ON THE AVENUES: Alas, New Albany is less of a place without a bookstore.

Hi, I'm Nawbany's village iconoclast. In my spare time I write sentences and drink lots of beer. 

The onetime PBS anchorman Jim Lehrer died on January 23, and when I heard the sad news, my thoughts raced back to those many occasions during the decade of the 1980s, working evenings at the long departed Scoreboard Liquors, and doing something that almost never happens with me nowadays: watching the evening news via television.

Whenever I spot a package store clerk with eyes glued to an iPhone or laptop, I think back to my entertainment options on slow business nights: a minuscule black and white television set with shabby rabbit ears, from which many a McNeil-Lehrer News Hour was observed. I probably should have been sweeping or stocking, anyway.

The city of New Albany had cable television back then, having handed the keys to the city to the first enterprising operator who stepped forward with hands extended, much as the nation’s railroads once fleeced the federal government for right-of-way privileges extending to the earth’s core in on direction and the moon in the other.

However there was no way Scoreboard’s owners would ever have paid for something quite that frivolous, although store manager Lloyd “Duck” Cunningham gladly would have watched Cubs day games if WGN were available.

In other news, there were sporadic attempts to have the morning’s Courier-Journal delivered to Scoreboard, although these usually came to nothing because the newspapers would so often get stolen. Seems journalism was subject to thievery even when the Binghams practiced it (until 1986, at least).

Given that I usually worked two jobs, time for me was scarce. To make it down from the Knobs a little early for work at Scoreboard meant having the chance to walk a block to the library and catch up on magazines, then in 1988 came a job at Data Courier in Louisville, where I abstracted magazine articles, exponentially expanding my available options to self-educate.

This experience genuinely changed my life, and while the public library remained a go-to-when-could, now there were some publications of sufficient obscurity to require a visit to the IU Southeast library for perusal.

By this time Scoreboard had moved to the corner of Spring and Beharrell Avenue on the other end of town, and I was living in Floyds Knobs with two good friends. We plumped for cable, which in practice meant sports, MTV and CNN. My library visits waned; there wasn’t much time to read, anyway. My social life was active, which is to say I drank far too much.

The overarching point to this opening digression today is that I’ve always placed supreme importance in being informed, by whatever means it takes. Almost certainly to a degree these channels of journalistic expression 30 or more years ago were biased and tainted. It would be foolish to argue otherwise.

Still, it is increasingly hard to imagine they were any worse than the befuddling cacophony greeting me each morning as I try to learn exactly what’s going on in the world. It's as if we cannot possibly know -- which benefits the oligarchs nicely, don't you think?

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Fast-forwarding 15 eventful (read: exceedingly rough) years, and seemingly as many personal lifetimes, and suddenly it was 2004. There’d be another dozen years to unfold before my NABC tenure concluded, and Diana and I had purchased a house on Spring Street, where we still live.

As for the time of which I'm about to speak, I’m guessing it was October, as I’d just returned from what proved to be the finale of my side gig as European motorcoach beer tour operator.

Diana and I decided to attend an open house at the Moser Tannery, then fully intact and only a short period removed from daily operation. It had been purchased by Al Goodman, who envisioned a museum of tanning among other uses for the buildings, as well as an ecological preserve for the Loop Island wetlands behind them.

Frankly, I didn’t know the natural area even existed. In 2020, it’s the only part of Al’s dream to come to fruition, because sadly, only a few months after the open house, a heavy snow caused the roof to collapse onto the amazing century-old hide tanning bays, completely destroying them.

Subsequently Al couldn’t leverage his plans into existence, and eventually what was left was scooped up by the opportunistic city, which acquiesced in the neglect of the remaining structures until they were torched by arsonists in what might be Jeff Gahan’s most cynical and purposefully scripted moral failure ever.

Ah, but I’m digressing into a previous existence. Apologies, Andrew.

If for no other reason, the open house at Moser Tannery in October of 2004 was memorable because I met Randy Smith for the very first time. I already knew his wife Ann Baumgartle from our time as students at IU Southeast. They informed us of something we hadn’t heard: Destinations Booksellers was soon to open at 604 East Spring Street, a mere five blocks from our house.

