The Tender Bar

If a picture is worth a thousand words, this one tells a few stories. Behind the bar at the Old Spaghetti Factory Restaurant downtown San Jose, 1974, with Mary the cocktail waitress.

PHOTO: BOB BROWN

I spent more than two years of my life as a professional mixologist.

That's a fancy name for bartender, or as some of my most trusted clients called me: barkeep. I called them regulars.

I mixed tequila sunrises, Singapore slings and margaritas, the popular cocktails of the day, as well as traditionals like daiquiris, old-fashions, sidecars, Tom Collins's, Black Russians, Manhattans, whiskey sours, screwdrivers, Rob Roys, rusty nails, Irish coffees and of course martinis.

"Do you know how to make an extra dry martini?" an elder gentleman outfitted in a blazer and ascot asked me.

"Hold a bottle of dry vermouth above the glass and whisper, "vermouth."

Each libation corresponded to a particular glass. A martini "up" went into a stemmed glass, flared like the opening of a lotus on top to accept and cradle the alcohol. 

Tending bar was much like attending school. Although you didn't know if you were student or teacher. Roles were interchangeable. Although I'm sure I learned more than I taught. 

My first gig "dancing the slats" was in 1973 for the Old Spaghetti Factory in San Jose, a themed establishment replete with antiques, faux Tiffany lamps and an authentic, richly wooded back-bar that had been trucked down from Marysville, California, Gold Rush country. It became a nugget of conversation for antique collectors who dropped in, as well as diminishing members of E Clampus Vitas. 

Clampers, as they're called, are dedicated to the preservation of the old American West, with particular fondness for the California Mother Lode. Clampers are recognized as both an historical drinking society and a drinking historical society. 

Rule number one: A serious barkeep should not drink with customers while on duty.

Theme restaurants were popular in the 70s. As part of an effort to revitalize downtown San Jose (which continues to this day), the novel Old Spaghetti Factory attracted a broad audience of dinner-goers and downtown drinkers. The once-agrarian town and surrounding region was known as Santa Clara Valley, the Garden of Earthly Delights. Silicon Valley existed, not as a name but as an underground of brainiacs developing tiny chips that would eventually alter the world. But we didn't know that.

I did know that the oldest daily newspaper in the state of California, once located around the corner, had picked up stakes and relocated to the outskirts of town between a bucolic abandoned farmhouse and an alfalfa field. The San Jose Mercury and News, morning and evening dailies, ten editions each day, were being produced in a new, modern one-story building with a moat in front, a la Sleeping Beauty’s Castle. With a lighted abstract sculpture in its portico, the newspaper plant shined like a beacon. Perhaps it was a warning.

I knew this because for two-and-a-half years I had been employed in that castle as a promotion writer.

During that time the newspaper's voice reflected the prune-picker heritage of old San Jose, with a front page column by Dick Barrett, who spoke the voices of Ma and Pa and the good ole days. Mainstream newspapers, like the Merc, took politically conservative editorial positions, while the cultural changes of the Sixties and early Seventies remained more of a derisive curiosity.

The spiffy newspaper plant was a harbinger for the invasion of high-tech campuses throughout the region. Today that newspaper building houses Super Micro, a chip manufacturing facility from China. I have no idea where the newspaper relocated. The internet has decimated a 300-year-old industry.

On an otherwise sunny day in September of 1972, I walked away from my job at the Murky News. I had had enough, the final straw being more criticism of the increasing length of my hair. My partner Tom Graham likewise stepped away from his typewriter. Computers weren't introduced at the newspaper until 1976. Together we merrily skipped over the watery moat as we plotted our futures, which would involve Volkswagen buses, restaurant work and much longer hair. 

"If you're going, I'm going," said Tom. 

Jim Schober, personnel manager, tried to talk us out of leaving. "You don't want to do this," he said.

"Yes we do," came our chorus.

We received a write up in the Guildsman, an internal newsletter published by union members who posed an adversarial stance against management. Tom and I were referred to as an example of a continuing "talent drain" at the newspaper. 

I was married with a three-year-old daughter, Molly. My employment had been my first career job out of college. Linda, my wife and high school sweetheart, encouraged me to quit the newspaper, primarily due to my complaining about the politics, while her unhappiness seethed below the surface.

Tom, Linda and I all found ourselves employed at the Spaghetti Factory, he and Linda waiting tables, me behind the bar. During that period, Linda became pregnant with our second child, Vanessa, and quit working.

Bar Talk

In a sense, the newspaper followed us. Those bar regulars were mostly reporters and public relations pros seeking post-deadline refreshment, a place to tell stories, laugh and linger over a glass or bottle while inhaling the aroma of garlic from the kitchen that mingled with the reek of the Lysol-scrubbed floor. It smelled better than ink and the clatter of typewriters after a few.

