Remembrances of Dried-Up Watering Holes

Heaven forfend, but the Rongovian Embassy is closed.

I know that most Dallasites haven’t the foggiest idea of what the Rongo was, but the few dozen of you who went to Cornell University or Ithaca College and spent an evening or two in that funkiest of bars will want to shed a tear. And for those of you who didn’t know the Rongo, drift back a few years, and change the names to fit your own memories.

The Rongo was on Main Street in Tru-mansburg, New York, my home town. A relic of the hippie years, it was a grungy but friendly place. Sunday brunch was fun, and if the semi-pseudo Mexican food was a joke, the homemade kitchen (some combination) was out of this world. The decor was middle Fifties found object, hard-core eclectic. The tables and chairs wobbled. The china was genuine garage sale close-out. A map of the mythical kingdom of Rongovia hung on the rear wall, a drink menu in multicolored chalk over the bar. Featured was a battery of rum drinks similar to Zombies, any one of which could flatten you. And on those nights when the floor under you was spinning and the table over you wobbled, you knew the true meaning of drunk.

At any rate, the new twenty-one-year-old drinking law that New York state passed last year laid low the Rongo. Since most of its clientele were students, the owners gave up the ghost. Another club, Camel’s, took up some of the slack, but it ain’t the same, folks.

I mentioned the Rongo’s demise one night recently to a crew at another watering hole in Dallas, and the conversation turned to bars we’d frequented in the Oak Lawn area during the years, taverns that have gone belly up.

Back in the middle Sixties, still wound up after shows at the Dallas Theater Center, we used to walk down the street to the old Quiet Man. No, not the newer version of the Quiet Man on Knox Street, which is gone now, too, but the original in the triangle between East and West Lemmon at Turtle-Turkle, we called it for some reason-Creek. In nice weather, we’d sit outside and hold shouted conversations beneath the Love Field traffic. In bad weather, we would jam ourselves around a corner table, drink draw beer, and talk theater, which was about all we talked about in those days.

If we weren’t at the Quiet Man, we were at the Round Table on Haskell, just across Cole Street from Bob and Madelyn Allen’s Speedie Mart, which is still there. The Round Table was quieter than the Quiet Man, which wasn’t quiet at all. Our bailiwick was the big round table surrounded by the low brick wall in the middle of the place. And what of the people of those places? Paul Baker, former director and soul of the old Dallas Theater Center, puts out a newsletter these days that’s fun to read, and some of that crew of actors, actresses, and drinking buddies are still making a living doing theater, but I’ve lost touch.

The Keg was on the McKinney side of Joe Miller’s (Jack Murphy’s at the time), where the Queen of Sheba now serves Ethiopian cuisine. The door was built into a keg-like facade, and inside, Sophie held court. A short and shapely/chunky Slav with an accent you could bottle, she had a tendency to pour a glass or three too many for herself, then dissolve in tears and regale anyone who’d listen with sad tales of her Tragic Past. The Keg’s pool tables were popular with a shark or two who’d come by now and again and keep the locals sadder but not wiser. None of us was very good, but we had fun, especially on the unforgettable occasion that the cognoscenti know as The Night Preston Scratched Eight Times in a Row on the Eight Ball and Hung Up His Cue and Walked Out and Nobody Said a Word to Him.

Remember the hamburgers at Adair’s on Cedar Springs? Best in town, by God. Big? What must have been half a pound of ground round was rolled in a ball and mashed into a squat patty on the grill. One would fill you up unless you were a stevedore, and you didn’t see many of them on Cedar Springs. Adair’s was kind of cozy until a columnist or two touted it and the place got a name. Then it was filled with too many drunk weekend cowboys itching for a fight. There didn’t seem to be much point in hanging out there after that. You should, after all, be able to talk in a bar.

So we moved across the street to the Longhorn Ballroom where a friend who was good for an occasional free beer worked the bar in the afternoons, which was right dandy. I remember a lot of weird people in the Longhorn, but that was Cedar Springs in the early Seventies. Bikers, whores, street people. Rednecks masquerading as hippies, I guess, because I don’t remember many peace signs being flashed. That could be a rough crowd, and staying away from the pool tables was often a good idea unless you wanted to eat a three ball.

We tried to remember the names of some of the rest of those bars we had frequented, their disappearances scattered over the past twenty years. A little hole in the wall of a bar on Oak Lawn where now stands a four-story office building with an obligatory piece of sculpture on the sidewalk. Another on Cedar Springs and Throckmorton that had the first air hockey game we’d seen. We’d go in there, drink beer and play air hockey, and come out half soused and with smashed fingers.

Where else? Mentally, we worked our way up one street, down another. The Knox Street Pub? Still there, and though good for a fine bowl of beef stew, the wrong feel for the crowd I hung around with. The Stone-leigh P, pretty much ditto, but substitute hamburgers for stew.

And my goodness, yes. The NFL? How could we have forgotten the NFL? Nick, Pete, and Lloyd. One of the greatest wastes of time I can recall was sitting there in the dark at 4:30 in the afternoon and watching Lloyd wash and arrange everything according to his own obsessively meticulous tastes, and listening to him grumble on and on about how important it was to keep a bar clean. One regular who claimed to have a degree in philosophy swore he worked his way through college playing pinball. Never in my wildest dreams had I believed anyone could actually control a pinball machine, but he constantly rang up hundreds of thousands of points and won most of the games he played. As for darts, the boards were rarely idle. Monkey see monkey do, so I bought a set and, looking serious as hell, got my pants beat off by everyone who walked through the door. I mean, those people could throw double and triple twenties when all I could hit were ones and fives.

Why is it that popularity can so easily kill a bar? Someone talks about a place on the air or in a column, and all too soon it’s packed from five on. The NFL added a loud Irish band and a cover charge, and filled up with college kids who were so rowdy you couldn’t hear yourself think. By the time it closed four or five years ago, we were long gone.

Gas stations and grocery stores changeand close too, but there’s something specialabout a bar that catches your fancy. Thelights are right and so’s the mood. There’s noplace quite like it for meeting friends andshedding the day’s and week’s tension, forescaping the real world for an hour or two,and feeling the better for it. And though it’sa little sad when a good watering hole goesdry, it’s nothing to get too wrought up about.Another one will come along. So belly up tothe bar, boys, and raise a glass, and put thaton my tab, Louie, and did you hear the oneabout… Louie? Louie?