Last Call, Vol. 55

LAST CALL!\ Interviews with Alaskan Bartenders \ \ By Richard W. Robinson \ INFINITY PUBLISHING\ Copyright © 2005 Richard W. Robinson\ All right reserved. \ ISBN: 0-7414-2698-6 \ \ \ Chapter One\ ANCHORAGE \ Einar Hagberg, Former Owner and Operator of The Gaslight Lounge, Anchorage\ Barbara Jean Alberg\ I've been in Alaska since 1975. I've been working at Darwin's Theory for eighteen years. It's a fun kind of old-fashioned bar. No tricks. What you see is what you get. You can tell people that they have to leave, if they're in a bad mood; which is right, because it's a small bar, so a bad mood or if somebody's angry is going to impact everybody else's mood. So you can tell them to come back when they're in a better mood and, generally, everybody listens to the bartender here, so we don't have a big problem. We don't have fights, or anything like that.\ Easter Sunday, my first year here, there were three people here and it was so boring. Everybody was out doing lunches and church and all that. I just couldn't have that, so the next year I had an Easter egg coloring contest. People came in and decorated eggs. There were about eight or nine people who participated the first year. This last year, thirty people participated and everybody wore Easter bonnets and I made a big feed-turkey and a lot of food and champagne. And now it's blossomed into a full-blown event.\ Darwin Biwer\ This is Darwin's Theory in Anchorage. I bought the bar with two partners back in 1981. It was Ruthie's Forty-Niner before that. Ruthie was seventy-six years old and she'd been in the bar business for thirty years, so she was ready to get out of the bar business. But she couldn't find anybody. I mean, all kinds of people were always wantin' her to sell it to 'em all the time, but she was a shrewd old tomato and she wasn't ready to sell it to just anybody. So finally Birdhouse Dick, Dick Delak ... Dick was one of my partners, when I opened up, and Bill Seltenrich from Fairbanks ... He was a buddy of Dickie's. So I was lookin' for a bar to buy and Dickie and Bill, I call him Willie, had a lunch-bunch thing every Friday over here at the Rice Bowl. So a bunch of guys would get together every Friday at noon and have lunch and drinks and just bullshit with them about whatever, be it football or where's the place to take your car or who's doin' what to whom, just gossip. So I was lookin' in Juneau and I went down to Kenai and Fairbanks. I came this close to buyin' the Howling Dog up in Fairbanks. So I was just kinda tellin' the guys what I was doin' and, finally, on 4th of July in '81, they were havin' a function up at the Birdhouse-the old Birdhouse-and Dickie motioned me over and said, "How about ... Think about buyin' Ruthie's Forty-Niner?" I just barely knew where it was. I had a girlfriend years ago that worked across the street and I'd pull up to pick her up and I saw the bar over there, but I'd never been in it. I'd been livin' out in Gerdwood and out in Alyaska for twenty-five years. I lived out there before I even bought the bar. So anyway, Dickie said, "How about goin' into Ruthie's Forty-Niner?" Well, Jesus, just to have Dickie as a partner, because he's been in the business a long time and knows a lot of shit. So we said, Okay. Then Willie was part of the deal, which I didn't know at first. So the three of us each put in twenty-five thousand dollars, bought the liquor license from Ruthie. The only reason we were able to do that is Dickie and Willie owned some little storage units down on Ship Creek and the people that ran them for Dickie and Willie, Bobby and Sandy Morrow, knew Ruthie-were good friends of hers from a long time ago-so they talked Ruthie into lettin' Dickie and Willie and I buy the bar from her. Kind of respectable business people, good referrals, references that they knew Dickie and all of this. And Dickie'd had the bar down at the Birdhouse for twenty years or almost that. So anyway, she finally sold it to us. She sold it to us on September 1, 1981, and we had a big going-away party for Ruthie at the end of August. We came in here and just started cleaning the place up. Basically, we changed the bathrooms. The little one here was the mens' bathroom and the big one over there was the womens' bathroom. But there was no urinal, it was just a toilet-just a commode-over there, so we took this one here and made that the womens' room and took the big one and put the urinal in there, so there's a commode and a urinal in the mens' room now and made those opposite. Then the bar, we took the sink from one side and moved it to the other side and plumbed it on the other side of the U-shaped bar so that we could have a waitress station. And we cut a hole for the garbage to go through, so you could take the garbage out the side. Ruthie always had all the doors closed up here. She got raped one night, many years ago. Way back when, quite a few years earlier, but in this bar. She opened this bar here in 1970, moved it from ... Ruthie's Forty-Niner was over here where the Westmark parking lot is. It was over there. When they built that hotel, she had to move it into this building. So somewhere between 1970 and 1981, in the mid-Seventies, she got raped back here by some Native guy, so she kept everything locked up and closed down and it was pretty ... And all the windows were boarded up with plywood, so it was a real dark hole in the wall where the bankers across the street