June 10, 2025 • 20 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, when Tennessee officials told Doug and Mary Ketchum they couldn’t run their liquor store in Memphis, they took their case to the Supreme Court—and won. Here they are with their story.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:17):
And we continue with our American stories, and up next
a rule of law story, which takes us to Memphis, Tennessee,
in a liquor store owned by Doug and Mary Ketchum
called Kimbro Wine and Spirits. Their quest to own their
own business is a horror story of sorts, as it
was necessary for the Supreme Court of the United States
(00:39):
to make a ruling as to whether or not this
couple would be allowed to pursue their American dream. Let's
take a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Mary and I met in Salt Lake City, Utah, shortly
after my wife passed away in two thousand and nine.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
Well, Doug and I had a lot of similar friends.
We kind of knew about each other. I knew who
he was, but we'd never really talked or been close.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
After my wife passed away, she opened up her house
for our funeral memorial dinner and just got to know
her then.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
That was actually really nice for me because I met
all of Doug's family. So when we finally did start
dating and decided we liked each other and we're going
to get married, I already knew everybody and they already
knew me, and so it was there was no you know,
nobody was scared of anything.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
We got married and Mary was working as a telephone technician.
As a network technician, she used to climb telephone poles.
Just to give you an idea how cool she is.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
First, when I would go to people's houses and I'd say,
you know, I'm the telephone man, it would be funny
because you get this odd reaction from people. They'd sit
and look at me for a minute. Their brain couldn't
quite put it together.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
We were in a position where she could take a little
time off, and I have a handicapped daughter that was
with their previous marriage.
Speaker 4 (01:58):
And we got married.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
She says, I want to be here to take care Stacy,
so we moved Stacy in with us.
Speaker 4 (02:06):
Stacy Is has cerebral palsy.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
She was born in nineteen eighty four and November of
nineteen eighty five, she suffered in a drowning accident in
my sister's swimming pool in Arizona, and that left her
with severe cerebral palsy. She is completely a quadriplegic. She
can't talk, she can't sit up by herself, she can't walk,
(02:31):
she can't do anything by herself. From the first the
first year after accident, she was.
Speaker 4 (02:37):
In a coma.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
It took her an entire year to come out of
her coma, and I used to have to walk her
to sleep outside. She couldn't fall asleep if she was
in the house. So every night for three years, I
would take her outside for a walk and walk her
until she'd fall asleep, and usually it took about between
a half hour to an hour, didn't matter if it
was raining or snowing or what was going on.
Speaker 4 (02:59):
She couldn't fall asleep unless she was outside.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
But after she slowly came out of her coma, she
used to have a gas trust to me tube, a
tube bin or stomach that we had to feed her through.
As she slowly came out of her coma, she started
she had to relearn everything. She had to learn how
to swallow, how to how to eat food and things
like that. So it was it was quite a process.
(03:23):
And spent a lot of years taking care of her
and worrying about her.
Speaker 4 (03:29):
But she is she's an angel, she, you know, just
the light of our lives.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
So having having somebody that was willing to take that
on uh and and marry me, knowing that I had
a handicapped daughter that required so much attention and so
much work to take care of.
Speaker 4 (03:56):
That's a pretty big deal to me.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
I you know, I overwhelmed every day at you know,
the amount of love that Mary has for her and
how willing she was to take something on. I don't
think that many people could do that. In my mind,
that just makes her a rockstar. We got married, we
moved in, We moved Stacey in with us, and Mary
became a full time mom to a handicap, handicapped daughter.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
She was so sweet and I could see her just
giving me the eye. Are you good enough for my dad?
I said to Doug. Later, I says, she really needs
to come and live with us, because I can tell
her mom's burned out and she needs a break, and
she's been taken care of her for a really long time.
And I says, I don't, honestly, I don't know if
I can marry.
Speaker 5 (04:38):
You unless she comes and lives with us.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
Because I thought that she needed a little better care
and I thought I could do that. So when she
first came here, I had a little bit of a
larning curve the first I don't know, three months or so,
But after that it's really easy, and it's pretty obvious
now that she should be with us.
