Skimming the floor for a dime to play a song in juke box

Preface: This collection of vignettes is a chapter from my childhood memoir that spans the period from 1950 to 1964 when my parents, Bill and Anne Haug, owned a bar on Bigfork’s Electric Avenue.

Next door to the Lake Café was my Dad’s bar. 

It was a white stucco building with big picture windows on the front, shaded with Venetian blinds. Cigars, fishing tackle and bride dolls for sale were always on display in the window. Just past the window, near the corner of the building were the double entry doors, each with its colored half-moon window. 

On our walks uptown, Mom and I went in to say ‘Hi’ to Dad, and to leave most of the groceries for him to bring home in the car.  Good old Long George was holding down his stool at the bar, mulling over his beer. Spike Broton, an old bachelor who walked into town everyday from his shack in Ferndale, was sitting near the window with a cup of bar coffee and working the crossword puzzle.

Dad’s eyes always lit up when he saw me come in. If he was talking with a customer, he’d say “There’s my kid!” with a mixture of pride and disbelief (he was 61, after all!). I ran up to him and hugged his legs; he caressed my shoulder. Sometimes he’d set me up on his shoulders while he poured beer from the tap.

“Can I have some foam, Daddy?”

He’d look at his customer and raise his eyebrows to say, “Is that OK with you?” before letting me sip some foam from the glass. If the customer frowned, Dad poured me a glass of root beer from a bottle he pulled from the refrigerated back bar.

Mom scooted me off to play in the back room while she did the daily books. There was always plenty to do, like picking out a tune on the old ricky-ticky piano, pushing a chair up to the pool table and shooting the balls into the holes, or scanning the floor for coins missed by the morning’s brooming, to play the jukebox.  “Ace in the Hole” was my favorite tune, unless it was Christmas time, and then it was Jorgy Jorgensen’s “Yingle Bells.”  

Sometimes I begged a piece of paper from Mom and contented myself with drawing pictures of the people in the bar, then sold them for a dime apiece.  I did pretty well at that.  

When Mom was finished with the books, we usually went to lunch at one of the cafes before heading home.

Next door to the bar was a one-bedroom cottage with an attic that could sleep two or three kids. When I was a toddler, Al and Elsie, who owned the Lake Cafe, lived there. But after they remodeled the cafe, they moved to  the apartment they’d created above the cafe, and rented out the cottage to Bonnie and Gene Hullett. Bonnie was the cook at the cafe, and Gene worked at the aluminum plant in Columbia Falls. 

Their daughter, Shari, was my age. It sure was handy having a playmate live right next to the bar, so that we soon became best friends. Shari had a younger brother, Stevie.

After a few years, they moved to a larger house in the village, and the cottage was rented to someone else.

Toyson’s Triple-E Cafe

Carl Toyson and his wife served breakfast and lunch in their cafe that was just on the other side of the cottage from our bar. Their daughter Carla sometimes babysat me in the afternoons if the bar was really busy so that Mom needed to help Dad. 

Mom loved their soups, and especially their chili. They made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for me. I don’t remember the cafe as being a very busy place after the Lake Cafe opened. A few years after I started school, they sold the building to Sam Stephens and he moved the liquor and jewelry store there (from Dad’s old bank building, leaving it vacant for several years).

To be continued.