Know that in 2004, the downtown food and dining revolution had yet to be launched. The embryo came in 2006 with the advent of Bistro New Albany, which by all rights should be memorialized by a plaque at Brooklyn and The Butcher, which now occupies the space.

Maybe today’s Develop New Albany can work on that if they the governing committee runs out of groveling, self-congratulatory photo-ops.

However, we got by. In late 2004 there was plenty of great beer and pizza at NABC on Grant Line Road, a short bicycle ride from our home. The library remained a reasonable ten minute walk, and providentially, just down the street was a bookstore.

Finally New Albany threatened to become livable.

At its inception in 2004, Destinations Booksellers was New Albany’s first full-service bookstore since 1947. Two years before this, our original brewery at Sportstime and Rich O’s was the first in New Albany since 1935. Whether any of this helped Randy and I to become friends is questionable, but it strikes me as significant in the sense of shared visions.

NABC expanded downtown to Bank Street Brewhouse in 2009, and contracted back to the mother ship in 2019. I left the business for good in 2018. As most blog readers already know, Destinations Booksellers has spent the past two weeks winding down and now has ceased operations after almost 16 years in business, making way for a soon-to-come food service tenant, leaving Randy and Ann to be landlords.

They’re not going anywhere. Neither are we, and yet already I feel the absence of their bookstore. In spite of all the many electronic and technological advances governing the way we interpret the world, receive news and fundamentally communicate, books remain sacred objects to me.

A bookstore, the public library, our private library where there’s no space to put any more books because there are so damn many books … well, these are the churches and chapels for an unrepentant atheist, humanist and rationalist.

I’m grateful for Randy and Ann for Destinations Booksellers. 15-plus years is a great run for any business, and New Albany isn’t exactly the sort of milieu that celebrates “book learning.”

Of course this city wasn’t much for snooty imported (and later craft) beers, either, but I started evangelizing about better beer all the way back in 1983, and had 20 years to prepare the market before we began brewing our own. Aspiration takes time and patience to nurture, and probably most often in life, the seedling fails to reach its full growth potential.

When it does, those are the special times.

Randy and Ann are our friends, and I’ve richly enjoyed the hours I’ve spent browsing at Destinations, attending the civic events held there (like pubs, bookstores need to be community centers), and chewing the fat with the proprietor.

To be honest, it made me proud as a New Albanian that New Albany had its own bookstore. It may be gone, but I won’t forget it. Maybe someday the city as a whole can be the sort of information-friendly learning zone like that room at 604 East Spring was from 2004 through 2020.

Unlikely, but a boy can still dream.

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Recent columns:

January 30: ON THE AVENUES: Dear Holocaust deniers: If you don't like this post, unfriend me now.

January 23: ON THE AVENUES: Running over the same old ground.

January 16: ON THE AVENUES: I won’t belong to any Dry January that would have me as a member.

January 9: ON THE AVENUES: Elusive sounds of silence.

A joyful noise? The six most-read ON THE AVENUES columns of 2018.

A joyful noise? The six most-read ON THE AVENUES columns of 2018.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

"If Potter gets hold of this Building and Loan, there’ll never be another decent house built in this town. He’s already got charge of the bank. He’s got the bus line. He got the department stores. And now he’s after us!"

Poor George Bailey gets a vision of awful, grasping Potter getting everything and naming everything after himself: Pottersville, a hideous ego-plutocrat takeover. And if he had a hotel chain, it would be called something alliterative, no doubt, like … Potter Palace?

Summit Springs?

The Jeff M. Gahan Family Fun City Hall?

We can't fault The Guardian piece's writer, who knows all about It's a Wonderful Life but hasn't witnessed the Potter-like proclivities of our own dull mayoral eminence.

And so our scene opens with a panoramic shot of the city filmed by drone, gradually zooming to street level. Stuffed to the turducken with campaign cash, Dear Leader is seen waddling toward Bunker Hatch #4.

He seems to be humming a tune: "You wish me a Merry Christmas -- or else."

