On Saturday night, September 27th, 1986, the streets of Georgetown were packed with college students. In four days, Washington, DC was going to raise its drinking age for beer and wine from 18 to 21, and plenty of people had come to enjoy the old rules one last time.
John Lyon, 18, had come up from Radford University in southwest Virginia with his friends. Standing outside a fast-food place on Wisconsin Avenue NW, he told the Washington Post:
“There’s a lot of talk about it at school, and we just wanted to see what it was going to be like this weekend.”
The doormen were the ones sweating. One at a popular Georgetown night spot, who wouldn’t give his name, told the Post he was thinking about quitting. From now on he would have to “separate kids by whose birthday comes before 9-30-68 and whose comes after 10-1-68,” he said, “plus you have to look out for the 21-year-olds.”
That’s because DC didn’t simply slam the door. Anyone who was already 18 when the new rule kicked in could keep drinking beer and wine. Everyone younger had to wait until 21.
At Houlihan’s on M Street, Georgetown University freshman Michael Flanigan, 18 and holding a beer, put it best: “I feel lucky as hell!”
Getting to that weekend took more than three years of stalling, steady pressure from Congress, and one terrible crash on the Capital Beltway. Here’s how Georgetown’s last call happened.
Beer and wine at 18
For decades, the District ran a split system. At 18, you could order a beer or a glass of wine in any bar in the city. Whiskey, gin and vodka had to wait until 21.
That wasn’t unusual. Maryland worked the same way until 1982, and Virginia had its own version. In 1984, the Congressional Research Service counted nine states with some kind of split drinking age.
What made DC different is that its neighbors changed, and it didn’t.
Maryland raised its age for beer and wine to 21 on July 1st, 1982, with a grandfather clause for anyone already 18. Virginia moved its beer age to 19 in 1983. From then on, if you were 18 and lived around Washington, the city was the only place nearby where you could legally order a beer.
The Georgetown magnet
Georgetown was where they went. In 1982, the Post counted more than 100 businesses in the neighborhood serving liquor. At peak weekend hours, the D.C. Department of Transportation estimated about 10,000 cars and 6,000 pedestrians moved through the intersection of Wisconsin Avenue and M Street alone.
The Post went back on a Friday night in May 1985. The line for Winston’s stretched down M Street, nearly merging with the crowd outside the Crazy Horse down the block.
Shelly Fabian, 18, and her friends from South River High School, near Annapolis, had turned it into a routine. Once a month, 10 of them piled into a van and drove 40 miles to drink legally. “You can go out and get drunk in Annapolis if you want to,” she told the Post, but the District “is the place to meet people. It’s the only place you can dance.”
Dave Zech, 19, was heading into Bojangles’ with three friends from Vienna, Virginia. He could still buy beer at home, but he called the District “one of the last refuges.”
The bar owners knew exactly who was paying the bills. Jeffrey Edwards, who owned the 21st Amendment near George Washington University, told the Post that 18-to-20-year-olds made up about 40 percent of his customers. Raising the age, he said, “would probably put us out of business.” The restaurant and bar industry estimated the city would lose $6 million a year in sales tax.
Not every Georgetown business felt that way. In 1985, according to The Hoya, 76 Georgetown restaurants and bars signed a petition backing a higher drinking age.
Members of Congress and officials in Maryland and Virginia kept saying the same thing: the District had become, in the Post’s words, “a magnet for young persons throughout the area who come to the city to drink and then drive home drunk.”
Washington turns up the pressure
In late 1983, President Reagan’s Presidential Commission on Drunk Driving urged every state to adopt a drinking age of 21. Reagan called drunk driving “a national menace, a national tragedy and a national disgrace.” The commission was blunt about young people crossing borders to drink:
“The lack of uniformity among state laws is especially critical regarding the minimum legal drinking age, because an incentive to drink and drive is established due to young persons commuting to border states where the drinking age is lower.”
That was, almost exactly, the DC situation.
On July 17th, 1984, in the Rose Garden, Reagan signed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act. Rep. James J. Howard of New Jersey championed it in the House, and Sen. Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey carried it in the Senate.
The law didn’t order anyone to do anything. It made holding out expensive. A state that let people under 21 buy or possess alcohol would have 5 percent of its federal highway construction money withheld in fiscal 1987, and 10 percent in fiscal 1988. A state that came around later could get the money back.
The deadline that mattered was October 1st, 1986, the first day of fiscal 1987. According to the Post, a state could only grandfather in people who were already old enough to drink if it got its new law on the books by then.
Virginia went to 21 on July 1st, 1985, exempting anyone already 19. DC still didn’t move.
Three and a half years of no
The first bill to raise DC’s drinking age was introduced on February 4th, 1983, by Council members Charlene Drew Jarvis of Ward 4 and John A. Wilson of Ward 2. They warned the city would become “a magnet for young drinkers from the suburbs.” Restaurant owners and liquor dealers fought it right away.
