[Magdalen] ATTN The Scotts !!!

[Jay Weigel]

Thank goodness UW-Madison was not so straitlaced. In my day the drinking
age in Wisconsin was 18 for beer (although it was 3.2) and 21 for "hard
stuff". Sometime in the late 60s-early 70s that changed because of the
draft laws to 18 for everything. Then, because of pressure from MADD and
insurance companies, it eventually went to 21 for all alcohol where it has
remained to this day, despite the fact that you can do everything
else...marry, establish credit, fight and die for your country, etc...at
18. I respectfully disagree with that and we allowed our kids and their
friends to drink at our house, although we took their keys and refused to
let them leave while under the influence and expected them to behave
reasonably (within limits,  of course).

Interestingly, the small church college I attended was about a mile and a
bit from a bar which served alcohol in both kinds. The proprietors knew
damned well that we were not supposed to be drinking there but their
reasoning was pretty much the same as ours was with our kids...that we were
going to be doing it anyway. They had some kind of tacit agreement with the
sheriff's department regarding raids so that nobody under age was ever
caught in the place. We all either went out the back door and hid in the
pasture (cars out front belonged to the "big kids" anyway) or we'd been
warned by an anonymous call to the men's dorm earlier in the day not to go
at all. And while the school had rules about drinking, they looked the
other way as long as we behaved ourselves reasonably well in the dorms.

On Thu, Jan 31, 2019 at 1:50 PM Brian Reid <reid at mejac.palo-alto.ca.us>
wrote:

> When I graduated from the University of Maryland in 1970, these exact
> rules were still in effect there. There was also a rule that if you were
> caught drinking alcohol, anywhere in the world, at any time, whether or
> not school was in session, you would be immediately expelled.
>
>
> On 2019-01-31 10:18, Scott Knitter wrote:
> > Young Michigan State students are typically aghast when told that up
> > until
> > the early 1970s, women had to wear a skirt or dress, and men a dress
> > shirt
> > (and possibly tie) to dinner in the dorms; and women were not allowed
> > to
> > march in the Spartan Marching Band. When I marched in 1978, some of my
> > colleagues in the saxophone section were some of the first women
> > admitted.
> > They typically were the best marchers and saxophonists in the band.
> >
> > Things were quite different, not so very long ago (well, it was long
> > ago,
> > but not SO VERY long ago, right?).
>