That hour of conviviality transpired between the time we opened and the time the dinner crowd arrived for spaghetti. You could still hear the sound track piping in soft rock music. The bar served as the welcome waiting room.

The above photo was shot by Bob Brown, a two-fisted PR gadfly who bellied up to the bar with a Nikon in one hand and a vodka-grapefruit in the other. The cocktail would have been called a Salty Dog but Bob didn't want the rim of his glass salted like a margarita.

"No salt," said the salty Brown, his blue eyes searching the room below his carrot-colored brows. He wore a navy sport coat, his necktie removed, his pink lips pursed, about to spread into a chuckle or smirk. 

Most customers left loose change on the bar as a tip. Some would lay down a much appreciated greenback. Cocktail waitresses tipped the bartender a percentage of their tips, based on their own discretion.  Our roles were defined and never questioned: women served the tables and men poured the drinks.

The Electric Light Tower in San Jose, Calif., circa 1905, after which the Tower Saloon on Santa Clara Street was named.   PHOTO: SAN JOSE LIBRARY ARCHIVES

A twenty-something Tom McEnery, tall and clean-cut, with an air of privilege and the blood of an Irishman, dropped in occasionally. Tom had politician written all over him, even puffed a long slender cigar. He would later become mayor of San Jose during its period of rapid growth and booming high technology. 

"I'll have a scotch and water," he said, adjusting himself at the bar, personable and forthcoming. I had him pegged for governor.

His family owned properties downtown, including the renowned Tower Saloon, a well-appointed watering hole named after the famous tower that once hovered over the central intersection in town, at Market and Santa Clara streets. During his mayorship, McEnery properly recused himself on matters related to downtown real estate.

Local politicos met at their own table in the saloon, among them Mayor Norm Mineta, who would later serve as cabinet secretary for Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. The Norman Y. Mineta International San Jose Airport was named in his honor. Of Japanese ancestry, Mineta was hailed as the first Asian-American to hold those offices.

Adorned in shades of red and gold and drowned in bar chatter and the pounding of leather dice cups on the mahogany bar, the Tower Saloon served as an after-hours haunt for local restaurant staff. The real party started when the doors were locked at 2 am and the jukebox was turned up with thumping soul-funk music. I mixed a few at the Tower. 

Rule number two: Repeat rule number one.

The Jocks

The Tower Saloon had its allure, but tending bar at a popular restaurant was most fun. I enjoyed the busy atmosphere of the Spaghetti Factory and variety of customers, never knowing who might stop by. I met and became friends with Al Feuerbach, an elite track and field athlete who held the world record in the shot put. He, Brian Oldfield and Bruce Jenner worked out together at Bud Winter Field at San Jose State in preparation for the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal. However, the Olympic Committee had banned Oldfield from the Games because he had competed for money in a brief, ill-fated professional track and fileld circuit.

I wrote a piece about Feuerback, an amiable, long-haired hippie jock. I tried, unsuccessfully, to sell it to Sport magazine. I interviewed Jenner with his first wife Chrystie at their very modest apartment in San Jose for a potential story that never gelled. Neither piece had a news hook. I profiled the colorful and controversial Oldfield in an article that did sell, twice. 

The following summer in Montreal, Feuerbach finished fourth in the shot put. Oldfield, also a shot putter who revolutionized the event by introducing a spinning approach-release, appeared in a televised advertisement for Kodak. Jenner, an extremely good-looking guy, won the grueling two-day decathlon that launched his celebrity. 

At the Spaghetti Factory the crowd moved through, never over-staying their welcome. The job required multi-tasking while dancing in a tight narrow space: Greeting newcomers, fulfilling orders for the wait staff, chatting with people looking to have a good time. I reveled having a stage and audience.

My final gig as a mixologist was at the nearby Laundry Works restaurant, developed by Vic Chung, a restaurateur who had started the popular Iron Works restaurant in Palo Alto, both featured a nouveau California-style cuisine. Vic had frequented the Spaghetti Factory while the Laundry Works was under construction. He asked me to come over. He drove a baby blue Porsche with the vanity plate, Bru Max, which scored a mention in Herb Caen's iconic three-dot column in the S.F. Chronicle.

I worked mostly day shifts at the Laundry Works -- a lunch crowd of mostly lawyers (bad tippers) from the nearby county courts  -- while focusing on moving away from the bar bizz. The party atmosphere had run its course. I had a family to support -- a wife and two young girls -- from whom I had been briefly separated due to circumstances of my employment and other unexpected family matters. Having married at ages 21 and 20 did not work in our favor.

Desperately seeking alternative employment, at the last minute, I turned down a public relations position with FMC (Food Machinery Corp.), a major employer in San Jose that manufactured a variety of machines, including the Bradley, a modern tank-like weapon of war. I couldn't do it.

At age 28, I felt lost and trapped.

Rule number three: Expect the unexpected.

To be continued.