"Bar Month" at OnMilwaukee.com is back for another round! The whole month of February, we're serving up intoxicatingly fun bars and club articles -- including guides, bartender profiles, drink recipes and even a little Brew City bar history. Cheers!

The first day of September in 1986 was pivotal for tavern owners, beer distributors, rock promoters, college students and other young adults in the Badger State.

It was the day Wisconsin's legal drinking age jumped from 19 to 21.

"A day that will live in infamy," Jon Greenberg said, wryly.

For Greenberg, the president of the Milwaukee Admirals, that day was particularly poignant.

It was his 19th birthday. Though his older friends were "grandfathered" because they reached the drinking age before the new law took effect, Greenberg missed the cutoff for being "legal" by a day. While many of his friends were able to purchase alcohol and patronize bars, Greenberg was -- at least technically speaking -- banned from joining them.

"I was a bit miffed about it," Greenberg said. "I wanted to call my legislator and complain, but I figured it wouldn't do any good."

Greenberg did plead his case to a different authority: his mom.

"I told her 'You had me at 2:06 a.m. Couldn't you have fired me out a little earlier?'"

As is often the case, mom had a comeback.

"She told me 'You were two weeks late.'" Greenberg said. "So, it was my fault."

Wisconsin legislators weren't trying to penalize Greenberg by raising the drinking age. They were trying to avoid losing a chunk of federal highway funds.

The passage of the 26th Amendment in 1971 lowered the voting age for federal elections from 21 to 18. Wisconsin lawmakers responded by dropping the age of majority from 21 to 18.

That took place on March 22, 1972. From that time until 1984, it was legal for anyone 18 or older to purchase and drink alcohol. For more than a decade, state legislators tried to boost the age. In 1983, the state passed Wisconsin Act 74, which created a drinking age of 19 and included an "absolute sobriety" provision that made any blood alcohol content illegal for drivers under age 19.

In the summer of 1984, President Ronald Reagan signed a law requiring states to conform to a national minimum drinking age of 21. States not in compliance by Oct. 1, 1986, would lose 5 percent of their highway aid allocation during the first year and 10 percent the second year.

Anthony Earl, then Wisconsin's governor, resisted the measure at the time but he and the legislature reversed their positions and passed a law calling for Wisconsin to raise its drinking age to 21 on Sept. 1, 1986.

Anyone who was 19 before that date was "grandfathered," so the state did not really have a uniform age of 21 until Sept. 1, 1988, which, coincidentally, was the day Greenberg turned "legal."

"I remember going out with guys and I'd walk to the door and bouncers would get a wry smile and say 'Wow, that sucks,'" Greenberg said. "About 98 percent of the time, it was no-go. But, once I found out where the 2 percent were, I just kept going back to those places.

"There were a lot of places that were pretty lenient. It's funny, I've reached the point now where I beg to be carded."

More than 20 years after the drinking age increased, the debate about it continues. Safety experts and representatives from groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving cite a reduction in fatal car crashes involving teenagers and claim success.

Lobbyists for tavern owners say that the reduction comes from increased enforcement and not a reduction in underage drinking. They point out that many of the accidents now involve drivers who are 21, so that the crashes have been delayed, not prevented.

Many advocates of a lower drinking age see hypocrisy in a culture that allows 18 years to live independently, vote, work, get married, serve in the armed forces and purchase firearms but not to drink alcohol.

John McCardell, former president at Middlebury College and the founder of the Web site chooseresponsibility.org, feels that the 21-year-old drinking age is detrimental to young people.

"The 21-year-old drinking age is bad social policy and terrible law," McCardell wrote in The New York Times on Sept. 13, 2004. "It is astonishing that college students have thus far acquiesced in so egregious an abridgment of the age of majority."

McCardell feels that the 21 drinking age leads to unsupervised drinking, binge drinking and breeds a disrespect for law and forces ethical compromises. Underage drinkers break the law, often going to extravagant lengths to do so.

Andy (last name withheld by request), a 23-year-old senior at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, got around the drinking age for several years with the use of a fake ID.

"A guy gave it to me, I didn't pay for it," Andy said. "When I turned 21, I passed it on to someone else. A lot of people have them, but more bars are using scanners now so it's a little different."

Andy's friend, Matt (last name withheld), a recent UWM graduate, said that many IDs are handed down by siblings and that people who use them worry about getting caught.

"You get to know places to go to," he said. "You can't go to Landmark (Lanes) with a fake ID. At places like Judge's and R.C.'s, you're pretty safe. At places like Paddy's (Pub), it's hit and miss."

McCardell feels that the risks of allowing drinking for people under 21 can be offset with education and the creation of a drinking "license," which would be revocable for underage offenses.

"What is lacking is an approach to alcohol education that consists of more than temperance lectures and scare tactics, that involves parents, and that assumes that most young adults and their families most of the time will, if given the chance, behave responsibly," McCardell wrote recently.

"Would it ever occur to us, when a young person reaches legal driving age, simply to say, "Here are the keys. You figure it out. Good luck. Our state forfeits 10 percent of its highway funds if I get into the car with you."

Yet that is precisely what Legal Age 21 says to young adults. Education, and licensing, offer a more promising way to deal with the reality of alcohol in the lives of young adults than denial or prohibition.