would hide and the basketball players from the city gym would come down and play basketball. But she really didn't have much business. She had it paid off, it didn't matter anymore anyway. That's kind of what was goin' on. So we just kind of cleaned the place up, put in a couple of TV sets, took out all the old furniture, put carpets on the floor, put in a new jukebox, smoke eaters, new tables and chairs, took out the booth that was in the front up there, took the boards off the windows, took off ... It was the Arctic entry, so we'd get two tables up front. It holds about fifty people now. So that was basically all it is. Then we just ... You know, Dickie'd been in business for years at The Birdhouse and Seltenrich was born and raised in Fairbanks and I've lived in the bush. I was a fisheries biologist, just out in Bristol Bay, for Fish & Game for fifteen years, so it was all our drinkin' buddies, you know, who came in. We got a lot of business from the old Derrick Lounge over in the Voyager Hotel. They were very unhappy with the management over there, so they just automatically moved over here as soon as ... 'Cause Dickie and Willie knew most of those guys. Most of 'em didn't know me, but they knew Dickie and Willie, so then they came in here. I started bartendin' right away and I bartended for the first eleven years. That's when I hired Caroline. She was workin' over at the Holiday Inn and a buddy of mine, a traveling salesman, was stayin' there and told her to come on over to see me,'cause she wasn't happy over there. She's been with me twenty years now, as a bartender. Barbara Jean has been with me eighteen years and she's still here. But I also got Kathryn, who was over at Le Mex. She came over and worked alone for several years. But then she's got another business, so she kind of fills in in the winter time. But I've got three or four bartenders that worked for me, then ran off and got married on me, or somethin' stupid like that. They just come in and fill in part-time. So my second string is better than most people's first string. I've got the best help there is in the whole state.\ CHARRA is the Cabaret, Hotel and Restaurant Retailers' Association. It's the liquor industry's trade and training association. The statewide CHARRA is kind of the hub. It handles all the statewide issues, like legislative-type stuff. Then each one of the affiliates are like spokes of that wheel. Like Anchorage has an affiliate, Kodiak, Sitka, Ketchikan, Fairbanks, they all have affiliates and they deal with the local issues like smoking bans or security training or parking or whatever deals with the local bar or liquor issues. I just recently got elected president of statewide CHARRA and I'm on the board of Anchorage CHARRA, so I deal with both state and ... Any issue that has to do with the liquor industry and hospitality industry I kind of have to deal with. I didn't really get active until just about three years ago. I was just too busy bartendin'.\ Anchorage has no smoking in restaurants. They haven't gotten on the bars, yet, but we're gearin' up for that. We're already getting a war chest to fight that. The last time they tried to do that stuff, we were able ... It got into the restaurants, but not bars. So we're ready to fight that. We've already defeated it in Homer. We defeated it in Sitka. We lost in Juneau. We lost it in Juneau, but not until 2008, so it's kind of on a hiatus. But if we do get electronic gaming in place and have gaming machines in bars and the cities are gonna get some revenue out of that, then they're gonna have to rescind that because you're not gonna get anybody to go in the bars, if they can't smoke, to play the machines; so the cities' are gonna be losin' money by havin' a stupid smokin' ban. And it should be a private issue. It should be an issue of the owners themselves. For instance, over here at Marks Brothers Restaurant, they've been no smoking for years. It doesn't hurt their business. Whereas there's another restaurant out south, Bradley House, they put a sign right on the front door, "This is a smoking establishment. If you don't like it, go somewhere else." Boom. And people do. So that's fine. And I say it should be up to the owner. It shouldn't be the city or the governor or some anti-smoking activist that dictates what a business person's gonna do. So we're fighting all of those kind of different issues and whatever comes next. We're tryin' to get an Off The Road Program here in Anchorage right now. We just got legislation passed to close up a couple of legal loopholes. This is where we can have two cab drivers come to the bar, if somebody's intoxicated ... They came to the bar, not intending to get intoxicated, 'cause nobody really goes to the bar to get drunk, they just go to have fun and then end up havin' too much fun. So if you drove to the bar and you had too much fun, then you could bring two cab drivers and one will drive you home and the other one will take your car home for you. So you wake up the next day and you've got your car home. It doesn't cost you anything. It's picked up by the bar. The bar picks up the fees and the cab companies have taken part of it. Then we're lookin' for sponsors and federal grants and this sort of thing to pay for the rest of it. So that's another project that we're also workin' on.