The home of Rev. Richard E. Taylor Jr. gives a sense of the history he loves so much. The stone house he shares with his wife on the farmland of southeast Topeka, Kan., was built in the 1870s. The original guttering lines the roof. Original stained glass graces some of the windows. An earlier house was torn down, but its stones were used to build the barn that still stands south of the house.
Between the house and the barn are a one-eighth-scale steam railroad that Rev. Taylor has restored and two old tractors. One tractor works and the other is a rusted 1921 model that doesn`t, but he can tell you how it would if it did. Someday, he promises, it will. He is a Methodist minister, but his schooling was in engineering.
Books on Kansas history and the Civil War fill shelves in one room of the house. But they seem somewhat unnecessary. Rev. Taylor taps a cover and gives a rich and detailed synopsis. Opening the book, he knows which page to turn to to find an arcane fact to back up his words.
He knows his stuff.
The subject Rev. Taylor knows better than just about anybody else is the history of drinking in Kansas. And as he is painfully aware, today begins a new chapter.
As executive director of the 107-year-old Kansas organization that is the taproot of the movement that inspired national Prohibition, Richard Taylor has led the anti-liquor efforts in his state for 17 years. Even though he holds his job reluctantly, he is widely regarded as so effective that he has all but single-handedly held back the tide of public support for easier access to alcohol.
Unfortunately for Rev. Taylor and his backers, a majority of Kansas voters disagreed with them in a referendum last November. This morning at 9 a.m., they will claim the spoils of the biggest battle that Rev. Taylor has lost. For the first time since April 30, 1881, Kansans will be able to buy liquor by the drink legally in a public place.
”We were the first state to adopt constitutional prohibition,” Rev. Taylor said at his house recently, ”and the last state to lose it.” For the first time in years, Kansas will no longer be the state with the nation`s most restrictive liquor laws.
The constitutional amendment outlawing the sale of alcohol in Kansas was implemented on May 1, 1881. Package sales were legalized in 1949, and a system of private clubs that could sell alcoholic drinks was initiated in 1965. But
”the open saloon” still was prohibited by the state Constitution.
Until today.
Now, in each of the counties that approved the liquor-by-the-drink amendment, beer, wine and liquor can be served to anybody of legal age, not just those belonging to private clubs. Although 69 counties–well over half the state–voted against the amendment and thus will remain on the club system, 36 counties, including all of the most populous ones, will be wet.
The new law requires drinking establishments without club restrictions to derive at least 30 percent of their income from food. So most of the open drinking spots will be restaurants, not corner taprooms or cocktail lounges.
Along with the transition to open drink sales, the legislature beefed up the state`s drinking and driving laws and raised the drinking age for weak beer from 18 to 21.
Many private clubs planned celebratory parties this week for members to burn their club cards and have a drink.
Rev. Taylor, understandably, is not happy about the whole thing, but he will continue his campaign.
”There`s always been drinking in Kansas; we`ve just always been at the bottom,” he said. He fears that the state`s per capita consumption will rise dramatically now that alcohol is more readily available, and he plans to work to prevent that.
”You live in a realistic world,” he said stoically. ”You hold the line where you can. Sure, I`d like to see a constitutional amendment prohibiting the sale of alcohol. But I don`t think it has a chance. I can`t waste my time on it. There are a lot of little important steps we can take.” And so, until he retires in a few years or until somebody comes along to take his place, Rev. Taylor will continue to spend nine months each year speaking at churches and anywhere else he can and three months each year monitoring the progress of bills through the legislature, pushing people to vote his way and putting pressure on them when they won`t.
”Those three months are really rough,” he said. ”I hate those three months.”
Rev. Taylor fits neither the stereotype of the moralist nor of the lobbyist. He does not drink, of course, but neither does he castigate those who do. He makes his argument on practical grounds, asserting that alcohol causes great pain and suffering, and he marshals an array of statistics to make his points. Working with legislators, he threatens and bullies. He tells them that he will let their constituents know how they are voting. And he does.
