Flint Photos: Raincheck Lounge

A Bar By Any Other Name...

Okay, this may just be a fellow Flint Expatriate messing with me, but does anyone remember a bar on Dort Highway called...The Toilet?

Flint Photos: Tropicana Bar

Flint Photos: Contos Cocktails

The Golden Leaf Revisited

In October, I interviewed the manager of the venerable Golden Leaf Club, as well as talk to my mom and her good friend Adrienne Oliver about one of Michigan's oldest black-owned nightclubs. A few days ago I ran across some recent photos of the Golden Leaf, along with some dispiriting shots of nearby Clark School, on the Welcome to Beautiful Flint blog. Here are the photos, along with the original post.







I was at a wedding party for my friends Keith and Kim at the Potrero Neighborhood Center, known as The NABE, last weekend in San Francisco. I spotted a guy in a Red Wings jacket who turned out to be Albert Johnson, a NABE employee who was born at Hurley Hospital and went to Clark Elementary (left) in Flint. His parents, Jerry and Jimmie, still live on Providence Street.

We ended up talking about The Golden Leaf, one of Michigan's legendary black clubs. It’s still in business at 1522 Harrison Street, just across the school yard from Clark Elementary. It’s a membership-only club, just as it was when it opened in 1921.

“My dad liked to play cards there,” Albert remembered, before our conversation turned to how glad we both were that Matt Millen is finally out as the Lions GM.The Golden Leaf is a well-known Flint landmark in my family. One of my mom’s best friends from the old days in Flint is Adrienne (Wilson) Oliver, who is the mother of Notre Dame assistant coach Jappy Oliver (left). Although it wasn’t unheard of for a black girl and white girl to be such close friends at that time in Flint, it was rare. And it was even rarer for a white girl to visit The Golden Leaf. But Ardrienne took my mom, Pat (McFarlane) Young, on several occasions.

“We never looked at Pat as being white or black. Pat was just Pat,” Adrienne told me during a recent conversation. “She was with me and she was my friend, so nobody thought anything of her going to the Golden Leaf.”

Except, perhaps, the girls' parents. Sometimes a little subterfuge was needed.

“We did some of the craziest things,” Adrienne remembers. “Pat would say she was spending the night at my house, then we’d tell my parents we were both going to spend that night at another girl's house, then we’d sneak out.”

Adrienne and my mom both remember Central High, where they graduated in 1948, as having good racial relations. Blacks and whites interacted and formed friendships.

“I remember there being more economic prejudice than racial prejudice at Central,” my mom says. “Students seem to divide over their neighborhoods and how much money their parents had.”

Ardienne adds: “At Central, everybody was wonderful, but there was a lot of prejudice hidden in Flint. Nobody came right out and said it, but it was there.”

And there was prejudice built in to the structure of Flint life. When performers like Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole or Lionel Hampton came to the I.M.A., whites went to a separate early performance, while blacks were only allowed at a second midnight to 4 a.m. show.

“That was terrible,” Adrienne says. “It’s sick to even think about, especially when most of the performers were black.”

The Golden Leaf was a popular destination before the midnight dances at the I.M.A. “You know, it’s just a hole in the wall, but we thought it was the greatest joint in the world,” Adrienne remembers.

Today, the look of the Golden Leaf is relatively unchanged. It’s owned and managed by Lottie Reid, who told me on the phone that it’s still the same long, narrow brick building with a dirt basement, a bar, and several tables, much like it was when Adrienne and my mom went there, not to mention more famous visitors like Sammy Davis, Jr., Dinah Washington, and Malcolm X. The age of the members ranges from 21 to around 80.

But the neighborhood has changed, starting with the massive I-69 — I-475 interchange that obliterated much of the community that once surrounded The Golden Leaf . And like many Flint schools, Clark Elementary is boarded up.

“There’s really nothing around us now,” Lottie Reid said. “There’s nothing but us on this block.”

White Stallion

The White Horse Tavern. (Photo courtesy of Stargate)

Anyone have any stories of Flintoids — perhaps after over-indulging — attempting to ride the White Horse Tavern's white horse? It seems like the kind of challenge that would be very enticing after a long night, or afternoon, at the bar. The base looks almost like it's constructed out of oversized Lincoln Logs for the very purpose of climbing. My guess is that reality would set in once you got to the shingled pedestal, but at that point you'd be so close to getting a handhold on the horse's hoof that you'd probably keep going.

If you have a story, it might be best to use nicknames to protect the identity, and the pride, of the climbers.