Naturally the captive local news media dares not take him to task. The Genius of the Flood Plain’s wretched anchor tattoo adorns every street sign and trash can. Sewer lift stations and Rice Krispies coeds titter when he is ushered into the photo-op by a team of drooling glad-handers.

Discarded envelopes flutter to the floor beneath the Pedestal of the Fruit Baskets, accumulating like snow (sic) drifts atop David Duggins’ desk at NAHA.

But hey: That’s why he’s here.

Those 37,000-plus city residents who currently do not enjoy the perks and privileges of inner circle membership somehow have managed to stumble to the conclusion of New Gahania Year Seven, known as "2018" to the wider world existing outside the confines of the Open Air Museum of Ignorance, Superstition and Backwardness.

Well, come what may, my job at NA Confidential is to provide the other side of the story. Truth actually mattered when I was growing up. You can count me out of the ring kissing. I don’t do idol worship, and I won’t pretend to honor the credentials of a middling mediocrity of a veneer salesman who hasn’t read a book since Ray-Gun was president, although I’d be remiss without offering a helpful suggestion: Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis.

On second thought, never mind. It would be pearls before bovine.

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Let’s have a glance at the six most-read ON THE AVENUES columns of 2018, with a necessary caveat.

As recently explained, the “scoring” system at Blogger underwent a manner of bizarre and largely unexplained alteration in October, and statistics for the past three months don’t correlate with those of the year’s first nine.

I regret my blog being situated at this perennially inept platform, and if 13,400 posts hadn’t already adorned the tote board since 2004, I’d do something about it. As such, we begin with one honorable mention, based not on Google hiccups, but an informal tally of Facebook engagements.

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This November 29 column looks to be tops for the months of October, November and December.

ON THE AVENUES: "That's why I voted no," explains Scott Stewart, pausing to duck rocks feebly lobbed by Team Gahan's propaganda pygmies.

City council president Al Knable’s inspired 2018 appointment of Scott Stewart to the cloistered confines of the Redevelopment Commission was a signal for New Albany’s suburban-minded, self-congratulatory ruling caste to move with characteristic pre-election haste to make the city safe for all the people just like them.

Accordingly, when Wile E Gahan pointed his ego toward someone else’s idea about a recreational rails-to-trails, and headed down to the Quality of Life Pawn Shop for the cash to pay approximately 3% of a long-term project located almost entirely outside city limits, Stewart asked a series of excellent, pointed questions.

These concerns were batted away by redevelopment’s the-fix-stays-in sycophants, who quickly reaffirmed their pre-determined vote prior to sliming Stewart in subsequent social media Trump-o-grams, which almost certainly were written by Adam Dickey, lifetime redevelopment wheel-greaser, who also serves as Democratic Party chairman.

Nepotism much?

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Number Six appeared on January 4, previewing the coming year’s renewed non-transparency.

ON THE AVENUES: Opposition? It is defined as resistance or dissent, expressed in action or argument, and in New Gahania, now's the time for it.

Tome May’s News & Maroon kicked off 2018 with another triumph of unalloyed stenography, providing Jeff Gahan with excessive column inches to belch his exaggerated feats of Kool-Aid consumption. Our forever posturing mayor heartily congratulated himself with the “shucks, just can’t help it if I’m perfect” plea familiar to cloistered autocrats (or Greg Fischer) since time immemorial.

I dissented, reminding readers that just because the local chain good-news-paper won’t tackle the hard issues, it doesn’t mean they’re not there: a flawed and unsafe street grid realization, luxury parks deficit funding, clearcutting of the urban canopy, the public housing putsch, criminal neglect of civic assets like the doomed Moser Tannery, and worst of all, Gahan’s pay-to-play lovefest with special interests.

There also was advice for Republicans: If Gahan won’t give a State of the City with real people in the room, interacting, then a Republican needs to give one instead. The marketplace of ideas is preferred by many, though abhorred by the likes of Gahan. I urged the GOP to full-court press him, because I’m getting damned tired of doing it all alone.

Not as though they ever began -- or I ever stopped. Such are the burdens of commitment.