Speaker 4 (04:57):
But in two thousand and fifteen.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Stacy caught a severe case of pneumonia and we spent
about a month and a half in the hospital, and
the doctors told us that the air quality was so
bad in Salt Lake City, especially during the wintertime, that
we needed to find a better environment for Stacy or
they didn't expect that she was going to last more
than about a year. So we started a search and
(05:23):
started looking for someplace to move that had cleaner air
and cleaner water, someplace that would provide us with some
kind of opportunity to own our own business and allow
us to have a little more free time to spend
with Stacy because we don't know how long she's gonna live.
So we ran across an opportunity and Memphis, Tennessee for
(05:46):
and found a liquor store that was for sale. We
spent I don't know about six or eight months looking
at it, negotiating with the previous owner about a sales price,
and trying to get all of our licensing and all
that kind of stuff worked out.
Speaker 4 (05:59):
In June of two twenty sixteen, we planned to move.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
We we had come to Memphis, we found a house
that we liked, and we had made an offer on
the business. Everything looked like it was going very well.
The ABC board told us that all of our information
looked fine. They were going to prove us for a
license at the next tiering at the end.
Speaker 5 (06:17):
Of June, and we got our city license.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Oh, we got our city license in that at the
same time. Yeah, June comes.
Speaker 4 (06:23):
And they called us.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Our attorney's calls and says, oh, the ABC board says,
they lost your paperwork. We're going to have to refile it.
So we're going to have to push it out till
the end of July. So in the meantime, we'd closed
out our house here and moved all of our furniture
and things out. Thought, okay, it's just a month away,
you know, we can we can make it another month.
(06:47):
So we packed, you know, we had everything packed up,
and we moved here and into July comes and our
attorney calls us again and says, the ABC board said
there's a problem and they're putting a hold on all
licenses this month. You're gonna have to wait till August
or great.
Speaker 5 (07:03):
I knew something was wrong.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
Yeah, we knew something was up, we didn't know why.
So August comes along and they said, we put a
hold on of licenses. We're not giving you a license,
and not only that, we filed a lawsuit against you
in court. So the issue was, and we didn't know
about this at the time, but the issue was they
(07:25):
had a rule that said you had to be a
resident for two years in order to get a license,
but in order to renew the license, you had to
have been a resident of Tennessee for ten years, which
effectively means that you could not get a license, a
liquor license in Tennessee unless you'd been a resident for
nine years.
Speaker 4 (07:42):
No one told us about that rule.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
Yeah, it took us probably six months to realize why
we were getting sued.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Yeah, we were completely in the dark. Had no idea why,
no idea why we were being sued. And as Mary
said has said numerous times, they could have just said no,
they didn't have to sue us.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
I thought right from the beginning we shouldn't quit our
job until we move. And when it came time to
close on the house and we hadn't gone our liquor
license yet, I said, are you sure maybe we should
postpone buying the house, and he goes, no, no, everything's going
to be fine. They've already told me it's going to
be great. And I said, okay. So we flew out here,
we signed on the house, wet, we packed up our house,
(08:21):
delivered all this stuff here, and we flew back home
and they said, well, we're going to do.
Speaker 5 (08:27):
It next month.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
So when Doug said, well a month, I said, well,
can you keep your job for another month? We'll just
stay here so that we have an income, because I
just didn't want to lose that safety in it, you know.
I wanted to make sure we had some income. And
he says, yeah, i'll stay here. So he stayed one
more month. We stayed a month longer, actually two months
longer than we thought that we were going to because
they kept postponing us.
Speaker 5 (08:49):
And he said, you know, we gotta go. We just
we got to go. So he did.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
He came out here in August all by himself with Stacy,
without a van, and that was before grocery stores delivered.
And I would talk to on the phone sometimes and
I would think, oh my gosh, how is he doing this?
Speaker 1 (09:04):
How is he doing this? What a piece of news
to learn that the arbitrary power of a state could
deprive you of a livelihood and for no rational reason.
And we're going to get into that in our Rule
of Lost story, the story of Doug and Mary Ketchum,
the story of kimbro Wine and Spirits, and so much
more here on our American stories. And we returned to
(09:40):
our American stories into the story of Doug and Mary Ketchum,
a couple that had to fight all the way to
the Supreme Court just to run their family business. Let's
pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
We had initially had negotiated an SBA loan with Wells
Fargo and it was, you know, guaranteed for a certain
amount of time. But because of the lawsuit, we lost
the SBA guarantee and when we finally won in court,
we had to go all the way back through the
authorization process to get a new loan. We lost our
(10:16):
good interest rate, and because of all the problems that
we'd had, they thought it was a greater risk. So
we had to take more money out of our retirement
account and we had to double the amount of down
payment that we put down on the business.
