HillBilly Ranch Bar Boston

As you get old you forget. as you get older, you are forgotten - anon

I know that I didn't come up with that quote, because I haven't really forget everything yet and the other day I was reminiscing about Lost Boston with a few old-timers at the bar of Jacob Wirth's. A judge, a lawyer, and my yet-to-arrived friend from Maine. We each picked a different beer from the hundreds available. No one had ever drunk all of them them.

"Remember when they didn't let women drink at the bar here?" William hailed from Savin Hill. He was a double eagle same as my oldest friend, Jimmy O'Brien. They had worked together on several senate campaigns for Ted Kennedy. We knew each other from Falmouth Foresides, Maine. 1950s. Jimmy and I had driven Yellow Checker Cabs during university.

"Yes, I used to bring my feminist friends here for a joke. They hated that the bartender would serve them at the bar. I thought it was a good laugh." I was a long-hair college student on the other side of the barricades from the two legal beagles, both fourteen years older than me.

"Maybe the bartender didn't think it was that funny." William had been a Marine.

"No, he loved telling those hairy girls to take a seat in the dining room." I couldn't remember his name, but we both agreed that a woman's place wasn't at the bar of Jacob Wirth's.

"You dirty hippie, and I mean that in the best of all possible terms."

Herbie showed up later and our collective memories toured the city of our past. We extolled the prune rolls at Warmuths, the grilled hot dogs at WT Grants, the strippers at the Two O'Clock Lounge, and relived friend's bachelor party in the Combat Zone. It was a blank in my mind.

"I vaguely recall stumbling out of the Naked I into the Hillbilly Ranch. I think I wanted to hear MAMA TRIED."

"We lost you for about an hour." Herbie ordered another round of beer. Different from the last. Between the four us us we were making our way through the drafts.

"Probably ended up with the drag queens at the Other Side." William laughed with his beer belly juggling like defrosted jello. The beer at Jacob Wirth's was better than good.

"No, I'd remember that. At least I think I would, but something sticks in my mind about getting up on the stage of the Hillbilly Ranch and singing a song." I had seen Sleepy La Beef, John Lincoln Wright, the Bayou Boys, and other southern bands of the 70s at the Park Square dive.

"That was a tough bar owned by Frankie Segalini. You were lucky that you weren't rolled in that place. It was filled with Navy peckerwoods and crackers. They didn't like us Irish."

"You returned to the Naked I intact." Herbie had a head for long ago. He worked in Tech.

"And we made it to the church in time."

"Sherri hated me."

"Still does."

We all nodded in unison and toasted our wives and those times gone by. We thought that they would never end and they don't at Jacob Wirths' or in your heads.

THe Hillbilly Ranch caught fire in 1980 and was re-opened a month later. The incident was memorialized in the song "They Tore Down the Hillbilly Ranch" by John Lincoln Wright. The Hillbilly Ranch finally closed in 1980 after the city took the land through eminent domain and Segalini was unable to secure a liquor license at another location according to Wikipedia.

ps Jacob Wirth closed in 2018. The building was gutted on June 25, 2024 in a large fire. Texas lightning.

The That That Was

I left my native Boston for New York at the age of 24.

Many of the following years have been spent overseas in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Whenever I return to the States, friends ask, "Don't you miss anything about the United States?"

"I miss Warmuth's Restaurant and Hi-Hat Lounge in Boston, the Orchida restaurant, Manic Panic, the 2nd Avenue Deli, CBGBs and Gough's Bar in New York, the pub in Victoria Station and Cafe le Pere Tranquille in London."

"All those places are closed." My friends remark with surprise. "Aren't there any open places?" <"The Oyster Bar in Grand Central and Frank's Lounge in Fort Greene." The former has the best selection of shellfish in New York and the latter is my local bar.

"Nothing else?" My friends are au courrant with the latest hotspots for dining and drinking.

I mentally scanned Manhattan and Brooklyn, then shook my head.

"I'm a man of limited vision." I like what I like, then added, "The Reading Room in the Main Library."

"Nothing new."

"I only go to the places I know." Like the Sand Bar in Rockaway Park rather than the BillBurg trendy joints farther down the beach. "But I'm willing to try someplace new."

They suggested several hot spots. Their names registered nothing. I was out of it as usual for someone who spent eight months out of the country last year, but it's hard missing someplace I've never been, so that I'm left to mourn 'that that was' with every closing of a bar, restaurant, theater, store or hotel for the sake of progress, especially my old neighborhood the East Village, which lost its charm, as young professional swarmed into the neighborhood during the 80s and 90s, forcing up longtime businesses to shut their doors.

One small store on the corner of 9th and 2nd Avenue had supplied clothing, cleaning fluids, stationary et al. In 1990 the landlords doubled their lease. The store was replaced by a t-shirt shop. It failed within the year as did every other venture in that spot. I argued with a property investor, Stephen Canelli, that the old store gave an intrinsic value to the area."

"If they couldn't pay the rent, then they didn't belong there." He was a ruthless man when it came time make a profit. History and legend meant nothing to him. He was from Ontario, Canada.

Intrinsic value held value for a developer like Stephen when the added value is to their benefit.

For the rest of us we live with the memories of prune rolls from Warmuths, quarter drafts at the Hi-Hat, Polish pizza at the Orchida, pinball at CBGBs, and dollar drafts at Gough's Bar across from the New York Times. That narrow bar served reporters, pressmen, and sports figures for decades. A portrait of John L. Sullivan graced its wall. The barmen knew the names and drinks of customers. A million beery conversations battered the wooden bar. All of it gone into the black hole for the That That Was.

And I shall entered the vortex one day, for as you get old you forget, but as you get older, you are forgotten, except by those in the That That Was.