sell beer and wine). 








     Back in blue law days you would have to remember to get wine and beer and liquor before Sunday---and cash too, as there were no ATM's. But that's a story for another posting.