Speaker 4 (10:30):
So that was the money that we.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Had allocated ready for operating capital and to come in
and do renovations and things like that.
Speaker 4 (10:37):
So that put us in a tight spot financially.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Also, because we no longer had that, you know, a
couple hundred thousand dollars cushion to run the business with,
we had to put it as a down payment. So
that's the other reason I had to really have a
job is we didn't have much leeway after that. We
now we got the business, but we've got a real
limited amount of capital a to rent, and we have to,
(11:01):
you know, be very careful how we spend our money
and how much income and overhead we have. So Mary's
the one who's handled that, and she has done an
amazing job with it. We're not they kind of give
up kind of people. We kind of people kind of dig.
Speaker 4 (11:15):
Our heels in.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
So we dug our heels in and and went to
court and it took us I think about a year.
We won our case, and that was in federal court,
and at that point the state basically was required to
give us a license.
Speaker 4 (11:32):
They want to, they didn't want to.
Speaker 5 (11:34):
We installed again, they stalled.
Speaker 4 (11:36):
And we we uh actually went to a hearing.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
At the ABC board where the opposing attorneys got up
and said, we know that the federal judge has ruled
that this is illegal, that they can't withhold them a license,
but you can do what you want.
Speaker 4 (11:54):
You don't have to give them a license if you
don't want to.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
And the commanditioner ask his attorney. He says, tell me
your opinion. If I don't give them a license, what's
my liability here? He says, well, you're breaking the law.
You could go to jail. He said, So you want
me to break the law and risk going to jail
by not giving them a license. And the attorney says,
that's that's your prerogative.
Speaker 5 (12:19):
That's exactly what we think you should do.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
Yeah, So he says, I'm not doing that. So we
were granted our license. They told us they would send
it to us, and we still never saw it. We
had to get our attorney to call the state attorney general.
Speaker 4 (12:32):
To go get the license.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
So there was just a lot of reluctance on the
part of the state to grant anybody from outside the
state of license. So the Retailers Association decided they were
going to fight it, took us to the Supreme Court.
We felt like, we had to have representation.
Speaker 4 (12:50):
And at that.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Point we had an attorney called my wife. His name
was Michael Bindas and he was out of Seattle, Washington
it is, with a group called the Incident for Justice.
He called her and told her, we heard about your
lawsuit and we have a vested interest in this case.
They had fought a case in the Supreme Court in
two thousand and five that they had won that was
(13:12):
very similar based on similar rulings, and they wanted to
make sure that that case stayed one and wanted to
know if they could represent us pro bono.
Speaker 5 (13:22):
And so Mary I started crying.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Yeah, well, at first she called me. She says, there's
somebody gonna call you and he wants to take our
case and they want to represent us pro bono. And
I'm like, is this a joke, because nobody ever calls
you and say we want to go to court and
we'll pay all the costs. But the Institute for Justice
was you know, we met with Michael Bindas. He flew
(13:48):
from Seattle down here to meet with us to talk
to us about our case and tell us what they.
Speaker 4 (13:52):
Do and how they do it, and they were phenomenal.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
I can't say enough about the Institute for j Justice
and how.
Speaker 4 (14:01):
Great they were and what they did for us. They
took the case on.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
They had an army of attorneys working on our case.
We went to d C and met the people in
the Virginia office up there. There had to be at
least one hundred people that were involved working on our case.
Speaker 5 (14:19):
Pretty overwhelming.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
It would walk into a room and see all those
people that were behind the scenes that helped us that
we had no idea.
Speaker 4 (14:27):
Yeah, it was overwhelming.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Actually, yeah, the Supreme Court case itself. We were able
to fly to DC and go up and sit in
the Supreme Court and listen to the arguments, and that
was also a really amazing experience.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
Well, we were really lucky because we got to bring
Stacy with us. Honestly, for me, when we walked in there,
it was kind of like being in church. It was
very reverent and there was a lot of respect that
when those judges come out, I mean you can just
see everyone in there is one hundred percent focused on
what they're saying, what's going on, trying to see the
(15:06):
innuendos and the cues and the questions of everything. It
was really intense. We we got to listen to a
case before ours. When they did finally get around to
talking about us, I just had this wow moment where
I realized, some of the smartest people in our country
are up there talking about me and what's going on
(15:28):
with us, And in that moment, I.
