Boones Farm Wine

High school nights at Settlers Landing and Brookside Park: Cleveland Remembers

Back in the 80's, some of us ... errr ... "Catholic" high school students partook in weekend tailgating traditions, especially popular after Friday night football games.

After one game in particular, I recall, my friends and I piled into our cars (or those borrowed from parents), 3 or 4 guys to a car, replete with a variety of liquid refreshments -- six-packs of Old Milwaukee beer, fifths of MD ("Mad Dog!") 20/20, and bottles of Boone's Farm wine were the favorites -- and we made our way down to one of our favorite rendezvous spots: the old Settler's Landing, before the Lake Front Line, the heyday of the West Bank, and the green-scaping.

By the time we arrived, the usually vacant lot was already crowded with other teen-aged revelers ... There was nothing particularly special happening -- it was just what we did. After an hour or so of mingling, the police expectedly arrived to roust us from feeling too comfortable. Yes, we were underaged, and, yes, we all piled into cars clanking with bottles of booze, but we didn't have to try too hard to make a clean getaway.

It was still early, and we weren't quite ready to call it a night, so we headed just a few miles to the south, to another of our favorite haunts: Brookside Park, underneath the old, crumbling Fulton Road bridge ... And, of course, upon arrival, we found ourselves surrounded by a different but no less familiar group of prep school partiers ... We hadn't missed a beat.

Only an hour or so later, though, the red and blues arrived again, and -- once again -- the caravan made a hasty retreat ... And we turned back to Settler's Landing, which now served as a rallying point for those of us still game ... Of course, in our absence, others had filled the void, and the lot was full again ... It seemed this time our tenacity paid off, as the zone cars only disinterestedly drove by, not taking the time to even flash a spotlight or siren our way.

-- Kevin C. Robison, Cleveland

Editor's note:  The Plain Dealer does not condone underage drinking, or driving drunk at any age. We include this story in Cleveland Remembers because it documents a football night tradition that, as far as we can tell, has not been acknowledged by us before.

Don't Give Boone's Farm to Your Mama « I'm Not Bougie

When I first moved to NYC, I really thought I was doing something… I had my first job, my first apartment and in my head I imagined that my neighbors and I would be like the Harlem version of ‘Friends’ and my social life would resemble ‘Sex in the City.’ As naïve as I was, I was fortunate enough to have some normal and friendly neighbors, but I learned quickly that my door wasn’t going to be left unlocked and that we wouldn’t be cooking any dinners together. As for the social life part, I was pretty much right on, but I digress… So I had spent my first few paychecks traveling, shopping and just kicking it, but then my mother said she was going to be in New York on a business trip and wanted to stay with me instead of in a hotel so we could spend some quality time together. It was at that point that I realized I had to get my apartment in order… I had been sleeping on a pallet on the floor amongst my designer bags and shoes because I was too lazy to buy a bed – besides, who wants to spend $2,000 on a bed when you can buy a Louie? (obviously I was misguided in my early 20’s). So I went out, got a bed (I was able to talk the guy down by $400 AND get the delivery fee waived – woop! woop!), went to Crate & Barrel and pretty much furnished my apartment in a day.

Mom already said that she didn’t want to go out for dinner so I went downtown and got her favorite meal from her favorite gourmet Chinese restaurant, then I went to the liquor store – and people, this is where I went wrong – My mom is somewhat of a wine connoisseur and I figured I would impress her and show her how GROWN I was by having some wine for us to drink with dinner… *pause* … yeah… *pause* … So I go around the corner to the liquor store and I ask the guy where the wine is and if there’s a good one he could suggest (visualize me asking this of a guy who works behind plexiglass – naïve, I know). So he points me towards a fridge and says, “Our strawberry wine is really popular.” This is where I should have turned around and went home, but instead, I go check it out because I’ve never heard of strawberry wine and since I wasn’t much of a drinker back then (we know that’s not the case now!) I assumed that this strawberry wine was something exotic that I hadn’t been exposed to in my short 21 years of life. So I check out the bottle and there’s a big orange sticker that reads, “2 for $5.” This was another point in which I should have given up my plan to impress, but I was a shiny faced, recent college grad with very little money who needed to impress my mother with my maturity and my deep knowledge of grapes so all I could think was, “Wow! I can get TWO bottles for only $5! That’s better than the Arbor Mist we used to drink in college.” So I bought my wine and went home to wait for my Mom to get there.

New York

The Signet encyclopedia of wine

LZ-'75, The Lost Chronicles of Led Zeppelin's 1975 American Tour

A Pirate Looks at Fifty

Esquire