A Quest to End All Quests

At long last, some crazy mixed-up dreamers named Emily, Jason and Andy have begun a noble quest. It's a journey that will require strength, skill, stamina and, perhaps, a concealed firearm or two. (Not having a job would also come in handy.) Their goal? To visit every bar in Flint and write about it on their blog, which is appropriately titled Every Bar in Flint.

Ahh, to be young again.

Here is their manifesto:

"We are going to drink a beer in every bar in Flint, Michigan. We are going to take a piss in every dirty bathroom, eat every overcooked hamburger, generously over-tip every waitress that calls us 'hun', burn our mouths on every 35 cent hot wing, and tip back a few with every kind of person we have in this fair city. Flint isn't so big that it can't be done, but it is big enough that this will be an epic journey and we hope you'll read along as we drink our way to adventure!"

Brash words. Even haughty. Can they do it? Well, judging from Andy's photo, they may be peaking a bit too soon. Remember, this is a marathon, not a sprint. Pace yourselves, young booze hounds. Pace yourselves.

The Ultimate List of Bars, Lounges, and Taverns

Damn, I mention the Mikatam and the comment section turns into a bar free for all. Even my mom joined in by hearkening back to a place called The Yellow Jacket. I'm all for bars, but I feel the need to impose some order. And I love lists. So how about we try to come up with a compendium of Flint bars, past and present. I'll pull the bars out of the comment section and add to the list below.

UPDATE: Okay, I couldn't keep up, so you'll need to check the comments for even more bars, lounges, and taverns not mentioned in the list below.

1. Ad-Lib Lounge
2. Al and Donna's
3. Aladdin
4. Ali Baba's
5. Ambassador
6. Andy's
7. Aquarius Lounge
8. Argonaut
9. Arlene's
10. Art's (Lewis Street?)
11. Autumn
12. Back Room (The Loft)
13. Bailiwick
14. Bar Bucks Bar
15. Beaver Trap
16. Bernie’s Lounge
17. Bill’s Still (Begat LL-T Show Bar)
18. Billy's Pub
19. Blarney’s (Saginaw Street)
20. Body Shop
21. Brass Rail
22. Caboose
23. Camaro
24. Camaro Lounge/Beaver Trap/Trap Door/50 Grand
25. Churchills
26. Civic Park Lounge
27. Cloud Nine
28. Club Reggae
29. Clubhouse
30. College Inn
31. Contos/Triangle
32. Copa (Hot Rock)
33. Corner Bar
34. Crankin' Rankin
35. Déjà vu (No Alcohol)
36. Deno's
37. Dominic's (at the Galaxy Center)
38. Doobie's
39. Duffys
40. Dugout
41. El Matador
42. El Rancho
43. El Toro
44. Embers
45. Farm
46. Fenton Road Tavern
47. Fifty Grand
48. Firehouse
49. Golden Leaf (Technically a private club, but still a bar)
50. Good Times
51. Good Times
52. Happy Hour Lounge
53. Hat’s Pub
54. Hob Knob Lounge (Center Road)
55. Hot Rock (Formerly The Copa)
56. Interlude
57. Ivanhoe
58. Ivor's Place
59. Jack Gilbert's Wayside Inn
60. Jake the Snake's
61. Jesters
62. Jimmy Lum's Aloha Lounge
63. Jim's Garage (burned and re-built)
64. Jolly Olive
65. Julie’s
66. Junk Yard Bar
67. Kelush's
68. Kimberly's
69. King's Armor
70. Lace
71. Lafferty's (begat Point After begat Bikini Bar begat Neighbors)
72. Lamplighter ( Tramplighter )
73. Light
74. Little Ceasar's Pizza Bar in South Flint Plaza
75. LL-T Show Bar (Formerly Bill’s Still)
76. Loft (aka Back Room)
77. Lone Pine
78. Lounge at Bishop Airport before remodel
79. Luge
80. Mark's Lounge
81. Merry Inn
82. Metropolis
83. Mikatam
84. Mr. Gibby's
85. Mr.G's
86. Nathan J's Cocktails
87. New Deville
88. Northgate Bar (N. Saginaw near Beecher)
89. Oddysey
90. Old Frank’s (Diviest dive that ever dove.)
91. Old Franklin
92. Pachyderm
93. Paddy McGee's
94. Palace Gardens
95. Pappy's (or some such name. Was it a private club? It was in the building where Putnam's TV used to be on Flushing and Stevenson. The former Soar And Dippity Kite Shop?)
96. Patio
97. Payne's
98. Payne's (The name says it all.)
99. Peppermill
100. Peppermint
101. Peter's Pub
102. Pink Garter (really a restaurant, but a Clio Road institution near O’Toole’s)
103. Point
104. Point After
105. Raincheck
106. Ray's
107. Red Ribbon
108. Reese Jones
109. Remington's
110. RP's
111. Rusty Nail
112. Sherman's Lounge
113. Shorthorn
114. Skips
115. Snotty's
116. Sports Bar
117. Sports Coupe (Former Sports Bar of Brush Alley moved to Dort Hwy)
118. Sunset Lounge (on Franklin appeared to be closed for years but was actually open)
119. Teddy Bear (now " Zoo")
120. Tender Trap
121. The Bank
122. Thrift City
123. Thunderbird or Fleetwood (just off Dort on Lippincott)
124. Timoothy's
125. Titty City
126. Torch
127. Track
128. Trapper Joe's
129. Treasure Chest
130. Tropicana
131. University Club (Private Club)
132. Vasco's
133. Vasco's (Teasers)
134. Vechells,
135. Viking Lounge
136. Villa Capri
137. Wagon Wheel
138. West Side
139. What's Next?
140. Whisper
141. White Horse
142. Wild Bill’s
143. Yellow Jacket

