Three Beautiful Things 08/08/08: Prize Dog, Prized Photo, Breaded Fish

1. Snug's groomer praised Snug for being a very good dog, even when she took grass seeds out of his paws. I am very proud of Snug for behaving so well with his wonderful and lovely groomer. I'll post a picture or two tomorrow.

2. Over at Photo Hunt, tnchick highlights one photograph from the previous week and urges Photo Hunt participants to go see it. She chose my "cloud" picture, here, as the feature photo of the week. I'm honored!

3. I went to the seafood buffet at Three Rivers Casino this evening and as I ate breaded shrimp, razor clams, and scallops with red sauce, I had the delicious feeling of being back at the Friday fish feed at the Sunshine Inn in Kellogg in my youth.

Remembering the Sunshine Inn

When the party was over in 1992 and again in 1997 at the Class of ’72 20-year and 25-year reunions, I joined classmates over a wee hour in the morning plate of food at the Sunshine Inn. Coming back to the Sunshine Inn took me back to remembering the many, many weekend nights Dad tended bar there. I’m trying to remember if I’ve ever been to or seen another place quite like it.

The Sunshine Inn was, in part, a motel, but I was more familiar with the other part of the business that was divided between a family/truck stop/too-drunk-to-drive restaurant that was open twenty four hours and a bar/lounge/dance floor. As a kid, I spent some time in the restaurant. It had a horseshoe shaped counter, and booths occupied the two sides of the room.

A door cut into the east wall opened into the other half of the Sunshine Inn. Whereas the all- night half of the Sunshine Inn featured burgers and fries, breakfast all hours, and cheap spaghetti and meatballs, the lounge half featured the Jackass Room, a more formal dining area. Tables were lighted by candles, the atmosphere was dim lit and, to quote Dad, “classy”. The Jackass Room was presided over by a picture of Noah Kellogg, the prospector who owned the jackass that kicked up the ore at the spot near what later became the Bunker Hill mine. It also featured an open broiler. Order a steak, and you would watch it be broiled, and have it brought to your table with a plastic bull stuck in it, colored according to whether the steak was rare, medium rare, medium, etc. The word “rare” or “medium rare”, etc. announced, underneath the bull, how the steak was cooked. Every Friday night the Sunshine Inn put on a fish feed, a popular payday buffet, especially for those Catholics who were not supposed to eat meat on Fridays.

Dad loved to eat a steak at the Sunshine Inn. He always ordered a martini and a bottle of Lancer’s rose wine, a sirloin steak medium rare with a fully loaded baked potato, a green salad with Roquefort dressing, the very kind Mom still serves at home, and garlic bread. Mom ordered prawns. Christy and I always had a Shirley Temple. It was our cocktail.

Sig and Bunny Peterson owned and ran the Sunshine Inn. They also lived there. Just off the dance floor, Sig and Bunny had an apartment. They were always at the Sunshine Inn. They would come right out of their residence, onto the dance floor, and circulate, saying hi, drinking right along with their customers, and adding a sense of cheer to the bar. Sig always dressed in matching slacks and a golf shirt, and as the seventies approached, wore a white belt and white shoes. His eyes always had that filmy, fishy, bloodshot look that comes from constant alcohol consumption. He walked slightly bent over, was always flat bellied, drove a Cadillac, and always carried a short clear drink on the rocks, probably gin or vodka. Bunny, too, always had a drink. Her speech was slurred. I heard her speak in the morning, afternoon, and the evening and she always slurred her speech and laughed extraordinarily loud at things that seemed sort of funny, but not as funny as Bunny did.

Dad worked the bar with Paul Riep. Paul and Dad ran a friendly bar, both drinking from a bottle of beer all night long, laughing, trying to keep things peaceful. It was a challenge. I know of one middle-aged woman who often showed up at the Sunshine Inn with a short skirt and no panties, flashing customers up and down the bar. Jack Robinson, a lifelong friend of my Dad's, could be a belligerent drunk, who often called my dad to bail him out of jail, and, who one night tore the white shirt off my dad’s back before dad threw him out the door and into the custody of the Kellogg Police Department. I was shocked when Dad came home early that night, his shirt shredded, briefly explained what happened, put on a new shirt, and went back to his job.

I don’t know if Sig and Bunny ever came to our house. I can’t remember. But they had Dad over to their apartment on holidays when the Sunshine Inn was closed and they had football game parties. The first picture ever taken of my younger sister, Carol, was taken at Sig and Bunny’s when she was five months old. When I went with Dad, or with Mom and Dad, into Sig and Bunny’s apartment, entering from the dance floor, right by the juke box, which Sig let us play free on such days, I felt like I was visiting royalty.