”The beer people give them $300 and expect them to vote for them,” he said of legislators. ”We don`t wine them or dine them or help their campaigns or take them to football games. One man and a secretary. That`s our staff.
”Most lobbyists sort of kowtow to legislators because they have to win them over. I don`t. I`ll present the truth. I`ll speak the truth with love, but I won`t back off from speaking the truth.”
Many legislators and others in state government and politics, including some of the most vociferous proponents of public liquor sales, say Rev. Taylor is extraordinarily effective. Were it not for his virtuoso abilities, it is almost universally accepted here that liquor by the drink would have been legalized years ago. Despite his sometimes abrasive approach to his work, many in the legislature are his personal friends, including some of his most vehement opponents.
Rev. Taylor does his persuading with a voice that is a harsh whisper, the result of a throat cancer operation years ago, and he does not mince words.
”Alcohol is a dangerous drug,” he says. ”The first swallow of Coors beer or wine or whiskey, the brain is immediately affected. Alcohol gives you the brain function of an insane person.”
Rev. Taylor is an effective preacher. But he does not talk of liquor as a morality issue. Instead, it is an issue of life and death, of suffering, of troubles that could be prevented if only there were more curbs on the use of drugs. He uses logic, and he is persuasive indeed.
When alcohol consumption rises, the incidence of alcoholism also rises. By making liquor more readily available, consumption is likely to increase, he says. ”Nationwide, there are 7,000 alcoholics per 100,000 population,” Rev. Taylor says. ”With a one-half percent increase in alcohol consumption, that would be an additional 35 alcoholics for 100,000 population. That`s additional suffering.”
The pro-liquor forces last year used persuasive arguments of their own. Kansas, they said, needed to modernize its archaic liquor laws if it hoped to be competitive in attracting businesses and travelers to the state.
Rev. Taylor`s response: ”It`s sad to see supposedly intelligent people promoting more drinking and more suffering for the sake of economic development.”
One of his main opponents on the liquor-by-the-drink issue was then-Gov. John Carlin. ”You can`t blame the press for reporting what the governor said,” Rev. Taylor said. ”But if the governor`s not telling the truth, who reports that? I`m just one voice. When you have the governor, the attorney general, Chamber of Commerce executives and the entire Democratic and Republican leadership against just one voice, who hears that voice?”
He paused. ”I`m not here for me; I`m here trying to prevent other people from being hurt. I didn`t ask to be here in the first place.”
That is the irony in Rev. Taylor`s job. ”The average person sees me as someone who created a position, and that`s what he does,” he said. ”Just the opposite. This is the last thing I ever intended to do, because I intended to serve a local church. But if you`re a Christian, you try to serve where you`re needed.”
Rev. Taylor left a budding career as a mechanical engineer 40 years ago to enter a seminary and become a United Methodist minister, because he was needed. Churches in Kansas had empty pulpits. For 21 years he served local congregations in Kansas: eight years in Salina, eight years in Concordia, five years at the University Church in Wichita.
At the same time, he also served on the board of directors of the Kansas United Dry Forces, the state`s original anti-alcohol organization. The group is a direct descendant of the Kansas Temperance Union, founded in 1880 by some of the thousands of Yankee abolitionists who had settled in the Kansas territory to vote to make sure it would enter the Union as a free state.
Most of these settlers were as fiercely opposed to alcohol as they were to slavery, and they made up such a large part of the new state`s population that they insired an amendment to its Constitution to prohibit sales of alcohol. Prohibition became known as the Kansas Idea and spread to many other states and, eventually, to the U.S. Constitution.
After the group`s leader and lobbyist, Rev. Roy Holloman, retired, Rev. Taylor was asked in 1968 to take over. He did not want the job, nor did his bishop want him to take it.