The Mikatam

I have to confess I have never been to the Mikatam and don't even know where it was located. Was it way out on Clio Road, or was that The Embers? I remember hearing about it, but know next to nothing about the place. It apparently had some sort of 32 for 1 drink special, which seems hard to organize. And readers keep referencing it. So what's the story with this place? What was it like? Who went there? Where the hell was it? And what's with the goofy name? Were the owners a couple named Mike and Tammy or something?

The Copa Conspiracy

Is Flint determined to erase all evidence of the fabulous Copa? First, The Copa's second home gets turned into an empty lot. Now it appears the original Copa location at 510 S. Saginaw is doomed.

"The Metropolis...a former dance club that hosted local bands as recently as 2005, could be torn down and replaced with a new three-story building," reports Joe Lawlor of The Flint Journal.

"The Community Foundation of Greater Flint, which this May moved into its own new digs on South Saginaw Street, plans to spend an estimated $3 million to $4 million to construct the new building, said foundation President Kathi Horton.

"Horton said she's optimistic that the deal will fall into place, hopefully within the next month."

Not to complain about Joe Lawlor, who's got a heavy workload at the under-staffed Journal, but you've got to at least mention the Copa in this story.

Well, as another of my personal Flint landmarks is consigned to oblivion, I offer up these classic eighties songs that got heavy rotation at the Copa when I spent a lot of time there.

Flint Artifacts: Copa Remember Me Card

Industrial love

As this early postcard shows, the male Flintoid has always possessed the requisite skills to please the ladies. Who could resist a romantic canoe trip down the scenic Flint River under the shade of a parasol, taking in the majestic beauty of the factories, smokestacks and water towers crowding the riverbank, while the industrial runoff fashions a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of color in the water?

This dude's a playa!

(Warning: Never touch or drink the water. Some river carp can be aggressive and territorial. Avoid all riverside saloons, bars, watering holes, factories and public parks where other intoxicated Flint males tend to congregate. Keep a sharp eye out for floating bodies, which tend to spoil the romantic mood.)

Ballad of Flint Bars and Fake I.D.s

The Copa's second home in the old Vogue store. (Photo by Tom Cheek/The Flint Journal)

When I was 15, I possessed what had to be the worst fake I.D. in U.S. history.

On the advice of my girlfriend, I used makeup to conceal the final digit of the 1966 birth year on my Michigan license. I took a piece of Scotch tape and lifted a "zero" out of the phone book, stuck it inexpertly where the final "6" had been, and used a razor blade to cut away the excess tape. I didn't have a light touch, and I cut an imperfect square into the license around the new number. Those grooves, coupled with the elevation caused by the makeup and tape, created a 3-D effect that drew the eye directly to the altered date. It looked like I'd spray-painted a tiny zero on a piece of Plexiglas and stuck it to my license with Bond-O. But in my hometown of Flint — a hard-drinking factory town with more bars than jobs — my new license worked like a charm.

Things are tougher today for young drinkers. An older drinking age means college kids are now scheming the way high-schoolers used to. Worse, bars actually seem to check I.D.'s in the San Francisco Bay Area where I now live and frequently turn potential customers away. Flint was not the kind of place that would deny someone the right to drink simply because they were underage, and I had many rivals for the "Worst Fake ID" championship. One girl I knew, who was black, managed to secure the ID of another friend's 21-year-old sister. There was only one problem: the sister was white. When she nervously presented her fake ID at a bar for the first time, the bouncer did a double take, then calmly said, "Nice tan. Go on in."

