The Blue Laws

Thomas E. Pollock made his money in lumber, banking, and ranching, and around 1901 he held the mayor’s chair of a town whose most reliable industries were the ones the new blue laws were written to restrain. When the saloons and bawdy houses rebelled against the Sunday rules, the young mayor produced a compromise that, in the publisher’s dry phrasing, appeased most locals.

The story of that compromise is a small masterpiece of territorial governance: what got licensed, what got fined on a schedule everyone understood, and what the town agreed not to see. The newspapers editorialized scathingly and the arrangement worked anyway.

Pollock went on to bigger ledgers, and a National Register building in Williams still carries his name. The compromise carried Flagstaff to statehood.