Review by Ed Quillen
Colorado:A Liquid History & Tavern Guide to the Highest State
by Thomas J. Noel
Published in 1999 by Fulcrum
ISBN 1-55591-260-5
THIS BOOK isn’t exactly history and it’s not quite a guidebook, although it contains strong elements of both. It’s more like a collection of the lore you would hear if you embarked upon a tour of the saloons, taverns, roadhouses, lounges, dives, gin mills, tap rooms, and bars of Colorado, and somehow remained sober enough to remember the tales, some of them doubtless true or true enough.
Every place where people gather to drink seems to develop its own informal history, which often starts with “You should’ve been here on the night when….”
What happened that night? A stove-up old cowboy, spurned by every woman in the place when he wanted to dance, left and returned with his horse for a country two-step. Or during big-game season, when an obvious visitor got 86ed, he staggered across the street, pulled the deer rifle out of his pickup, and emptied it through the front windows. Or a passionate couple, their inhibitions reduced by the alcohol, are discovered in flagrante delicto under the pool table.
That’s the sort of thing that seldom appears in published histories, but is known and recounted by every bar-stool regular, that builds a sense of community and continuity. It ought to get written down every so often.
Tom Noel, a professor of history at the University of Colorado at Denver, took on this challenge for all of Colorado after cataloging all 500 or so saloons in Denver.
There he discovered that any book is a snapshot — saloons frequently come and go, so that the author always misses a few, and other accounts are obituaries by the time they appear in print.
His research method, which I was privileged to observe, involved grabbing a local informant if possible, then a night of bar-hopping, with Tom always scribbling notes on 3″x5″ cards. These became the basis for the book.
It is organized alphabetically by towns, from Alamosa to Yampa, and Noel’s research extends from the Victorian splendors with gorgeous backbars which were in operation long before Prohibition to rather tacky modern operations, like one tavern in a Quonset hut.
Some Colorado guides focus only on the small mountain towns, but Noel gives Denver, Colorado Springs, and Pueblo their full due, and does not stint on the High Plains.
For instance, I didn’t even know it was possible to get a drink in Fort Morgan, but it turns out that the place went wet in 1965, and at the Queen Lounge there:
“After lunch and a few beers, I noticed the clock, which hadn’t marked the time. `Oh yeah,’ the waitress sighed. `When Bill finally got out of jail — he’s the town drunk — he came in here to celebrate…. Finally, I had to tell him — `last call for alcohol. I’ve got to close. It’s two o’clock.’
“`No, it ain’t,” Bill fired back, whipping out a pistol. He shot the clock, stopping it at two minutes to two. Bill went back into Fort Morgan’s spiffy new jail, and the bar is still open at the Queen Hotel, where it is still two minutes to two.”
That’s the sort of lore that Noel accumulated throughout the state, though he seems to have missed some likely towns, such as Gunnison, Kremmling, and Alma.
Of Jameel’s Lounge in Alamosa, we learn that “I made the mistake of arriving in a sport coat, and the whole bar bristled. One swarthy, scared-looking fellow whimpered `Jesus, he looks like my lawyer.’ ”
There’s hard-drinking Leadville, where the Manhattan “is so rough that the regulars chew on their beer bottles,” and “the beer signs are more than the decor; they also provide the lighting and help hold the roof up. The Manhattan also has the other essential ingredient for a saloon: shiftlessness.”
One of my favorites, the Owl Cigar Store in Cañon City (still serves malts the old-fashioned way, and its hamburgers make no concession to the health craze) gets nearly a full page, and the book answered a couple of my own questions that I’d never bothered to ask.
One was how the Silver Dome in Silver Cliff came to be — after the Raccoon Saloon went down in arsonist flames, one Charles Behrendt, Jr., saw the fire and muttered “We’re going to build this town another bar, a dome bar,” and Noel observes that it is “the only geodesic-dome bar in America.”
I was also curious about the tin ceilings in many handsome old saloons, such as Salida’s Victoria Tavern. They look good, but they’re hell on acoustics when there’s a band. That’s by design, Noel explains — since there were hotel rooms upstairs in many such establishments, and people wanted to sleep despite any revelry downstairs, the tin ceilings were designed to reflect the sound downward.
There are places where Noel misses a date by a year or two, and as mentioned, there are some deserving towns he omitted. The only other flaw is that he quoted me (accurately, alas) at some length when I was shooting my mouth off at the Vic while assisting in his research.
This is a fine book, witty and humane, about those Colorado places “where everybody knows your name.” Indeed, Colorado began in such a place — the first effort at organizing the territory, then split among Kansas, Nebraska, Utah, and New Mexico, began in Dick Wooten’s saloon in what is now Denver.
— Ed Quillen