It went nowhere. When Wilson brought a new bill to committee in 1985, it was voted down 4 to 1, with Jarvis among the no votes. The Post later called Wilson “basically a one-man band” on the issue. As of May 1985, only two council members had co-sponsored the bill, and Mayor Marion Barry hadn’t taken a position.
Part of it was money, and part of it was principle. DC stood to lose about $2.6 million in highway funds in fiscal 1987 and more than $5 million in fiscal 1988. That was real money, but small next to what big states had at stake.
And an aide to Wilson put the other objection plainly: “A lot of people see it as a home rule issue.” In other words, Congress shouldn’t be dictating DC’s local laws.
Congress kept pushing anyway. On January 30th, 1986, Rep. Howard and Rep. Michael D. Barnes of Maryland filed a bill to permanently withhold 10 percent of highway money from the District and 13 states. Rep. Frank Wolf of Virginia pushed to squeeze DC’s federal payment and made his case in a Post op-ed on June 1st, 1986.
The mayor’s office moved before the council did. On July 21st, 1986, Barry’s advisory panel recommended an age of 21, and his spokesman said the mayor was leaning that way. In September, Barry sent the council emergency legislation to get it done before October 1st. He wanted to go straight to 21, with no grandfather clause at all.
The council was a different story. Emergency bills in DC take effect right away, but they need nine of the 13 council members, a two-thirds majority. One week before the vote, Barry’s aides could count only five sure supporters.
Then came the weekend of September 20th.
Be a Friend
Out in Bowie, Maryland, the marquee at Bowie High School carried the same message every summer and holiday: Be a Friend.
By the Post’s count, drunk driving had once killed 15 young people from Bowie in two years, and by 1981 the town was fighting back. The message was meant to set off a list of reminders. Don’t drive drunk. Don’t let your friends drive drunk.
Patrick Kreitzer, 20, Darren D. Yuhas, 19, and Scott Vaill, 19, all knew it well. All three had graduated from Bowie High and lived within blocks of each other. Yuhas had made a pact with his friends that he would never drink and drive, and Kreitzer had told his mother the same thing: when he went out with Yuhas and Vaill, one of them would not drink.
On Saturday night, September 20th, 1986, they headed to Georgetown. “They needed a break,” a neighborhood friend told the Post. “They just wanted to hang around and party that night. They made the decision just to go down to Georgetown.”
Nobody knows exactly where they went. Their hands had no ink stamps, the marks bars used to show who had paid to get in. Even their closest friends didn’t know which bars they’d been to.
Shortly before 2 a.m. on Sunday, September 21st, Yuhas’ white 1978 Toyota Celica slammed into an abandoned flatbed truck on the paved shoulder of the Beltway, near the Mormon Temple in Kensington. Witnesses told police the Toyota had been racing another car and using the shoulder to pass a bus.
Witnesses put its speed at about 70 miles an hour. The other car didn’t stop.
All three died. Police found a cooler of beer in the car and open bottles near the bodies.
Maryland’s chief medical examiner, Dr. John M. Smialek, said Yuhas had a blood alcohol level of 0.25 percent, nearly double the state’s 0.13 intoxication threshold. His passengers measured 0.12 and 0.11. “None of them really should have been driving,” Smialek said. Police also found that Yuhas was carrying a falsified ID card.
When Kreitzer’s mother, Delores, was told the numbers, she cut the conversation short. “The kids are dead,” she said. “I don’t care what the blood alcohol levels were.”
Shortly after 8 a.m. Monday, Bowie High’s principal, John Hagan, stepped up to the microphone. According to the Post, his voice shook:
“I regret to announce the untimely and tragic deaths of three of our students. These three young men were fine young men, well-liked and admired and, indeed, very much respected. I would hope that this tragic waste of young lives would serve as an example to all of you.”
Their crash wasn’t the only one. The Post’s headline that Monday read “5 Young People Die in 2 Md. Auto Crashes.”
Eight and a half votes
On Monday, Wilson and advocacy groups held a news conference in the District Building. Norma Phillips, national president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, made the pitch: “Let’s close those ‘blood borders’ and save our teen-agers’ lives.”
By the next morning, the Washington Post reported on September 23rd, 1986, the votes were shifting:
D.C. Council members, in a flurry of activity after the weekend deaths of three young persons in an alcohol-related automobile accident, gathered enough support yesterday for raising the District’s minimum drinking age to 21 to force a vote on the issue at tonight’s meeting.
The proposal, long opposed by D.C. officials despite local and national pressure, had not been scheduled for a vote because council members who backed the bill were convinced they lacked the nine votes necessary to adopt emergency legislation.
But the Sunday morning deaths of three young persons in a suburban Maryland accident after a reported night of partying in Georgetown helped to change the minds of at least three council members.
Jarvis, Frank Smith of Ward 1 and Polly Shackleton of Ward 3, who had all opposed the bill in committee, now said they’d vote for it. “The recent tragedy has caused other members, like myself, to reflect that our action could save lives,” Jarvis said.
