Thirty-eight years ago I wrote a “Drink, Drank, Drunk,” series of six articles for the Milwaukee Journal in which I used my personal experience with booze along with pointing out the stranglehold the beer/booze industry has in formulating our absurd collective relationship with alcohol. Incredibly, a recent review of those articles leads to the inevitable and unfortunate conclusion that with only minor changes for updating statistics they could have been written yesterday. Never in my many years of practicing personal journalism have I ever experienced the kind of reader response “Drink, Drank, Drunk” generated. Hundreds of letters poured in, from shaky alcoholics, from the grieving mothers of country boys killed in car crashes, from children expressing the heartbreak of abusive or missing parents, from frustrated therapists and counselors, from bartenders and preachers and many others. In the “Pulitzer” dream world of every journalist, mine was shattered by the Journal not even submitting the series for consideration. But what do I know. Could the “industry” have been a factor?