You can't go to the Sunshine Inn now. It's closed. No one runs it. However, if you'd like to resurrect the old place, here's the number to call:

Home Alone

In my blog writing, from now until eternity, I will refer to my wife as the Deke. The Deke is out of town this weekend. She is teaching a ukulele workshop in Seattle. She'll be home this afternoon and my weekend home alone will end. Damn. I mean, I enjoy my wife's company and all, but it's peaceful, sitting here at the kitchen counter, dishes piled up in the sink, having drunk a whole pot of coffee and having gone to Starbuck's for a venti house with room on top of that, having put the dogs in their crates for a rest, and having no one to answer to, no one to talk to, no one even moving in the house. It's rare.

My Oregon State University stepson is in town, but spent the night at a Halloween party in Portland and is conked out elsewhere. My Eugene stepdaughter has moved out of our house. She's working this morning. The phone has rung twice, but no big deal. I have only spoken face to face with two human beings this weekend: one was an election canvasser who I got rid of by saying right away I was voting for his candidate. I would have said that no matter whose button he was wearing. The second human I talked to was my stepdaughter, working at Starbuck's.

This is a perfect weekend. I can write, read blogs, lie down and nap, run to the window and see which group of loud-mouthed, disaffected youth is walking by the house this time, watch my next-door neighbor in his head to toe camaflogue hunting outfit and rifle case return home from the hunt, and no one asks me what I'm looking at or what I'm doing.

I'm not a misanthrope. I enjoy people. In small doses. Anymore, my mind is so occupied with poems, stories, memories, teaching ideas, the state of my marriage, my health, finances, songs, more memories, well, I just want to be alone and let my mental stew simmer.

Right now the dogs are quiet. The cat is at peace. The refrigerator runs quietly. The fan in my laptop kicks up every so often. I can hear the water on the street whining under under tires as cars pass.

I think about Kellogg and how quiet it has become. I visit my mother. I sit in her back yard, overwhelmed by the variety of flowers and vegetables in her SmelterSmoke-free garden. And it's quiet.

Growing up, it wasn't quiet in Kellogg. Prosperity is noisy. Trains clanged in and out of Kellogg at all hours, straining under the weight of ore, their arrival and departure announced with a horn sound like a ferry boat, the rails squealing as the trains stopped and started. The Lead Smelter, Zinc Plant, and mine mill operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Going down West McKinley Avenue in Kellogg, to where City Hall and the police station have now moved, the silence is almost eerie. I used to ride my bicycle out there and listen to the mine mill dynamos pound pound pound like the heart beat of a whale and that sound echoed throughout town, depending on the wind.

Walking through town now is eerily quiet, too. Miners with money drink. When Kellogg was booming, the sounds of juke box music, some live music, underground card games, laughter, arguments, clinking glasses, beer bottles being popped open, and back slapping comraderie poured out of the bars. Pay day was Friday. Fridays were festive. Bars had beer busts. The Sunshine Inn had a Friday night Fish Feed. Card games thrived.

No wonder I long for quiet. The first day I went to work in the Zinc Plant, the din shocked me. Men beating zinc-covered cathodes with chisels to strip the zinc. Fork lifts honking, dragging their forks along the cement floor, picking up pallettes of zinc. Men pounding crooked cathodes with mallets to straighten them out. Men yelling conversations. Huge firey furnaces whooshed with heat, ravenously eating the zinc the strippers had stripped and stacked.

I know that Kellogg was economically much better off when it was a noisy town. I relish how quiet it is now, maybe selfishly. And maybe it's selfish when the Deke goes away to teach the ukulele that I relish the quiet of being home alone. The fact is: I enjoy being home alone. I like people. But, in small doses.

Bar Fight

Earlier tonight a good friend, Russell, and I went to a bar, The Old Pad, to watch the fourth game of the World Series. A guy spilled beer on another guy's girl friend. About an hour and a half later, the protective boyfriend confronted the guy who spilled the beer on his girlfriend. Fighting words flew. Chests puffed. A third party intervened. His chest puffed. The bartender took over. Peace prevailed. I remembered some bar fights.