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Number Five took a look back, and was as relevant on February 15 as it had been three years earlier.

ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: No more fear, Jeff (2015).

From the moment Gahan settled into the anchor’s seat in 2012, he began drinking deeply of the ego-driven power potion, as preferred the world over by big fish swimming in small ponds. The bullying and intimidation has only escalated in the following years, and transparency has become as rare as mountain oysters on downtown vegetarian restaurant menus.

Free speech seems a particular irritant to Gahan and the Floyd County Democratic Party, especially as it pertains to social media. In the marketplace of ideas, they’re a one-party dictatorship, albeit without any verifiable dogma to protect from scrutiny apart from daily compounded monetization of municipal contracts. It is telling that Chairman Dickey rivals Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin in his eagerness to block dissenters.

I’ve actually been to places where fear was a daily consideration, but New Albany isn’t East Germany, and we can do better than this.

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On September 30 there was reason for hope. It's Number Four.

ON THE AVENUES SPECIAL EDITION: As David White's mayoral campaign begins, let's briefly survey the electoral landscape.

On November 6, the Floyd County Democratic Party’s ramshackle jalopy bottomed out on a speed bump in a snail’s path.

In the aftermath of a certifiable Red Wave, the Alamo Scenario materialized: Gahan, his party chairman and a scant four remaining city council Democrats placed in a last-ditch, us-against-them scenario, tattered and bedraggled but with no choice except defending the lucrative system of political patronage that Gahan has adeptly exploited these past seven years.

David White already had declared his intention to challenge Gahan in the 2019 Democratic primary, and Gahan's steadily multiplying negatives make a strong case for White, given the centrist (at best) and right-leaning (bingo!) tendencies of those older local Democrats who actually bother voting.

White is a fiscal conservative, and while no flaming radical, his concern for the community’s most vulnerable citizens, coupled with libertarian attitudes toward social issues, is a welcome change for those of a more youthful and progressive bent, given they'd no longer have to clench their teeth and tolerate Gahan's reactionary worldview in an ongoing Faustian bargain to preserve the party's declining prospects for ward heeling.

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Coming in at Number Three, there was a nostalgic remembrance of employment, which was published on March 1.

ON THE AVENUES: Scoreboard daze of old.

Three decades ago, my introduction to the Open Air Museum was a gig at Scoreboard Liquors, located across the street from the Federal Building in an oppressively ugly structure long since demolished -- for once, rightfully.

Package stores of Scoreboard’s socioeconomic ilk remain an ongoing psychological experiment. During my tenure, insights into the human condition were plentiful, and sometimes fairly hard to stomach.

It was my introduction to good beer, and we did a fairly good trade in imports, given their obscurity and the fact that whenever I wasn’t on site to explain what they were, consumer requests generally were greeted with a sneer by Duck, the manager.

“Huh? I don’t drink that shit.”

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The year's runner-up at Number Two came on January 25. Truth-telling isn't always easy; it took far too much effort on my part to interest the newspaper in this story, so most of what we know was disseminated right here. 

ON THE AVENUES: David Duggins’ violent “jokes” will continue until the New Albany Housing Authority’s morale improves – or Duggins is fired. We advocate the latter.

In early 2017, Gahan seized control of New Albany Public Housing, firing NAHA’s longtime director and packing its board with a collection of shameless, kowtowing lickspittles unparalleled in venality even by New Albany’s subterranean standards.

Gahan appointed his flagrantly unqualified campaign fund bag man David Duggins to one of the city’s top-paying positions as NAHA disheveler-in-chief, and Duggins missed very few opportunities to remind us what a dreadful idea his appointment was in the first place, as when he emerged from a board meeting in January of 2018 and threatened a NAHA resident with an impromptu disciplinary tasering.

The ruling caste predictably laughed it off -- Davey, well, he's OUR boy -- but of course had the same NAHA resident “joked” about shooting or tasing Duggins, he likely wouldn't have emerged from the meeting room uninjured.

