.jpg "Vern Miller became a national celebrity for his anti-liquor efforts of the early 1970s, but he fought the marijuana wars as early as 1959.")
Vern Miller became a national celebrity for his anti-liquor efforts of the early 1970s, but he fought the marijuana wars as early as 1959.
kansasmemory.org, Kansas State Historical Society
Kansas and Missouri have a long and colorful history when it comes to crossing state lines for the enjoyment of vices. Most of it has involved liquor and the states’ differing laws.
Last year, with Kansas legalizing sports betting, Missourians had to start flocking west to gamble.
Now we enter a new era, with recreational marijuana becoming legal in Missouri while all marijuana, including medicinal, is outlawed in Kansas.
Several queries to KCQ — The Star’s ongoing series with the Kansas City Public Library that answers readers’ questions about our region — have posited versions of the question: What happens now? Will Kansas cops arrest people who legally buy weed in Missouri?
Area law-enforcement officials on the Kansas side have said they will continue enforcing marijuana laws just as they always have. That means it won’t matter if your cannabis was obtained legally in Missouri or anywhere else, you will still be subject to arrest — and overzealous cops would be within their rights to charge you.
But they might not go as far as Vern Miller once did.
For those not old enough to remember, 50 years ago the Sunflower State’s attorney general roamed the prairies, cracking down on all sorts of vices — including marijuana — and taking to the rails and the skies to enforce Kansas’ status as a dry state.
Some folks might now wonder whether Kris Kobach will become the modern-day version of Vern Miller.
Kobach, a Republican who took over as the state’s attorney general last month, developed a reputation for publicity-generating actions regarding voting fraud and illegal immigration while he was Kansas’ secretary of state. He also happens to oppose marijuana, even for medicinal purposes, and has vowed to “defend every law.”
That sounds like the rhetoric Miller spread before he was elected Kansas’ attorney general in 1970, winning office even though he had been a lawyer for only four years and having never tried a case in court.
Before making headlines for his anti-liquor tactics, becoming a national figure and turning Kansas into a national punchline in the process, Miller took down partakers of the evil weed. While campaigning for attorney general (he was a Democrat, by the way), he promised that if elected he would “land in the middle of the drug-ridden hippie commune in Lawrence with both feet.”
Sure enough, five weeks after taking his oath, Miller led a raid that produced 33 arrests in Lawrence. He later was known to make surprise drug-enforcement visits to dormitories at the University of Kansas.
Such crime-fighting tactics were nothing new for Miller. As Sedgwick County sheriff in the 1960s, he had ambushed drug suspects in Wichita by jumping out of car trunks. He also had cracked down on obscene films, nude dancing and illegal gambling and even threatened church bingo games.
“A lot of old ladies in town didn’t like that,” he said later. “They like to play bingo.”
Along the way, he wasn’t shy about seeking publicity. In fact, Miller once deputized a reporter so he could cover his drug raids.
Still, the man known as “Super Cop” didn’t make national headlines until he pulled what he described as the “Great Train Raid.”
Newton’s law
While in college, David Peironnet worked as an attendant for the Santa Fe Railroad after Santa Fe had ceded passenger service to Amtrak.
“This was during the transition with Amtrak,” Peironnet, who now lives in Rocky Mount, Missouri, told The Star by phone. “It was still the Santa Fe, but the name Amtrak appeared on things.”
He was aboard train No. 19, the Chief, which ran from Chicago to Los Angeles on July 18, 1972. His shift ended in Kansas City, and he disembarked at Union Station.
“Then I find out — I guess the next morning it was in the morning paper — that Vern had stopped the train. … In essence, Vern gets on with his signature pearl-handled pistols and proceeds to arrest the train conductor and the dining car steward for operating an open saloon.”
Peironnet said Santa Fe had not challenged state or county laws that prohibited alcohol sales, but Amtrak took a different tack. Amtrak officials figured since their operation was federally chartered, they would not be subject to state and local laws. Miller disagreed, and, eventually, so did the federal courts.
But not before Miller had his day in the limelight.
The Kansas attorney general boarded No. 19 in the late July evening at Newton, Kansas, and, with support from agents from his office and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, headed to the lounge car. They confiscated all the alcohol and arrested conductor Walter Woodson of Kansas City, Kansas, along with bartender James F. Thomas and waiter Lee Adams, both of Chicago. All were charged with violating the Kansas liquor statute.
Woodson, who was employed by Santa Fe, said, “I had no idea I was responsible for that. Now it looks like I’m a Mafia leader. … I felt like I was being skyjacked.”
The three alleged scofflaws were paraded in front of a judge in the Harvey County Courthouse, where they were arraigned and released on $500 bond. The charges eventually were dropped, but Amtrak stopped serving liquor while passing through Kansas.
