This photograph is of my grandmother, Margaret (Kelly) Birkenbach, second from the right.

She was born in southern Ohio in 1904. Judging from her age, this photograph was most likely taken in 1915 or 1916, when she would have been 11 or 12 years old and her sister, Katie Ruth Kelly, on the far left, would have been 15 or 16.

I don’t know the occasion for the photograph, I only know that my grandmother and her friends were squarely on the side of the prohibition of alcohol. Their pennants read, “The Liquor Traffic Must Go.”

Many years later, when my sister was a teenager, my grandmother tried to fix her up with the young man who mowed her lawn. Among his redeeming features, my grandmother said, was the fact that he didn’t drink.

When the young man pointed out the beer advertisement on his t-shirt, my grandmother quipped, “Oh, who doesn’t have a beer every now and then?!” ~shared by @yelly_kelly6363