Our city hall C-students -- almost all of them white, male and insular graduates of New Albany High School --- seem unable to grasp that only with disproportionate power comes the “right” to say it was all a joke, and make no mistake: Duggins’ threats were about power. So was Gahan's hostile takeover of public housing.

People? They're just in the way.

Jeff Gahan owned this predicament when it occurred, and he still does. Duggins has been empowered for far too long, and after he made a fool of himself and exposed the intellectual vacancy of Gahanism in the process, his power actually increased.

This made me sick then, it makes me sick now, and it should make readers sick, too. Duggins should have been fired on the spot, and still should be -- before someone gets hurt.

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It should come as no surprise that my commentary about a new luxury city hall for "inhumanely" treated city workers was Number One, and the most-read ON THE AVENUES of 2018 (June 12).

ON THE AVENUES: Histrionic preservation? $8.5 million to gift Jeff Gahan with a luxury city hall "want" is simply obscene in a time of societal need.

Whenever Gahan, a presumed Democrat, pontificates about the Reisz Mahal project being “a move to protect our history," I sadly recall the fate of Haughey’s Place and so many other remnants of the city’s past, buildings that might have been adaptively re-used, but didn’t meet the threshold of narcissistic grandiloquence demanded by the mayor’s ethics-free selective reasoning and laughably elevated self-image.

In a city more allergic to irony than pollen or ragweed, Gahan’s newfound tender concern for the historical imperatives of the Reisz building is profoundly ironic, too. Do you recall those two words, “dilapidated” and “neglect”?

They’re not mine.

Rather, they come straight from Dear Leader’s mouth, via the medium of Mike Hall, the Shadow Mayor & Big Word Interpreter & Imperial Court Food Taster, and they serve as the convenient excuse for Gahan to don his Halloween leftover Superman outfit and rescue this pathetically abused historic building from the scandalous clutches of its shirker owner, who after all, has allowed it to deteriorate to the current juncture of high urgency.

Except the neglectful "villain" in this instance has been remunerated far above market value for his stubbornness. The redevelopment commission surreptitiously gifted the Reisz’s purchase price of $390,000 to the city’s preferred contractor Denton Floyd -- by sheer coincidence a firm frequently contributing to Gahan’s campaign war chest -- which duly passed the money to the Reisz building’s owner, who as Gahan himself concedes, rendered it dilapidated in the first place.

In consequence-free Nawbany, the words “miraculous government-enabled windfall bailout” spring immediately to mind.

Eagerly abetting Gahan’s desire to erect a lasting memorial to his shimmering and saintly benevolence is councilman David “Tunnel Vision” Barksdale, a thoroughly camouflaged Republican and prominent historic preservationist, who has let it be known that the Reisz building is so very important to the city that no cost is too great to “save” it.

To summarize, for at least thirty years the structure has rotted, but only now, with a crucial municipal election coming in 2019, does time suddenly become of the essence. The decision about Reisz must be made right away, with as little transparent public debate as possible, or else the city’s forward progress will be halted dead in its tracks.

And people still wonder why I’m cynical.

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Recent columns:

December 6: ON THE AVENUES: Straight tickets, unsociable media and whether Democrats should rally around Gahan's gallows pole.

November 29: ON THE AVENUES: "That's why I voted no," explains Scott Stewart, pausing to duck rocks feebly lobbed by Team Gahan's propaganda pygmies.

November 22: ON THE AVENUES: A few thanks to give before we return to our regular anti-anchor resistance programming.

November 15: ON THE AVENUES: Notes on Solidarity after a visit to the European Solidarity Centre in Gdansk.

ON THE AVENUES: Scoreboard daze of old.

ON THE AVENUES: Scoreboard daze of old.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

On the occasion of Indiana's impending (and long overdue) Sunday Sales Apocalypse, I'm finding myself waxing nostalgic about Scoreboard Liquors.

These reflections were published most recently in 2015 at The Potable Curmudgeon blog; the article actually originated here at NA Confidential back in 2004, and eventually morphed into one of my pre-merger New Albany Tribune columns.

Joe K. mans the counter during the Reagan Years.
He introduced "retail-itis" to the lexicon.