Tuesday afternoon, Wilson was on the phone with Council member Carol Schwartz, an at-large Republican, trying to work out a deal to make her the ninth vote. Before he could offer it, she told him she had already decided, reluctantly, an hour earlier.
That evening, Council Chairman David A. Clarke was telling reporters there were “eight and a half” votes for the bill when an aide handed him a note. The ninth vote was firm.
“The big deal was giving people some reason to change their position,” Wilson told the Post. “I had to do a lot of trading.”
The trade that mattered most was the grandfather clause. Barry had wanted none, but short of votes, his aides wrote one anyway to bring wavering members along. College students had lobbied hard for it.
Shackleton, who still didn’t like the higher age, explained her vote this way: “I just thought as long as it was inevitable, we might as well make the best deal possible.”
Just before midnight on Tuesday, September 23rd, the council voted 10 to 3. The no votes came from John Ray and Betty Ann Kane, both at-large, and Wilhelmina Rolark of Ward 8. Here’s how the Post opened its story the next morning:
The D.C. Council, bowing to longtime pressure from Congress and the recent support of Mayor Marion Barry, voted last night to raise the District’s drinking age to 21 for all types of alcohol but to continue to allow persons who are 18 by the end of this month to buy beer and wine.
The same late-night session, the Post reported, also approved a pay raise for council members. Yes, you read that right. The night it closed the loophole, the council gave itself a raise.
Crash or Congress?
So what changed the council’s mind? The Post’s first story credited the crash. Two days later, Sandra Evans wrote it up differently, under the headline “Hill Pressure Swayed Vote on Drinking Age”:
“What preceded and shaped the final vote were years of increasingly pointed congressional badgering, a few months of support from a strong mayor, a week of intense lobbying on both sides and a day of last-minute deal-making and maneuvering.”
In her telling, the Bowie crash was “an emotional and highly publicized backdrop for the debate.”
The truth is probably both. Congress and the mayor had made a higher age feel inevitable. But a week before the vote, the council still didn’t have the votes, and after the crash it did.
Last call
Not everyone waited for the law. John McDonald, manager of Champions near Wisconsin Avenue and M Street, told the Post he had started barring anyone under 21 after 9 p.m. on September 1st, three weeks ahead of the council. “We are not a kiddie bar,” he said. He was “tickled silly” by the vote.
Students were less thrilled. “They should start hanging the drunk drivers,” said Tom Cooper, 21, president of the University of Maryland’s student government. “This age change punishes everyone.” He figured Maryland students would keep coming to Georgetown anyway.
At George Washington University, student leader Adam Freedman, 20, called the bill a victory, because of the grandfather clause. “We feel we have protected the rights of 6,000 students,” he said.
That last Saturday night, out on the street, 18-year-old Maggie Ketelhut, visiting from Radford with Lyon, said the new law wouldn’t matter much: “The serious drinkers get false IDs anyway.” An 18-year-old standing nearby proved her point, showing off a Virginia driver’s license with his name, a friend’s picture and an age of 22. “It works every time,” he said. “No one really looks at it closely.”
Even the old split system confused people right to the end. Amy Embury, 19, in town from West Chester, Pennsylvania, said her group paid the same $4 cover as everyone else, then found out they could only order beer and wine. “It’s like having a child pay the adult fare at a movie and then telling him he can’t see the R-rated movie.”
What the law actually did
The emergency act lasted 90 days. The council followed it with a permanent version, D.C. Law 6-178, signed November 25th, 1986, which took effect February 24th, 1987.
That law made it illegal, for the first time, for anyone under 21 to drink in the District, with one exception: “a person who has attained 18 years of age before September 30, 1986, may drink beer or light wine.” Holding a drink, oddly, stayed legal for minors until 1993.
Eighteen-year-olds could still wait tables and serve drinks, just not work as bartenders, defined as anyone who “fixes, mixes, makes, or concocts” a drink.
The grandfather clause had no residency test. So some 18-to-20-year-olds from Maryland and Virginia kept drinking beer legally in Georgetown until they turned 21. The last of them aged out in 1989.
It was enough for the federal government. On September 30th, 1986, UPI reported that DC appeared to be in compliance, grandfather clause and all, while eight states were still set to lose highway money.
The neighbors noticed, too. In October 1986, C. Vernon Gray, chairman of the Howard County Council in Maryland, wrote to the Baltimore Sun to thank DC for finally acting.
After the last call
Georgetown University adopted a stricter alcohol policy in 1987. In 1989, the city’s alcohol board put a moratorium on new liquor licenses in Georgetown, the first in DC. It lasted until 2016.
Back in Bowie, that same week in September 1986, mourners filed into the Beall Funeral Home for Patrick Kreitzer’s funeral. The marquee at Bowie High kept its message: Be a Friend.
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