\ Now it's just Anchorage, but we fixed the statewide legislation, so that ... There were some legality problems. You know, what if the guy drivin' your car ... The cab driver got in a wreck with your car and you didn't have insurance and that kind of thing. There were some legal things there. Hopefully, we got those straightened out. So when that law passed, well they got straighened out this last legislative session. What we're doin' this session is tryin' to get-and we've got pretty good support for that-is to get a gaming commission in place. Right now pull tabs and Bingo are the only real legal gambling, besides certain raffles with a permit and that sort of thing. But last year there was $275 million spent on pull tabs in the state of Alaska. If you add in Bingo, that's another $70 million, so that puts you up to $340 million dollars spent on gambling and then you've got the raffles and some other ... Well, they even consider a salmon derby as gambling. There's nobody regulating them. Theonly regulation comes from the Legislature. You know how that is. So there's only two-in the Department of Revenue, right now-there's two auditors that go around and check whether the state's gettin' it's fair share of the money, which is only a fraction. It's like one and a-half percent. It's nothin'. The state's gettin' nothin'. There's thirty-six operators in the state and they're rippin' off the whole state. They're payin' themselves $100,000 a year, plus they take money for their expenses, like their rent and all this other crap, you know, they hired their brother-in-law and all this stuff. So they're just rippin' everybody off. And they're supposedly giving some money to the charities, but the charities are gettin' ripped off as well. That's something we want to try to stop. In all the polls that we've done and everybody has done, Alaskans are really in favor of gaming and gambling. Alaska Airlines sold over 80,000 round-trip tickets from Anchorage to Las Vegas last year and the year before that. So, it just so happens that ... Round-trip tickets for trips to Las Vegas. In fact, they just now instituted, starting November 5th of this year, they have direct flight, non-stop, from Anchorage to Las Vegas. You can get on a flight here, in Anchorage, at midnight and, by six o'clock in the morning, you can be sittin' at a craps table at a casino in Las Vegas. Non-stop, boom, you're right there. Now tell me Alaskans aren't interested in gambling. And it's just ... You know, it's crazy. And I've gone to several conferences in Vegas on responsible gaming. In fact, there's a conference coming up here in the first part of December that's put on by the Harvard Medical School on addiction. They're co-sponsors with the casinos. So they have all these scientists, the clinical part of it, like you have behavioralists and you have psychiatrists, psychologists, biologists, you know, that studied why gambling and how it all works out. And then you have the managers. For instance, you have gaming commissions from all the states around the United States as well on how you try to recognize problem gamblers. The same way we do with problem drinkers and everything else. It's real scientific and it's really well operated. I'm goin' down for that conference here in December as well. Two years ago we got a call from the cable channel Comedy Central. "The Insomniac," with Dave Atell, is a program on this channel. He's a stand-up comedian from New York that used to come up to Chilkoots and do a stand-up routine. He's got a shaved head. He'sreally weird. He goes around at night-he's an insomniac-so he's out in the middle of the night and goin' to bars and goin' to these places and he's drinkin' all the time and he talks to hookers and transvestites and anything that goes on in the middle of the night, gambling places, whatever, he goes around and just does stuff in the middle of the night. Well, he came up here to do a show on "The Land Of The Midnight Sun," you know, where it's sunny all the time, 'cause he'd been up here before. So Steve was up here for four days, interviewing people, and he came into Darwin's Theory, here. It happened to be my birthday, which is the 20th of June, and he asked the same question you did, "What're some funny things ..." Well, there's some funny stuff, but they're almost kind of private jokes, you kind of have to be there. I said, "Well, we do have the Blue Book." "The Blue Book. What's that?" Well, we've got this book for photographs behind the bar. We take Polaroids and slip them into the book. What we do is, we have a deal here where the girls come in and if they can take everything off from the waist up-their bra, their sweater, their jacket, whatever they're wearin'-if they're naked from the waist up, they get a free Darwin's Theory T-shirt. Then, of course, there's picture-takin' while they're puttin' the Tshirt on, so all of these go in ... So what happened, Dave Atell said, "Oh, shit! That's, what we want." So he goes out and he shows 'em off all the time. What he did was took those four days and put it into a series, so it looks like it went through one night. It actually took four nights. 'Cause he'd go down fishin' down here at Ship Creek, he went up to McCue Creek and stuff, he caught a salmon down here and went to four\ (Continues...)\ \ \ \ \ Excerpted from LAST CALL! by Richard W. Robinson Copyright © 2005 by Richard W. Robinson. Excerpted by permission.\ All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.\ Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. \ \