The essay has been updated several times, and lately my memories seem prompted by mental archaeology ... or, the constant excavations of my cluttered cranium as I struggle to recall the details of my 1980s-era travels in Europe, which occurred during the same period of liquor store employment described here.

Another reason is belatedly remembering Ralph, and others who are no longer with us.

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There used to be a package liquor store called Scoreboard Liquors on West Spring Street in downtown New Albany. I worked there part-time from 1982 through 1988, when the store moved to a different location, a couple of miles uptown. In fact, I continued to work at Scoreboard after the move, but to tell the truth, it was never the same as it had been at the downtown location.

Scoreboard’s downtown building directly faced the federal courthouse, and it was within spitting distance of numerous bankers, lawyers, title abstractors and others performing their hoary time-honored roles amid the daily antics of a county seat in seemingly terminal decline. For a lad from Georgetown, working the package liquor trade in the core of the historic business district was both a kick and an education.

Surely the 1940’s-era structure housing the business was the ugliest in all of downtown. Tacked onto its frumpy backside was the infamous (trust me) Cadillac Lanes bowling alley, run by a fractious family of immigrants from Pittsburgh eligible for reality television long before the genre was invented. In olden times, the cobbled-together retail space out front had hosted an upscale automobile dealership.

Needless to say, those days were long gone, even in 1982.

The barren north side of Cadillac Lanes faced a gravel parking lot separating it from Elm Street, and it became known among liquor store employees, in purely figurative terms, that to be taken “out behind the bowling alley” meant to be stood against the otherwise useless concrete block wall and shot for crimes against humanity.

In retrospect, this reference seems tactless, but it was used quite often, especially in conjunction with obnoxious, drunken customers – particularly those employed by the Coyle auto dealership down the street.

I worked two or three nights a week, Saturday afternoons and the occasional day shift. The job was good, my pay was hard cash, and included as part of the deal were discounts on merchandise (where most of my paycheck naturally landed). My early travels were plotted from behind the store’s worn Formica counter, using paper, pens and actual books.

Nowadays, whenever I spot a package store clerk with eyes glued to an iPhone or laptop, I think back to my entertainment options on slow business nights: A minuscule black and white television set with rabbit ears, from which many a McNeil-Lehrer News Hour was observed. I probably should have been sweeping or stocking, anyway.

Package stores of Scoreboard’s socioeconomic ilk still are a trip, and an ongoing psychological experiment. During my long-ago tenure, insights into the human condition were plentiful, and sometimes fairly hard to stomach.

At least the owners indulged my interest in imported beers (craft beer had not yet come into existence), and they allowed me to purchase and stock options beyond the norm. I was given one walk-in door and a shelf outside it for warm bottles. We did a fairly good trade in imports, given their obscurity and the fact that whenever I wasn’t on site to explain what they were, consumer requests generally were greeted with a sneer by Duck, the manager.

“Huh? I don’t drink that shit.”

My favorite Duck story (his real name was Lloyd) was the time when he was standing behind the counter, peacefully smoking a cigarette, when a complete stranger walked in. The man gestured toward the door to the rear office, and asked, “Do you mind if I go back there and change my pants?”

YouTube obviously didn’t exist back then, but Candid Camera did, and Duck's immediate, unprintable reply to the unknown man’s request would have played well in syndication, with Allen Funt joyfully suffering the brunt of bleeped-out epithets as the would-be wardrobe shifter was physically chased from the premises.

After a few years, business downtown began declining, and the owners had few good options when the lease expired in 1988. Scoreboard’s relocation took place the same summer. I took a week off from my “real” job in Louisville to help move the store to affordable digs at the traffic-challenged corner of East Spring & Beharrell.

Few tears were shed by New Albany’s historic preservationists when the downtown building was hastily demolished to make way for a vacant lot, and a few years later, the construction of Chase Bank, which still stands there today. The store itself changed ownership, and eventually was shuttered.

Three decades later, I think back to the downtown liquor store stalwarts, and sadly, quite a few of them have died, including Jim, the principal owner. More recently, Mamie and the School Marm both passed away. There was Norman and James Not Jim, the Canadian Club lady with all the books, the Upholsterer, and certainly numerous others. Their faces pass through my dreams on occasion, as though it had come time for a final round before closing.