Two years later the dry forces still were without a leader, and the request was renewed. Rev. Taylor still did not want the job, ”but the bishop said, `Maybe our Heavenly Father has a special need for you in this ministry in Topeka at this time,` ” Rev. Taylor recalled.
Each year since then, Rev. Taylor, like every other United Methodist minister in Kansas, has received an assignment from the bishop. His appointment has been the same each year–to remain where he was. ”My bishop backs me all the way.”
At 62, Rev. Taylor is three years from retirement. But though 35,000 people across the state subscribe to the Kansas Issue, the publication he puts out, nobody has stepped forward. ”They haven`t found a replacement,” he said.
Several years ago Rev. Taylor changed the name of the Kansas United Dry Forces, adopting as a name what had been the group`s slogan: Kansans for Life at Its Best!, complete with exclamation point.
Kansas United Dry Forces, he said, had a somewhat negative connotation. Kansans for Life at Its Best! is more positive, upbeat.
And, he added, true.
He quotes Abraham Lincoln, his favorite human being after Jesus Christ.
” `Alcohol has many defenders but no defense.` How can you defend the drug that causes more suffering than all others combined?” he asks. ”Alcohol is a drug. It is the most damaging drug there is. Its only close rival is tobacco.”
Though Rev. Taylor has never smoked, he has a very real knowledge of the danger of tobacco. His rasping voice is the result of surgery to remove a tumor from his vocal chords in 1974. When he told doctors before the operation that he did not smoke, they assured him the tumor would be benign. It wasn`t. ”It was probably secondhand smoke that caused it,” Rev. Taylor said.
”That`s what the doctors told me.”
Now he uses his voice to illustrate the dangers of smoking. ”I have a tape of my voice before, and I play it for them when I speak,” he said.
Liquor by the drink was not the only defeat suffered last year by Rev. Taylor and Kansans for Life at Its Best! On the same November day that voters approved that amendment, they also embraced legalization of a state lottery and parimutuel gambling.
”All three passed,” he said, shaking his head. ”We may have been able to fight one at a time but not all three. We just let the lottery and parimutuel go. We didn`t have the time for the effort.”
Now, he said, ”we`ll do our best to make an impact. On the lottery, we`ll encourage people to buy in stores that do not sell lottery tickets.”
He warms to his subject. Again, he has facts and figures to support his arguments, and he reels them off. A chain of grocery stores in northern California, he said, discontinued its sale of lottery tickets after discovering that, in the same period it sold $1 million in tickets, grocery sales had decreased $1 million.
At that, Rev. Taylor smiled and suggested that Kansas lottery tickets be sold only in liquor stores. ”If more liquor money is spent on lottery tickets, we`ll have safer highways.”
As he says, you live in a realistic world: ”Having a drink does not make you a bad person. There are a lot of good things about people who drink. And I always say there are a lot of bad things about me and people who do not drink.
”The best amount is none. But if every drinker would stop with one or two drinks in a 24-hour period, and wait one hour before driving, fine.”
His other approaches to safe drinking include rehabilitation or treatment when necessary, education about safe drinking habits and getting tougher drinking laws passed.
On Sundays, Rev. Taylor gets in his car and traverses Kansas to preach. He speaks to congregations, he speaks to youth groups, he speaks to Sunday schools. ”I speak wherever I`m invited.” Not just Methodist churches, either. Nazarene, Baptist, Presbyterian. All support his work, and many invite him to speak. ”I work for all denominations,” he said.
Even though he spends his Sundays preaching, he misses having a local congregation of his own to minister to. ”You have people who are your people, your friends,” he said. ”Sure I miss it, and I`d still be there if the board of directors hadn`t put me here.
”But the thing that makes up for it is this: When I`m driving to other churches, I often have to spend the night if it`s far. They have me stay with a church family. I never met these people in my life. Now they`re my best friends. That happens all over Kansas. I have friends all over Kansas. That`s really my congregation.”