Speaker 5 (15:31):
Just realized what a really big deal it was.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
Before that, I just knew that we were treading water,
trying to, you know, make lives for ourselves and take
care of our daughter.
Speaker 5 (15:40):
But in that moment, and when I was looking at them,
I was thinking, Wow, this is going to affect the
whole country. This is a big deal.
Speaker 4 (15:49):
Yeah, it is a big deal.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
We had one of the attorneys sit with us and
talk to us about the process.
Speaker 4 (15:58):
And what was going on.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
If we had questions about what the judges were asking,
you know, we could we could whisper to her, and
she had explained it to us.
Speaker 4 (16:06):
But the whole thing was was really phenomenal.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
But sitting through the sitting through the hearing of the
Supreme Court, it became obvious to us, or fairly obvious
to us, that the judges were were not very happy
with the way the laws were written and the way
they were being handled.
Speaker 4 (16:22):
In the in the state of Tennessee.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
And that our rights were being violated, and our rights
were being violated with no just cause.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
So they asked a lot of questions about that, and
asked a lot of questions about why, you know, it
should be legal to make somebody have a residency requirement
when the Constitution says that everybody should be able to
go to any state and and work and have gainful
employment without any kind of you know, restrictions. And so we,
(16:49):
you know, eventually won the Supreme Court case, which was
great for us because we have invested every penny of
our savings into this business and picked ourselves up, sold
our home, quit our job, moved across the country, and
kind of felt like we had the.
Speaker 4 (17:06):
Rug yanked out from under us.
Speaker 3 (17:11):
Twice a week vendors come in so that we can
place our orders for our liquor. And every time something
new comes in, they usually bring an open bottle and say,
taste this and see if you like it. So it's
really fun because we get to try every new product
that comes out on the market. Not to mention over
the holidays, some of those.
Speaker 5 (17:29):
Things are really nice.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
So these are gift ideas and so I get to
drink wine and some scotches and bourbons that you'd never
think you get to. You get to try all these
different things, and that's really fun.
Speaker 5 (17:42):
You know.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
Honestly, if I'd had any idea how much fun this
was gonna be, I would have done this a really
long time ago.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
Well.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
Number one, everyone who comes in the liquor store is
either in a good mood or in a bad mood,
and they're in a good mood when they leave. If
someone had told me what was going to happen to
when we first started doing this, I said, I would
have said, no, I don't ever want to do that.
Speaker 5 (18:04):
That would have been too hard.
Speaker 3 (18:05):
It's been very, very challenging, but I have to say
that now that we're on the other side of it,
I'm really glad we stuck it out. And then when
we did it, I tell everybody, the smartest decision I
ever made in my whole entire life was when I
decided to Mary Doug. And I just feel so lucky
that when we got here, I was with him when
this happened, because.
Speaker 5 (18:25):
I knew that we could get through it, and we did.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
And I'm really really glad the way it worked out
that Justice was served, and I'm grateful for IJ.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Mounty Montgomery. And what a story. And
we love bringing you these rule of loss stories because
it matters, and for people who've lived in other countries
and come here simply for property rights and the enjoyment,
the quiet enjoyment of owning something you own and not
having the state just take it from you. In many
(18:57):
parts of the world, that is how people live from
day to day. There is no rule of law, and
in the end, it's very hard to proceed with a
business or any other enterprise. And what wonderful people we met,
Doug and Mary. Catch them, you just love them. They're
the heart and soul of the country. And look what
Mary did marrying Doug and ticking on the responsibility of
(19:19):
that beautiful girl, Stacey, and then just moving everything on
behalf of their daughter. That's why they end up in
Memphis to begin with. And here come these state laws
that say nine years. And what's that about, Well, it's
about protectionism, and it's about well the thing that many
people hate in this country, which is crony capitalism. And
(19:39):
big companies are big interest groups stopping a small person
from doing their business. And thank goodness for places like
the Institute for Justice who fight for the rights, but
property owners who can't afford to litigate against these bigger interests,
And my goodness, imagine being in the US Supreme Court
and having your case matter not just for you, for
every other small business that gets bullied by some state
(20:03):
board or from some silly state law. The story of
the Ketchums, and in the end, the story of rule
of law prevailing. Here on our American stories
And we continue with our American stories, and up next
a rule of law story, which takes us to Memphis, Tennessee,
in a liquor store owned by Doug and Mary Ketchum
called Kimbro Wine and Spirits. Their quest to own their
own business is a horror story of sorts, as it
was necessary for the Supreme Court of the United States
(00:39):
to make a ruling as to whether or not this
couple would be allowed to pursue their American dream. Let's
take a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Mary and I met in Salt Lake City, Utah, shortly
after my wife passed away in two thousand and nine.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
Well, Doug and I had a lot of similar friends.
