Last Call: The Night Wyoming Became The Last State To Raise Drinking Age To 21

It was late in the evening on June 30, 1988, and 19- and 20-year-olds were bellied up to bars across Wyoming, enjoying one last legal drink before the stroke of midnight signaling the state’s reluctant compliance with a federal law raising the drinking age to 21.

Lawmakers in Wyoming, which was the last holdout against the National Minimum Drinking Age Act signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1984 to reduce alcohol-related car crashes among young people, considered the legislation a major government overreach.

“We don’t like to be blackmailed by the Federal Government; we don’t like to be dictated to by the Federal Government; we don’t like to be told what to do,” Dennis Curran, spokesman for Democrat and then-governor Mike Sullivan, told The New York Times after Wyom