Nine Little Bottles

Three days before Christmas, Melvin Hass, 28, an ex-major of infantry now an oil company employee, did what thousands of Kansans were doing to fortify themselves for the holidays. He drove to Missouri, bought two bottles of bourbon for himself and seven bottles for some friends and toted them in his car back to bone-dry Kansas.

What happened to him after that was quite unusual in Kansas. State highway patrolmen, who ordinarily pay no mind to citizens bringing in small amounts of liquor, stopped his car and searched it.

When they found the whiskey they explained, a little sheepishly, that they had mistaken Hass's 1940 Lincoln coupe for the car of an out-of-state bootlegger. They were sorry for Hass, they said, but they hauled him before a county judge, who confiscated his car, his liquor and fined him $200.

By last week the strange case of Melvin Hass had become a statewide story. Kansans who had laughed for years over flouting the law, but had done little to get it off the books, growled at the severity of Hass's penalty and at the hypocrisy of other citizens who vote dry and drink wet. In Wichita, a group of businessmen started a fund to buy a new car for Scapegoat Hass. By this week they had raised more than $800 and formed a club called: "It Could Happen to Me." They hoped that the incident would help Kansas overthrow its 67-year-old prohibition law in an election next November.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.