We kind of knew about each other. I knew who
he was, but we'd never really talked or been close.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
After my wife passed away, she opened up her house
for our funeral memorial dinner and just got to know
her then.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
That was actually really nice for me because I met
all of Doug's family. So when we finally did start
dating and decided we liked each other and we're going
to get married, I already knew everybody and they already
knew me, and so it was there was no you know,
nobody was scared of anything.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
We got married and Mary was working as a telephone technician.
As a network technician, she used to climb telephone poles.
Just to give you an idea how cool she is.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
First, when I would go to people's houses and I'd say,
you know, I'm the telephone man, it would be funny
because you get this odd reaction from people. They'd sit
and look at me for a minute. Their brain couldn't
quite put it together.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
We were in a position where she could take a little
time off, and I have a handicapped daughter that was
with their previous marriage.
Speaker 4 (01:58):
And we got married.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
She says, I want to be here to take care Stacy,
so we moved Stacy in with us.
Speaker 4 (02:06):
Stacy Is has cerebral palsy.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
She was born in nineteen eighty four and November of
nineteen eighty five, she suffered in a drowning accident in
my sister's swimming pool in Arizona, and that left her
with severe cerebral palsy. She is completely a quadriplegic. She
can't talk, she can't sit up by herself, she can't walk,
(02:31):
she can't do anything by herself. From the first the
first year after accident, she was.
Speaker 4 (02:37):
In a coma.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
It took her an entire year to come out of
her coma, and I used to have to walk her
to sleep outside. She couldn't fall asleep if she was
in the house. So every night for three years, I
would take her outside for a walk and walk her
until she'd fall asleep, and usually it took about between
a half hour to an hour, didn't matter if it
was raining or snowing or what was going on.
Speaker 4 (02:59):
She couldn't fall asleep unless she was outside.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
But after she slowly came out of her coma, she
used to have a gas trust to me tube, a
tube bin or stomach that we had to feed her through.
As she slowly came out of her coma, she started
she had to relearn everything. She had to learn how
to swallow, how to how to eat food and things
like that. So it was it was quite a process.
(03:23):
And spent a lot of years taking care of her
and worrying about her.
Speaker 4 (03:29):
But she is she's an angel, she, you know, just
the light of our lives.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
So having having somebody that was willing to take that
on uh and and marry me, knowing that I had
a handicapped daughter that required so much attention and so
much work to take care of.
Speaker 4 (03:56):
That's a pretty big deal to me.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
I you know, I overwhelmed every day at you know,
the amount of love that Mary has for her and
how willing she was to take something on. I don't
think that many people could do that. In my mind,
that just makes her a rockstar. We got married, we
moved in, We moved Stacey in with us, and Mary
became a full time mom to a handicap, handicapped daughter.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
She was so sweet and I could see her just
giving me the eye. Are you good enough for my dad?
I said to Doug. Later, I says, she really needs
to come and live with us, because I can tell
her mom's burned out and she needs a break, and
she's been taken care of her for a really long time.
And I says, I don't, honestly, I don't know if
I can marry.
Speaker 5 (04:38):
You unless she comes and lives with us.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
Because I thought that she needed a little better care
and I thought I could do that. So when she
first came here, I had a little bit of a
larning curve the first I don't know, three months or so,
But after that it's really easy, and it's pretty obvious
now that she should be with us.
Speaker 4 (04:57):
But in two thousand and fifteen.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Stacy caught a severe case of pneumonia and we spent
about a month and a half in the hospital, and
the doctors told us that the air quality was so
bad in Salt Lake City, especially during the wintertime, that
we needed to find a better environment for Stacy or
they didn't expect that she was going to last more
than about a year. So we started a search and
(05:23):
started looking for someplace to move that had cleaner air
and cleaner water, someplace that would provide us with some
kind of opportunity to own our own business and allow
us to have a little more free time to spend
with Stacy because we don't know how long she's gonna live.
