Joe Kimball's February 2 article in MINNPOST, "Bill Calls for End of Ban on Sunday Liquor Sales," described the most recent bill to allow off-sale liquor sales on Sundays in MN in purely economic terms. (Senate file 197) Since Sunday-sales laws (blue laws) have been an issue during my whole tenure at the Legislative Library, and even before the Library began more that forty years ago, I couldn't resist looking back at some of the older clippings in the library's files. I remembered articles claiming that Sunday sales of liquor or even department stores items would destroy family life and the sanctity of the Sabbath.
Our files included a set of articles from 1967, the year that the Legislature allowed communities to sell licenses for restaurants to sell liquor on Sundays, if approved by voters in a local referendum (Laws of Minnesota 1967, Chapter 691).
In the same year the Legislature also passed Chapter 165. It restricted Sunday sales of a wide range of retail goods including paint, varnish, wallpaper, and hardware! That would put a crimp in weekend home improvement projects. That law was found unconstitutional and repealed in a Revisors bill in 1971. In 1974 the issue came up again, but not for moral or religious reasons. State Representative Bruce Vento proposed a bill that would close retail stores on Sundays and allow them to remain open only five hours per week beyond regular daytime hours in order to address the energy crisis. The Catholic Bulletin published a strongly supportive editorial, urging the Legislature to revise the Sunday closing laws.
The blue law clipping files were not as large as I thought they would be. They included fewer articles in total about Minnesota than about North Dakota, which did not repeal its 100-year-old general Sunday closing law until 1991. Even the New York Times noted the repeal. "For North Dakota Shoppers, No More Minnesota Sundays" talked about the fiscal impact on Minnesota border towns, which had benefited from border-hopping Sunday shoppers. "David Gerszewski said that Sundays at his pawn shop and variety store in East Grand Forks, Minn., just across the Red River from Grand Forks, N.D., used to be his busiest days. But last Sunday, he said, "It's been kind of dead. It was just like a weekday today.""
This set of a few interesting articles from the Library's files doesn't even address one ongoing contentious Sunday issue - car sales. But when that issue comes up again, we have plenty of background.
Robbie LaFleur