Among the departed was Gin Lady, originally known to us as Mother Gargle, who usually walked to the liquor store from the East Bloc-designed senior citizen housing tower one hundred yards away. As the day progressed and she stopped for the second or often third time, her red-dyed hair would become more and more unmanageable and frizzy. By late afternoon, her mop would be standing straight up, antenna-like, as though she’d jammed a finger into the power grid.

You see, the Seagram’s was never for her. It was for her gentleman friend, who perpetually called on her, but was never seen then or any other time. Neither was Gin Lady after the store moved across town.

Chemical Man was so dubbed for the spectacular lack of nutrients in his bloodstream, and my rigid certainty that the only thing keeping him alive was infusions of formaldehyde, Kessler whiskey and Sterling beer.

Early on, when I hadn’t come to understand the nuances of alcoholism, I asked Chemical Man why he bought three half-pints of Kessler at points throughout the day rather than a liter of whiskey first thing in the morning, which would be cheaper.

He sputtered indignantly that my college education had taught me absolutely nothing, because any fool knows that if you start the day with a big bottle, you’ll just go and drink it before lunch – and then what?

Later, Chemical Man grew too weak to carry the daily case of Sterling to his house, which fronted the side street fifty yards from the store’s front door. I’d carry it over and put it on the porch for him. A year or so later, his obituary was in the newspaper. I’d have bet money that he was in his 70s, but he was only 59 at the time of his death.

Of all the people I met at Scoreboard, Snake was tops. For decades he kept a series of decrepit pick-up trucks alive just long enough to run a regular route through New Albany, collecting cardboard and taking it to Riverside Recycling for a few bucks, which went into the jar and paid for season tickets to Louisville Redbirds games.

Snake’s life wasn’t easy, but it could have been worse, and he generally kept a cheerful demeanor in the face of the curve balls thrown at him by fate. For example, the nickname came from a tattoo on his right arm, the one that ended just below the elbow, the rest having been removed after an accident decades earlier.

He had a recurring, acrimonious relationship with the New Albany Tribune, our local newspaper of record, and often vowed that if his wife died before him, he’d call to cancel the newspaper first -- and only then ring the funeral home.

Snake worked hard as a bartender, and drank just as hard as a customer until swearing off the bottle in the early 1960’s. He never drank a drop again, ever. When the bartending jobs at New Albany’s neighborhood taverns dried up, Snake turned to cardboard full time, and occasionally filled a shift at the liquor store.

In 2001, Snake’s truck died for the final time, and since cardboard wasn’t paying squat, anyway, it was time for him to get out of it. He’d already decided that ballgames were too expensive and the club’s management too arrogant. A couple years later he stopped by my pub to chat, and it was the last time I ever saw him, for he died shortly thereafter on the day before my birthday.

There were others dear to me, like Gene, Tom and Lewie, and I miss them all – the people, the store, and the time – but I miss Snake the most. Rest in peace, my friend. If you could see what’s become of the local newspaper these days, you just might reconsider that vow of sobriety.

We often had too much time on our hands.

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Recent columns:

February 22: ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Money is the ultimate bully (2015).

February 15: ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: No more fear, Jeff (2015).

February 8: ON THE AVENUES: Golden oldie classic comfort beers at an old school pub? Sounds like Pints & Union to me.

February 1: ON THE AVENUES: Did you hear the one about Duggins' deep TASER regrets? I laughed until I cried -- and so did the folks in Keokuk.

Sadly, Karem's Meats has closed its doors.

With 225 shares on Facebook since the 19th of February, this will come as old news to many of you, but note that Karem's Meats has closed.