So we ran across an opportunity and Memphis, Tennessee for
(05:46):
and found a liquor store that was for sale. We
spent I don't know about six or eight months looking
at it, negotiating with the previous owner about a sales price,
and trying to get all of our licensing and all
that kind of stuff worked out.
Speaker 4 (05:59):
In June of two twenty sixteen, we planned to move.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
We we had come to Memphis, we found a house
that we liked, and we had made an offer on
the business. Everything looked like it was going very well.
The ABC board told us that all of our information
looked fine. They were going to prove us for a
license at the next tiering at the end.
Speaker 5 (06:17):
Of June, and we got our city license.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Oh, we got our city license in that at the
same time. Yeah, June comes.
Speaker 4 (06:23):
And they called us.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Our attorney's calls and says, oh, the ABC board says,
they lost your paperwork. We're going to have to refile it.
So we're going to have to push it out till
the end of July. So in the meantime, we'd closed
out our house here and moved all of our furniture
and things out. Thought, okay, it's just a month away,
you know, we can we can make it another month.
(06:47):
So we packed, you know, we had everything packed up,
and we moved here and into July comes and our
attorney calls us again and says, the ABC board said
there's a problem and they're putting a hold on all
licenses this month. You're gonna have to wait till August
or great.
Speaker 5 (07:03):
I knew something was wrong.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
Yeah, we knew something was up, we didn't know why.
So August comes along and they said, we put a
hold on of licenses. We're not giving you a license,
and not only that, we filed a lawsuit against you
in court. So the issue was, and we didn't know
about this at the time, but the issue was they
(07:25):
had a rule that said you had to be a
resident for two years in order to get a license,
but in order to renew the license, you had to
have been a resident of Tennessee for ten years, which
effectively means that you could not get a license, a
liquor license in Tennessee unless you'd been a resident for
nine years.
Speaker 4 (07:42):
No one told us about that rule.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
Yeah, it took us probably six months to realize why
we were getting sued.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Yeah, we were completely in the dark. Had no idea why,
no idea why we were being sued. And as Mary
said has said numerous times, they could have just said no,
they didn't have to sue us.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
I thought right from the beginning we shouldn't quit our
job until we move. And when it came time to
close on the house and we hadn't gone our liquor
license yet, I said, are you sure maybe we should
postpone buying the house, and he goes, no, no, everything's going
to be fine. They've already told me it's going to
be great. And I said, okay. So we flew out here,
we signed on the house, wet, we packed up our house,
(08:21):
delivered all this stuff here, and we flew back home
and they said, well, we're going to do.
Speaker 5 (08:27):
It next month.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
So when Doug said, well a month, I said, well,
can you keep your job for another month? We'll just
stay here so that we have an income, because I
just didn't want to lose that safety in it, you know.
I wanted to make sure we had some income. And
he says, yeah, i'll stay here. So he stayed one
more month. We stayed a month longer, actually two months
longer than we thought that we were going to because
they kept postponing us.
Speaker 5 (08:49):
And he said, you know, we gotta go. We just
we got to go. So he did.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
He came out here in August all by himself with Stacy,
without a van, and that was before grocery stores delivered.
And I would talk to on the phone sometimes and
I would think, oh my gosh, how is he doing this?
Speaker 1 (09:04):
How is he doing this? What a piece of news
to learn that the arbitrary power of a state could
deprive you of a livelihood and for no rational reason.
And we're going to get into that in our Rule
of Lost story, the story of Doug and Mary Ketchum,
the story of kimbro Wine and Spirits, and so much
more here on our American stories. And we returned to
(09:40):
our American stories into the story of Doug and Mary Ketchum,
a couple that had to fight all the way to
the Supreme Court just to run their family business. Let's
pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
We had initially had negotiated an SBA loan with Wells
Fargo and it was, you know, guaranteed for a certain
amount of time. But because of the lawsuit, we lost
the SBA guarantee and when we finally won in court,
we had to go all the way back through the
authorization process to get a new loan. We lost our
(10:16):
good interest rate, and because of all the problems that
we'd had, they thought it was a greater risk. So
we had to take more money out of our retirement
account and we had to double the amount of down
payment that we put down on the business.
