Alcohol’s the Loser in Arkansas Election

BLACKWELL, Ark. — A year or so ago, Margaret Kaufman was offered a cool $1 million for her liquor store.

She rejected the offer, but now she thinks maybe she should have taken the money. At the time, she says, she didn’t have any idea how things were going to go in Conway County--which to her way of thinking has been straight downhill. No one in the liquor business seriously believed the county would vote to go dry. Such things didn’t happen, not in Conway County, a booze mecca in a dry land.

Liquor was, after all, big business in this county of roughly 20,000 people, worth something like $18 million a year in sales. The five surrounding counties--all 3,644 square miles’ worth--were dry, but in Conway liquor had been legal since the repeal of Prohibition. Imbibers from dry towns like Russellville and Pleasant Valley always drove over to stock up on beer, wine and whiskey.

Then came the November election and proof that every vote counts. Conway County’s voters turned out the liquor stores by a margin of 33 votes.

Alleged Irregularities

Now store owners like Kaufman and Bryant Lipscomb on the other side of the interstate and Mark Cambiano over in the county seat of Morrilton are claiming election irregularities and fighting to keep their whiskey on the shelves. If the election is upheld in the courts, some consumers will find themselves driving more than 120 miles round-trip to buy a six-pack of beer.

Those who led the fight to clean house in Conway County say the wets can file all the lawsuits they want, but it won’t do any good. The voters have spoken.

“I’m just amazed you can be put out of business,” said Kaufman, who bought the store with her husband six years ago after they retired.

Bucks the Trend

Kaufman and the others had reason to think they were safe. Previous attempts to make liquor sales illegal in the county had all failed at the polls. And voting to go dry bucks the trend both in Arkansas and across the nation. True, 43 Arkansas counties--more than half of those in the state--are dry, but Don Bennett, an attorney for the state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control division, cannot remember the last time a wet county voted to close its liquor stores. No wet county in neighboring Oklahoma has ever voted to go dry. Around the country only 2.4% of the U.S. population lives in places where liquor sales are illegal.

“The trend is from dry to wet.” said Lisa Tate of the Distilled Spirits Council of the U.S. in Washington.

But here in Conway County, an hour’s drive northwest of Little Rock on Interstate 40, anti-liquor forces, spearheaded by fundamentalist religious groups, pulled off an anti-booze coup, and the wets realized too late that they were facing a serious challenge.

Now, the wets complain, this dirt poor county at the base of the Ozark foothills will lose one of its biggest employers at a time when the area’s economy is sinking fast--the cotton mill went out of business in 1984 and unemployment is running at about 16%.

Drys reply that new industry is much more likely to relocate in a place that dosn’t have liquor stores galore.

Sunday Morning Sermons

The issue has divided the county into two camps in this part of the country, where much of the citizenry spends Sunday morning listening to the preachers talk of drink and the devil in the same sentence.

“You’re dealing with ol’ country folks here who are broke and out of a job and scared,” said Lipscomb, co-owner of Big John’s Liquors. “When the preacher tells them something, he doesn’t lie.

“If it goes down, we got serious problems.” he said. “We’re going to lose a ton of money. This place isn’t good for anything else, except maybe for a bingo game on Monday night. We should have started earlier. We should have gone ahead making plans for the election.”

Trying to overturn the vote in the courts, the wets contend that the drys acted in a something less than Christian way at the polls. One lawsuit, filed by attorney Mark Cambiano, who also owns a liquor store and a tavern, alleges dozens of voter irregularities--that a number of people voted twice, that people living outside the county cast votes, that ballot boxes were pried open and that election officials took it upon themselves to vote the “dry” box on the ballots of people who had not made a choice. In one instance, Cambiano claimed in his suit, a “dry” vote was cast by a woman who is dead.

“There were gross voting irregularities in the election,” said Cambiano. “Dead people voting is the most outrageous.”

Lawsuit’s Contentions

Cambiano’s lawsuit also takes issue with the Arkansas law that allows private clubs to serve liquor even in dry counties, saying that denies his clients due process and equal protection under the law. And he contends that legislation which allows an existing legitimate business to be prohibited is also unconstitutional.

The drys deny that there were election irregularities.

‘Fairest Election Ever Held’

“This was probably the fairest election ever held in Conway County,” said Larry Miller, one of the leaders of the anti-liquor group that calls itself Citizens for Progress. Miller also is the chief reporter and photographer for the local newspaper, the Petit Jean Country Headlight.

Miller, who first worked for a dry vote when he was a boy and his father was pastor of a local Assembly of God Church, said the charges of campaign irregularities were “hogwash.” He said he saw the dry vote as a first step toward bringing in new business and improving the economy.

“We think it will have a dynamic effect on the economy,” he said. “It’s a step, the same as when man first stepped on the moon.”

He said he prides himself on the fact that no religious advertising was used in the campaign, just ads on the dangers of alcohol.

‘Number One Problem’

“The fact is that alcohol is the number one problem in America,” he said. “I think the biggest thing is that America does not realize is that alcohol is the biggest problem as a drug. More people have been killed on the highways as drunks than in all our wars.”

The wets counter that more people will be driving drunk because of the long distances they will have to go for their liquor. The drys contend wets already drink while driving, so there will be no appreciable difference.

The wets say liquor stores draw customers to the other businesses. The drys say most people go to the larger surrounding towns to shop and the liquor businesses don’t increase retail traffic.

The wets say the county will dry up and blow away without liquor sales. The drys say the opposite is true.

They will see each other in court and the wets will be pulling out all the stops to keep their stores and their customers.