I was a pre-teenager when my dad came home early one night from tending bar at the Sunshine Inn in Kellogg. His white shirt was torn down the front, buttonless, ripped open, his chest red with scratches. My mother was aghast.
"What happened?"
"I threw Jack out of the joint."
"For what?"
"I said something. Pissed him off. He reached across the bar. Grabbed me." He pointed to his torn shirt. "Pulled me toward him. Ripped my shirt. I came around the bar. Picked him up and threw his ass out the door."
"Did you call the police?"
"No. Shit. Jack's my friend."
Jack was my dad's friend since childhood. Dad was the best man in Jack's wedding. Only being away in Korea kept Jack from being my dad's best man. Jack had a short fuse. Dad lit it that night. The two didn't speak for a while. One night later Jack got thrown drunk in jail. Dad bailed him out. They were speaking again.
.
The Kopper Keg was where many of my friends and I drank beer and wine flips when we turned nineteen. Nineteen was the legal drinking age back in Idaho in 1972. I should italicize legal. Plenty of Silver Valley bars served and sold beer if a guy could see over the bar. The Kopper Keg was loud with young men laughing, shouting stories, picking up girls, playing air hockey and foosball and pool, and feeding the jukebox with quarters to play Charlie Rich, Charlie Daniels, Ray Charles, and sometimes some Crocodile Rock. Most of the guys in the bar were going to different colleges...North Idaho College, Spokane Falls, University of Idaho... many were home on weekends to work at the Smelter or the Zinc Plant and some were in the armed forces, home on leave occasionally. The Kopper Keg often had the air of reunion.

On night, in July, Lennie Curry was in the Kopper Keg. He was born the day before I was. We rode bikes and went to each other's house when we were grade schoolers, but went our separate ways in junior high and high school and he went into the army and became an MP. He and Jim Bachmeir and some other guys and I were talking. We could see that Bob Wintermute was in the bar. Normally, he tended bar. Not tonight. He was just getting loaded, all two hundred fifty pounds or more of him, sporting his new toupee, talking cocky.

Bob was one of those Kellogg guys that no one quite knew where he came from or where he'd been. He showed up. He drove a huge car. He got in with Lloyd Finley, one of the Kopper Keg owners, meaning he liked to gamble and deal illegal blackjack in the back room at the Kopper Keg. He was a good guy to have deal cards and pour beer. He was menacing.

Bob came over to us, standing near the end of the bar, and suddenly said something like, "You little son of a bitch" and clubbed Lennie across the chin, lifting him off his feet, knocking him flat on the floor. But, it was like the floor had springs. Lennie was right on his feet and punched Bob back. Cooler heads intervened, separated the combatants, and prevailed. We all went back to drinking. Bob went back to the bar. Lennie cursed him. We all went back to drinking.

It was March, 1980. I was new to Eugene. I'd been looking for a bar that I could feel at home in and found one in North Eugene, up River Road. I don't remember its name. Now it's a strip joint: the Alaska Bush Company.

Final exams were over. I went to a Kentucky/Oregon women's tournament basketball game. Oregon won. I decided to go up River Road and have a few beers. I settled in at the bar. Two mill workers to my left were playing a dice game for beers. It was pay day. They'd been in there since day shift ended, about five or six hours earlier. Soon two couples came in, two guys in their late forties or early fifties. All four were dressed in the Oregon Ducks' colors, green and yellow.

The mill workers were getting agitated with each other. They disputed who won their last dice game. They started getting very profane. One of the newly arrived Duck fans told the mill workers to cool it. The mill workers ignored him. The Duck fan got louder, saying there were ladies in the house and he wanted them to clean up their mouths. They ignored him. Behind the bar, one of the employees was on the telephone talking to her boyfriend. The young guy tending the bar sense trouble. Especially when the two beefy husband Duck fans got up from their table and got in the mill workers' faces, telling them to cool it. In a second, the millworkers were off their stools, started punching the beefy Duck fans and a wrestling match ensued, two tables tipping over, glasses of beer flying, and the bartender yelling, "Stop! Stop you guys! I've called the police!"

I watched. I figured the bartender was bluffing about the cops. The gal behind the bar had been on the phone the whole time, even giving her boyfriend a blow by blow account. Things cooled down. The millworkers got up and left. The beefy Duck fans set the tables and chairs back up and things were quiet.

Until, the doors blasted open and a swat team of Eugene police with clubs and weapons blasted into the bar, ready for action. They were armed and ready for nothing. The swat team chief approached the bartender.
"We got a call."
"It's over" the bartender replied.
"Over? You pushed the silent alarm. That alarm alerts us to an armed robbery in place. We have the road out there blocked both ways."
"Oh, shit. No, we just had a bar fight here."
"It's over?"
"It's over. Didn't last long."
"Son." The swat team's chief's voice was very low. "Don't ever push that silent alarm again unless you are in dire trouble here."
By now the swat teams' adrenaline had slowed down considerably.
"You don't even want to know how much this operation cost the city."
The police left.
I went to pee. A guy came in and occupied the urinal next to mine.
"You come here often?"
"No," I said. "This is just my second time."
"It's not usually this exciting."
"Oh. Well, good."
We both went back and drank our beers.