Revels

The Master, the Swabber, the Boate-swaine & I;
The Gunner, and his Mate
Lou’d Mall, Meg, and Marrian, and Margerie,
But none of vs car’d for Kate.
For she had a tongue with a tang,
Would cry to a Sailor goe hang:
She lou’d not the sauour of Tar nor of Pitch,
Yet a Tailor might scratch her where ere she did itch.
Then to Sea Boyes, and let her goe hang.

Long ago, I attended a play at the Tivoli Theater in Chattanooga, performed by the University Players of the University of Chattanooga; it was The Tempest, and the above song drew more applause than anything else in the play. Shakespeare might not have liked that result, but as a man of the theater would have been unsurprised. I think. Presumptuous to think for Shakespeare, a monument without a tomb and all that.

Joe Morgan played Stephano, Hugh (a.k.a. Tom) Holt played Caliban, Trinculo I forget. The clowns were the hit of the play. Arlie Herron, an English professor, well-liked and with the respect of his peers, played Prospero with a crystalline delivery that reminded me of a really good Episcopal lay reader.

I haven’t thought of that night for quite a while. I was friends with most of the cast. We all spent many happy hours at the Rathskeller, much missed and long gone, German food and cold beer in a high-ceilinged old building with layers of dust and picturesque objects hanging from the walls. Löwenbräu on tap, back when it was still German beer. Other, cheaper brands for when the funds were not flowing. Ah, what Elysium had we known, Keats would have been proud.

One night I delayed too long in inviting a girl to go home with me from the Rat, and turned from the bar to see her vanishing through the front door with a Dutch exchange student. The Dutch guy liked to call me “Mr. Pickwick” for my resemblance in those days to the bespectacled and portly Dickens comic hero. Lutz Kirchner, was the Dutch fellow’s name, or something like that. I have forgotten the girl’s name. Pity. Faint heart never gets the girl to go home with him.

I turned back to the bar and ordered another Löwenbräu.

St. Patrick’s Day

The Day of Saint Patrick. Mixing sacred and quite sensual memories and thoughts. I remember quite a few St. Patrick’s day when my devotions owed more to beer, youth and hormones than anything the man himself said or did. On St. Patrick’s Day, 1967, I was chatting up a young and comely lady in the old Rathskeller, my home away from home in Chattanooga in those days, as the music played and the beer poured. I made one trip too many to the packed bar for fresh beer, and when I turned there went the girl out the door with a Dutch exchange student who liked to call me “Mr. Pickwick,” after Dickens’s portly comic creation in the Pickwick Papers. I was, indeed, portly and I wore wire-rim glasses. Not a figure to compete with the Dutchman, who was tall, blond and exotic to a Chattanooga girl. I don’t blame her.

How My Family Survived Prohibition

Alcohol has never been a stranger to my family. The gradual extension of the prohibition of alcohol production in the United States came early in Tennessee. The Volstead Act was voted in to be effective in 1920, following the ratification of the18th amendment in 1919. Tennessee had been dry under state law since 1912.

My various Great-grandparents and grandparents never missed one toddy due to these niggling legalities. In common with their coevals in the business and professional community of the day, each of them had arrangements with bootleggers and whiskey distillers scattered throughout the area, especially in the wooded fastnesses of Walden’s Ridge. Orders would be placed for quantities of corn whiskey, accompanied by charred oak kegs acquired by my family from various sources. The kegs would be returned full of distillate, to be stored in attics and cellars until age and charcoal had transformed the raw moonshine into passable whiskey.

An ironic note to those days furnished my Granny Phyllis with a story she loved to tell. She grew up on Vine Street in the Fort Wood neighborhood of Chattanooga, an upper-middle class area. A block down the street the proprietor of the formerly legal Deep Springs Whiskey Distillery lived in a large, comfortable house. This gentleman simply made other arrangements for continuing his business after Tennessee made whiskey production illegal. As a sidebar to this bit of history, seventy years later the same house was purchased to provide a rectory for the new rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, the downtown parish I now attend. The new occupants of this house delighted in its history and made it a point to tell every visitor about their illustrious predecessor. Episcopalians enjoy irony as well as whiskey.

My grandmother had other stories about the nicieties of liquor consumption during these years. My great-grandparents, her in-laws, had a large, three story house on Walnut Street close to Fifth Street, about where one of the many UnumProvident parking lots is now located. Two black employees kept the house running, Andy, a man of all work and sometime chauffeur, and a cook whose name escapes me. My great-grandmother, Tennie, insisted that her husband and any guests drink only in the third floor sitting room she used as a sewing room. Her reason for this rule was fear that the servants would realize that drinking was going on in the house. Tears would run down my grandmother’s face as she told of Tennie’s naïveté. There are no secrets in a house with servants.

Then there was the time my father tried to Save His Parents From Jail. At the age of about nine, my father became aware of the illegality of liquor. He already knew of certain bottles kept in a cabinet deep in his parents’ house. One day, tormented by the fear that his parents would be busted by the revenue agents, Daddy took each bottle out of the cabinet and poured it down the drain. My grandparents were not amused. They installed a lock on the cabinet and my father lived hard for weeks.

Eventually, of course, prohibition was repealed, first at the federal level, then state by state, legalizing whiskey again in Tennessee by 1937. An old gentleman who refinished and touched up furniture in his retirement once told me that repeal was the reason there were no really large white oak trees in Tennessee. As the distilleries started up again, the demand for white oak barrel staves resulted in every sizeable tree in the late thirties being cut down. Ah, the environmental damage from misguided temperance forces trying to ram abstinence down Tennessee throats.

Thankfully, nobody in my family ever felt parched.

Lines on the Stone Lion Tavern

Recycled Stuff Day. From May, 2003. Deal with it. *snerk*

A couple of years ago, well before the announcement that the Stone Lion Tavern, a dive bar of epic flavor, was to close, I read some posts anent said closing recorded in the very early hours of the day. I was moved to write the following:

They are gentlemen of the small hours,
Who roll up night like a blanket in the soft stirring
Airs of the dawn, and then crawl homeward long after
They have heard the chimes at midnight.

From evening ‘til last call flow beer and whiskey;
Deep draughts of conversation wash away slow
Hours uncoiling under the obsidian bowl of night.
Beneath the spiky light of stars scattered across the iron dark,
They stave off the day until dawn burns the sky to gold.