A thirsty student from the University of California in Berkeley set out to walk one mile, the story goes. It was 1937, and prohibition had been in place for decades in the San Francisco Bay Area, the frontier of American expansion.
Alcohol sale was barred anywhere within one mile of the campus, including at the grand Claremont Resort on the edge of Berkeley. Yet as support for prohibition waned, the law was tweaked to measure the radius by street distance rather than crow’s flight.