Speaker 4 (10:30):
So that was the money that we.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Had allocated ready for operating capital and to come in
and do renovations and things like that.
Speaker 4 (10:37):
So that put us in a tight spot financially.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Also, because we no longer had that, you know, a
couple hundred thousand dollars cushion to run the business with,
we had to put it as a down payment. So
that's the other reason I had to really have a
job is we didn't have much leeway after that. We
now we got the business, but we've got a real
limited amount of capital a to rent, and we have to,
(11:01):
you know, be very careful how we spend our money
and how much income and overhead we have. So Mary's
the one who's handled that, and she has done an
amazing job with it. We're not they kind of give
up kind of people. We kind of people kind of dig.
Speaker 4 (11:15):
Our heels in.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
So we dug our heels in and and went to
court and it took us I think about a year.
We won our case, and that was in federal court,
and at that point the state basically was required to
give us a license.
Speaker 4 (11:32):
They want to, they didn't want to.
Speaker 5 (11:34):
We installed again, they stalled.
Speaker 4 (11:36):
And we we uh actually went to a hearing.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
At the ABC board where the opposing attorneys got up
and said, we know that the federal judge has ruled
that this is illegal, that they can't withhold them a license,
but you can do what you want.
Speaker 4 (11:54):
You don't have to give them a license if you
don't want to.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
And the commanditioner ask his attorney. He says, tell me
your opinion. If I don't give them a license, what's
my liability here? He says, well, you're breaking the law.
You could go to jail. He said, So you want
me to break the law and risk going to jail
by not giving them a license. And the attorney says,
that's that's your prerogative.
Speaker 5 (12:19):
That's exactly what we think you should do.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
Yeah, So he says, I'm not doing that. So we
were granted our license. They told us they would send
it to us, and we still never saw it. We
had to get our attorney to call the state attorney general.
Speaker 4 (12:32):
To go get the license.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
So there was just a lot of reluctance on the
part of the state to grant anybody from outside the
state of license. So the Retailers Association decided they were
going to fight it, took us to the Supreme Court.
We felt like, we had to have representation.
Speaker 4 (12:50):
And at that.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Point we had an attorney called my wife. His name
was Michael Bindas and he was out of Seattle, Washington
it is, with a group called the Incident for Justice.
He called her and told her, we heard about your
lawsuit and we have a vested interest in this case.
They had fought a case in the Supreme Court in
two thousand and five that they had won that was
(13:12):
very similar based on similar rulings, and they wanted to
make sure that that case stayed one and wanted to
know if they could represent us pro bono.
Speaker 5 (13:22):
And so Mary I started crying.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Yeah, well, at first she called me. She says, there's
somebody gonna call you and he wants to take our
case and they want to represent us pro bono. And
I'm like, is this a joke, because nobody ever calls
you and say we want to go to court and
we'll pay all the costs. But the Institute for Justice
was you know, we met with Michael Bindas. He flew
(13:48):
from Seattle down here to meet with us to talk
to us about our case and tell us what they.
Speaker 4 (13:52):
Do and how they do it, and they were phenomenal.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
I can't say enough about the Institute for j Justice
and how.
Speaker 4 (14:01):
Great they were and what they did for us. They
took the case on.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
They had an army of attorneys working on our case.
We went to d C and met the people in
the Virginia office up there. There had to be at
least one hundred people that were involved working on our case.
Speaker 5 (14:19):
Pretty overwhelming.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
It would walk into a room and see all those
people that were behind the scenes that helped us that
we had no idea.
Speaker 4 (14:27):
Yeah, it was overwhelming.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Actually, yeah, the Supreme Court case itself. We were able
to fly to DC and go up and sit in
the Supreme Court and listen to the arguments, and that
was also a really amazing experience.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
Well, we were really lucky because we got to bring
Stacy with us. Honestly, for me, when we walked in there,
it was kind of like being in church. It was
very reverent and there was a lot of respect that
when those judges come out, I mean you can just
see everyone in there is one hundred percent focused on
what they're saying, what's going on, trying to see the
(15:06):
innuendos and the cues and the questions of everything. It
was really intense. We we got to listen to a
case before ours. When they did finally get around to
talking about us, I just had this wow moment where
I realized, some of the smartest people in our country
are up there talking about me and what's going on
(15:28):
with us, And in that moment, I.