AFTER 53 YEARS OF SERVING NEW ALBANY, KAREM’S MEATS REGRETS THAT THEY MUST CLOSE THEIR DOORS. I WOULD LIKE TO THANK EVERYONE THAT HAS BEEN A PART OF KAREM’S MEATS SINCE THEY OPENED IN 1965. KAREM’S HAS ENJOYED BEING A PART OF THIS COMMUNITY AND APPRECIATE THE LOYALTY FROM THE CUSTOMERS THAT HAVE PATRONIZED OUR HOMETOWN MEAT MARKET FOR GENERATIONS

It's been only seven months since Karem's enjoyed a rebirth.

Karem's Meats: Grand (re)opening and customer appreciation day is Saturday, July 29.

Indie business longevity: "Karem's Meats is New Albany's locally owned Meat Market since 1965."

Earlier in 2017, Karem's shifted to a new location at 3306 Plaza Drive, off Grant Line Road (near Aldi and NABC's original location). This weekend, they're celebrating.

Indie business ownership is rewarding.

It's also unrelenting trench warfare, especially in a monopolistic system of terminally ill capitalism, now firmly jigged toward chains and franchises.

Perhaps the relocation of an indie business is the most difficult of all these tricks. Customers develop habits, and they're hard ones to break. There isn't always time to adjust, or to develop a new shtick. 

I'm reminded of my experience working at the old Scoreboard Liquors, which was situated for quite some time on the 100 block of West Spring, just across the street from the federal courthouse.

In 1987, the liquor store's owners were told the building was being sold, and their lease wouldn't be renewed. They had a year to make a decision, and eventually opted to move the store all the way across town, to a fixer-upper on the corner of Beharrell and E. Spring (it had been a Night Owl food mart decades previously).

Scoreboard made the move; Chase Bank now occupies the space where the store and Cadillac Lanes bowling alley once stood.

Jim and Ed had nicely remodeled the building at Beharrell and Spring, but while highly visible to traffic speeding past -- well, the basic problem was that traffic kept speeding past, because access was feasible only when traveling westbound. I didn't know it at the time, but I was witnessing one of several reasons for traffic calming and human-scaled streets.

Neighborhood trade made up for some of it, and yet the fact is that the new location never really jelled. Eventually the license was purchased by a competitor, and Scoreboard Liquors passed into history's mists.

I feel awful for Matt Nash, who's as good a bloke as I know. May his next step be more rewarding -- and as an extremely reluctant capitalist, this isn't to imply money alone.

Sleep's more important in the end.

Fire destroys Bottles Unlimited.

Just yesterday I pedaled past the site of the B & B Bar & Grill and paused to watch the cinderblock construction as a new building rises at the corner of Culbertson and 15th. I'm assuming that the owners are rebuilding. Does anyone know for sure?

Then, word came this morning that Bottles Unlimited has burned, too: Downtown New Albany liquor store destroyed by fire.

Bottles Unlimited went into business in the early 1980's. As with Scoreboard Liquors on Spring, a big part of its business came from Louisvillians at a time when Kentucky's archaic liquor pricing laws remained in effect. Until Bottles arrived, Scoreboard had the off/on ramp monopoly, and the freshly minted package competition highly annoyed Scoreboard's owner (and my boss at the time), the late Jim Creech.

My youthful opinion at the time was that Scoreboard should relinquish the price-driven trade and go upmarket with higher quality selections, tastings and information unavailable elsewhere. It was the strategy subsequently pursued, albeit a decade or more later, by the Bairds at their Old Mill shop on Charlestown Road. But of course it was Jim's money, not mine, and anyway, I always intended to pursue other possibilities -- and on occasion actually did. He stuck with his business plan, and more often than not, got beat at it.

Soon afterward the Kentucky laws changed, and the playing field leveled. Bottles still had the superior first-past-the-post field position, and in 1988, Scoreboard lost its lease and moved uptown, where it sputtered to a halt in the late nineties. Jim died five years ago, and I miss him. Had the timing been different, I still think we could have put our heads together and come up with a way of reinventing the liquor store for a different market.

Amid the steadily improving urban clutter around Elm Street and State at the I-64 ramp, Bottles Unlimited has been a successful, productive, long-term business. Will it rebuild? Catastrophes like this often serve as opportunities, and this one might afford Bottles Unlimited a chance to reinvent itself downtown, and become part of a fresh wave.