There was no shortage of bars to sample in Flint: Mona's Cocktail Lounge, The Torch, Augie's Garden Glow, Vechells, the Fifty Grand Cocktail Lounge, The Ambassador, Rube's, Ivor's Place, The Embers, The King's Armor, and a cleverly named strip club called the Treasure Chest, which competed for customers with a classy little joint called Titty City, to list just a few.

But there was really only one place my friends and I frequented in high school. In a rough town with lousy weather and bars called The Wooden Keg and The Rusty Nail, we hung out at The Copa. As the ridiculous name indicates, The Copa was not your average Flint bar. In a city suffering through an economic meltdown of epic proportions memorialized in Michael Moore's mockumentary Roger & Me, The Copa was a business miracle simply because it was located downtown on North Saginaw Street and it was actually open.

Bill Kain opened The Copa in 1980, and diversification was the secret to his success. While Flint lived and died with the auto industry, Kain catered to just about everyone. The Copa was primarily a gay bar, but Thursday was officially straight night and the crowd was mixed on many evenings. In fact, the only people coming to Flint instead of leaving it in the '80s were gays and lesbians visiting The Copa. In a largely segregated town, The Copa was racially mixed, playing funk and New Wave in a market that made Foreigner, Styx and Billy Joel rich. It was the only bar in town where dancing to the Tom Tom Club or New Order wouldn't warrant an ass-kicking. (Asses still got kicked at The Copa, just like any bar in Flint, but not for dancing. It had its share of shoot-outs and brawls.) There were house music nights, male strip shows — attended primarily by straight women — and rap acts.

Kain was an outspoken critic of the hare-brained schemes to revitalize Flint with auto-themed amusement parks and high-end shopping projects, but the fact that he had a thriving business didn't give him much pull at City Hall. When Kain died in 1991, he was dismissed with a tiny, three-paragraph obit in The Flint Journal.

So what made The Copa so enticing to 15-year-olds armed with fake I.D.’s and Flock of Seagulls hairdos in Flint, Michigan? Why does anyone become a "regular" at any bar? The reasons go way beyond the simple lure of alcohol.

Madelon Powers, a history professor at the University of New Orleans, is what you might call a saloon scholar. In her 1998 book Faces Along the Bar, she explores life in the old-time saloons of pre-Prohibition industrial America, but many of her observations still apply to today's bar scene.

"At a time when various groups from Bible-thumping evangelists to profit-hungry industrialists were busily hatching paternalistic schemes for reshaping working-class leisure habits, the saloon offered its predominantly male clientele a place to work out their own solutions to their needs," Powers writes. "Drink, food, shelter, and companionship have ever been the tavern's stock-in-trade. Since many saloongoers lived in substandard tenements with few home comforts, the saloon in comparison seemed a most appealing prospect."

Basically, saloons in 1870 offered patrons something they weren't getting elsewhere, and bars today do the same thing. In Flint, if you didn't want to drink with unemployed autoworkers twice your age who played "Dust in the Wind" on the jukebox, you went to The Copa. Most of my favorite bars don't provide the "luxurious" surroundings available to pre-Prohibition drinkers, but they offer the chance to escape certain things nonetheless. At Sadie's Flying Elephant in San Francisco, it's rare to hear a conversation about modems or options or downloads. Cell phones don't seem to ring. That's a rare luxury anywhere near Silicon Valley — a factory "town" just like Flint, but without the heart or the swagger. A loud cell phone conversation wouldn't get you tossed at Sadie's, but it wouldn't be welcome, either.

Powers points out that bars have always had certain codes of behavior. "Just as churches had their congregations, so most saloons had loyal constituencies of perhaps 50 to 60 'regulars' who kept them in business," she writes. "Like their counterparts in medicine, politics, and athletics, they observed certain regulae of their own — the venerable traditions of drink culture — which boosted their esprit de corps and encouraged honor and order in their dealings with one another."

At the same time, I would never align myself with a bar where everyone was just like me — several of my ex-girlfriends probably have nightmares about entering such a place — let alone one where everybody knows my name. The fictional bar on Cheers seems like the kind of homogenized, locals-only place I hate. The lure of The Copa, like any good bar, was that it had so many people who weren't like me, but I could somehow relate to them just by being there. The fact that you sought the bar out and made it inside said you had some redeeming qualities.

But let's remember that one of the obvious reasons people go to bars is to drink, and I keep a mental Rolodex of bars and what I drank there. I remember the amazing pitcher of Pabst Blue Ribbon I had with my buddies in a little place in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan one summer when our truck broke down. I cringe when I recall sitting in the Latin American Club in San Francisco drinking a White Russian and a margarita at the same time. But nobody who's on the right path goes to a bar just to drink. They never have.