Thanks to his father serving in the US Army, Nick Laracuente lived in more than a dozen places, including Germany and Arizona, before the sixth grade. Whether it was scrambling around cliff dwellings in the American Southwest or castle ruins in Bavaria, he started to develop an affinity for uncovering the past. But eventually becoming an archaeologist, and one who has since made a career unearthing evidence of vanished Kentucky distilleries, was not on his mental radar.
“I didn’t realize that you could get paid to basically explore in the woods and explore ruins. I hated social studies and history when I was in high school. I was much more of a math-geometry-science person,” Laracuente recalled. But that gradually changed once he got to college, first at Tulane for his undergraduate degree and then the University of West Florida for