Speaker 5 (15:31):
Just realized what a really big deal it was.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
Before that, I just knew that we were treading water,
trying to, you know, make lives for ourselves and take
care of our daughter.
Speaker 5 (15:40):
But in that moment, and when I was looking at them,
I was thinking, Wow, this is going to affect the
whole country. This is a big deal.
Speaker 4 (15:49):
Yeah, it is a big deal.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
We had one of the attorneys sit with us and
talk to us about the process.
Speaker 4 (15:58):
And what was going on.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
If we had questions about what the judges were asking,
you know, we could we could whisper to her, and
she had explained it to us.
Speaker 4 (16:06):
But the whole thing was was really phenomenal.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
But sitting through the sitting through the hearing of the
Supreme Court, it became obvious to us, or fairly obvious
to us, that the judges were were not very happy
with the way the laws were written and the way
they were being handled.
Speaker 4 (16:22):
In the in the state of Tennessee.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
And that our rights were being violated, and our rights
were being violated with no just cause.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
So they asked a lot of questions about that, and
asked a lot of questions about why, you know, it
should be legal to make somebody have a residency requirement
when the Constitution says that everybody should be able to
go to any state and and work and have gainful
employment without any kind of you know, restrictions. And so we,
(16:49):
you know, eventually won the Supreme Court case, which was
great for us because we have invested every penny of
our savings into this business and picked ourselves up, sold
our home, quit our job, moved across the country, and
kind of felt like we had the.
Speaker 4 (17:06):
Rug yanked out from under us.
Speaker 3 (17:11):
Twice a week vendors come in so that we can
place our orders for our liquor. And every time something
new comes in, they usually bring an open bottle and say,
taste this and see if you like it. So it's
really fun because we get to try every new product
that comes out on the market. Not to mention over
the holidays, some of those.
Speaker 5 (17:29):
Things are really nice.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
So these are gift ideas and so I get to
drink wine and some scotches and bourbons that you'd never
think you get to. You get to try all these
different things, and that's really fun.
Speaker 5 (17:42):
You know.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
Honestly, if I'd had any idea how much fun this
was gonna be, I would have done this a really
long time ago.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
Well.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
Number one, everyone who comes in the liquor store is
either in a good mood or in a bad mood,
and they're in a good mood when they leave. If
someone had told me what was going to happen to
when we first started doing this, I said, I would
have said, no, I don't ever want to do that.
Speaker 5 (18:04):
That would have been too hard.
Speaker 3 (18:05):
It's been very, very challenging, but I have to say
that now that we're on the other side of it,
I'm really glad we stuck it out. And then when
we did it, I tell everybody, the smartest decision I
ever made in my whole entire life was when I
decided to Mary Doug. And I just feel so lucky
that when we got here, I was with him when
this happened, because.
Speaker 5 (18:25):
I knew that we could get through it, and we did.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
And I'm really really glad the way it worked out
that Justice was served, and I'm grateful for IJ.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Mounty Montgomery. And what a story. And
we love bringing you these rule of loss stories because
it matters, and for people who've lived in other countries
and come here simply for property rights and the enjoyment,
the quiet enjoyment of owning something you own and not
having the state just take it from you. In many
(18:57):
parts of the world, that is how people live from
day to day. There is no rule of law, and
in the end, it's very hard to proceed with a
business or any other enterprise. And what wonderful people we met,
Doug and Mary. Catch them, you just love them. They're
the heart and soul of the country. And look what
Mary did marrying Doug and ticking on the responsibility of
(19:19):
that beautiful girl, Stacey, and then just moving everything on
behalf of their daughter. That's why they end up in
Memphis to begin with. And here come these state laws
that say nine years. And what's that about, Well, it's
about protectionism, and it's about well the thing that many
people hate in this country, which is crony capitalism. And
(19:39):
big companies are big interest groups stopping a small person
from doing their business. And thank goodness for places like
the Institute for Justice who fight for the rights, but
property owners who can't afford to litigate against these bigger interests,
And my goodness, imagine being in the US Supreme Court
and having your case matter not just for you, for
every other small business that gets bullied by some state
(20:03):
board or from some silly state law. The story of
the Ketchums, and in the end, the story of rule
of law prevailing. Here on our American stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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