DENVER — Every hour is happy hour at Modern Drunkard magazine.
It's barely 3 p.m., and Frank Kelly Rich, who edits the bimonthly homage to getting soused, is draining his gin and tonic and eyeing a whiskey bottle on the top shelf. Moments later, he's drinking that as well.
A huge bar dominates the office, the fridge is stocked with beer and the handful of employees is invited to drink. Smoking is OK too.
As the booze flows, Rich, 41, extols the virtues of alcohol, calling it a boon to mankind while claiming that drunks are an "oppressed minority."
Nothing can knock him off message.
What about cirrhosis of the liver? "There's a tidal wave of new evidence that drinking is actually good for you," he insists.
What of alcohol's effect on families? "I think drinking is conducive to a happy family life," he counters.
Rich lights a cigarette and smiles as the ice melts in his cocktail. His downtown Denver office is decorated with posters of Dean Martin, Jackie Gleason and other famous tipplers of yesteryear.
"The most accomplished people have been drinkers. Hemingway was a great literary drunk, and I think a lot of teetotalers would trade their lives for his in a second," he said. "Alcohol is the great socializer. Can you imagine a world without it? Well, I guess you can -- it's called the Middle East."
Modern Drunkard is an irreverent, 50,000-circulation glossy magazine full of pinup girls and macho men alongside articles on drinking, getting drunk and hiding a hangover from "the Man," i.e., the boss. It also includes serious examinations of liquor, biographies of history's great drunks and selected odes to the drinking life. The magazine sells for $4.50 in bookstores across the U.S. and Europe, and free copies are available in many bars.
A recent issue included the feature "You know you're a drunkard when ... (you fall down a well and send Lassie to the liquor store)"; a dictionary of bar slang: "pal tax n. -- the act of covertly ordering a drink on a friend's tab"; and a story titled "Booze is My Copilot," on how drinking cured one man's fear of flying.
Rich revels in the retrograde excess of his magazine. The way he sees it, reality is so awful, why not get drunk?
"People always say, 'If you drink, your problems will still be there in the morning,' " he said. "That's like telling a guy going to the Bahamas that in a week, he'll be right back where he started. Well, for a week, he'll be gone."