The arrests made headlines across the nation.
Shortly after the Great Train Raid, The Star sent young reporter Robert W. Butler to ride the same Amtrak train and report on what he saw. Butler (who went on to serve as the newspaper’s movie reviewer for more than 30 years) began the story he filed after the 7½-hour trip across Kansas:
“What Carry Nation did to Kansas saloons 80 years ago, Vern Miller is doing to Amtrak trains now.”
Like Nation, who took a hatchet to taverns in the Sunflower State as she led the national temperance movement in the late 19th and early 20th century, Miller had plenty of critics. Whereas the wife of a bar owner hit Nation on the side of the head with a broom, Miller’s foes typically wielded words.
Butler interviewed Mrs. Charles Bowman, who was riding from Kansas City to Dodge City to pick up her mother.
“If Vern Miller was my son, I’d spank him for acting like a spoiled brat,” she said. “When is he going to get the airlines? And how is he going to manage that — with a skyhook or what?”
Up in the air
Well, Miller immediately went after the airlines. But he never boarded a plane to make arrests, and he never ordered airlines to stop serving liquor on all flights that flew above Kansas.
But that’s what some people remember happening, perhaps because of the widespread ridicule from newspaper columnists, political adversaries and TV humorists.
▪ Great Bend Tribune: “Now we are about to have an airborne Carrie Nation. The attorney general is threatening to arrest airline crews in flight if liquor is being served on the planes they fly at 30,000 feet over Kansas.”
▪ Arkansas City Traveler: “Can you imagine flying over Kansas and suddenly looking out the window and there is our great attorney general peeking through the window to see if somebody is having a drink.”
▪ Rep. Donn Everett, R-Manhattan: “The attorney general’s opinion against sale of liquor in airlines is the silliest thing ever. He’s only interested in his own pictures, his own headlines.”
In truth, the four airlines operating in Kansas had agreed that they would cease selling alcohol on flights taking off or landing in Kansas, but not on other flights over the state.
Miller explained his rationale during an interview with the Los Angeles Times.
“If there’s an assault on an airplane over Kansas, we could prosecute the case,” he said. “We have jurisdiction. So, it holds true for serving drinks in the sky over Kansas in a public place as well.”
He said he never proposed that all flights over Kansas stop serving drinks.
“We have only asked that the four airlines with flights stopping in our state close their bars in the sky when over Kansas.”
Of course, as a Frontier spokesman complained in February 1973, there was no way to know exactly when a jetliner bound for Wichita passed into Kansas airspace.
Meanwhile, pilots were making so many smart-aleck remarks about ceasing alcohol service at the border that Continental Airlines issued a memo banning sarcasm.
By March 1973, the state’s House Federal and State Affairs committee was considering a bill to allow trains and planes to serve alcohol. Speaking on behalf of the airlines, Ken Smith told the committee that Frontier, Braniff, Continental and TWA no longer were serving alcohol aboard flights touching down in Kansas but still were getting complaints from “passengers concerning deprivation of personal services to which they are accustomed in the other 49 states, and, in fact, anywhere in the world.”
He said the bill “serves to correct an obvious absurdity.” On April 6, 1973, the Kansas House rejected it 114-11.
Final chapters
The airlines might have dodged a bullet by agreeing to the concessions. Miller said that if they hadn’t, he would have considered pulling a Newton-style raid on a jetliner and arresting crew members. He also indicated that seizing planes “would be a possibility all right” if airlines broke the agreement.
On the ground, Kansans were limited to buying package liquors at licensed stores or circumventing the liquor-by-the-drink ban by paying a few dollars to join “private clubs” that served booze.
At the same time, young Missourians flocked over State Line Road to drink beer in Kansas. The legal drinking age was 21 in Missouri, but it was 18 for beer (3.2% alcohol only) in Kansas.
Miller saw the irony in the situation.
“Unquestionably, the liquor laws in Kansas are hypocritical,” he said. “But the answer to eliminating bad laws is not to ignore them but to change them through the legislative process.”
That happened in 1986, when Kansas voters approved a constitutional amendment that allowed liquor by the drink, although it was on a county-option basis. (Three counties, all in western Kansas, remain dry.)
By then, Miller’s policy banning booze on trains and planes also had been reversed. New Attorney General Robert Stephan did so in 1979, and Frontier Airlines immediately announced a one-day special offering free drinks as part of the “Kansas Cocktail Hour.”
After Miller captured the nation’s attention in the early 1970s, he slid back into the shadows. Although he won reelection as attorney general by a landslide in 1972, with all 105 of the state’s counties supporting him, he lost a run for governor in 1974.
Miller opened a private law practice in Wichita and later launched an unsuccessful bid to return as Sedgwick County sheriff when he was 71. He died June 11, 2021, at age 92.
