Flint Quotes: Brawling From Tavern to Tavern

“The bearded lumberman with their coonskin caps, red sashes, and hobnailed boots brawled from tavern to tavern,” explains Carl Crow in a sometimes flamboyantly written history of Flint commissioned by General Motors in 1945. “Lumbering was rough business and lumberman were rough men. They worked hard, played hard, and usually drank quantities of hard liquor. There was a story throughout the logging camps that some of the lumberjacks would cheerfully eat pine chips or sawdust if generously moistened with whiskey.”

The Detroit Lions: Shimmering Silver Glitter

Hey, the Detroit Lions have a new logo, which looks more like a wolf or a San Jose SabreCat than a Lion to me. (For the record, I've worked in San Jose and I can safely say that no matter how bad things get in Motown, it will never be as bad as San Jose.) The new proprietary font is cleverly called “NFL Lions” and, as you can see above, it is one ugly ass font. In fact, that font is far more offensive to me than last year's 0-16 season.




Now it's easy to poke fun at the Lions, like the folks at Real Clear Sports did with their suggestion that the team adopt a new Cowardly Lion logo.


But I'm trying to be constructive when I suggest that the Lions should take the opportunity to connect with Detroit history (Stroh's Brewery) and a favorite pastime of seemingly all Michiganders (drinking beer) and simply adopt the Stroh's Beer lion as their official mascot. As you can see below, the Stroh's lion has a cool crown and what appears to be either a pair of nunchucks or two lead pipes, which the Detroit football team can obviously use. Granted, later versions of the Stroh's lion indicate he traded in the weapons for a college diploma and some sort of butter-churn implement, but let's ignore that.




Of course, even if you don't like the new redesign, it can't be as bad as the 1980-81 upgrade: "The Lions changed the dull silver stripes and trim on their uniforms to a shimmering silver glitter. This only lasted two seasons because of complaints by other teams about the glare."

Flint Photos: Contos Cocktails

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 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 Drive of a Lifetime

What happens when four young Flintoids try to "find themselves" by drinking and skiing? Read The Passenger to find out.

Drink your way to financial security

In these troubled economic times, are you looking for some investment advice that all Flintoids, current and former, can fully embrace? Here it is via How to Avoid the Bummer Life:

"If you had purchased $1,000 of Delta Air Lines stock one year ago, you would have $49 left.

"With Fannie Mae, you would have $2.50 left of the original $1,000.

"With AIG, you would have less than $15 left.

"But, if you had purchased $1,000 worth of beer one year ago, drunk all of the beer, then turned in the cans for the aluminum recycling REFUND, you would have $214 cash.

"Based on the above, the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle..."

Thanks again to Michael G. for this investment advice.

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

Alice Cooper's unexpected duet in Flint

Would someone please turn off the fan? It's disturbing the snake.

Flint Expatriate Rich Frost recounts his encounter with Alice Cooper at the IMA:

Growing up in Flint, I got a chance to see a lot of great Michigan rock n' roll bands as I was a part of the "behind the scenes" production team at Sherwood Forest for Wild Wednesday and all the other concerts that Peter C. Cavanaugh staged there. I also got a chance to work some rock concerts at the IMA, Delta College and the Saginaw Civic Center.

If you're into stories about rock n' roll and Flint's IMA, here's one for you:

Alice Cooper did a warm-up concert in Flint before doing a big tour. It was one of those concerts where the band could get the kinks out of the show and make it better before taking it on the road. The band was based in Detroit at the time, so they were able to drive up to the IMA Auditorium in the afternoon to get ready for the show.

As soon as they got into town, Alice requested several top hats to wear while he performed, so I was put in charge of going out to get them with his girlfriend at the time — a model whose name I can't remember. We drove all around town to secure some top hats, eventually finding them at H&D Tuxedo. With top hats in hand, we drove back to the IMA where sound checks were in progress. By all appearances, it looked like the concert was going to be just another rock n' roll show, but the appearance of another celebrity in town changed all of that.

Just before the show started, none other than Micky Dolenz of The Monkees showed up. Dolenz was in town to do a live appearance at the South Flint Drive-In where the movie he was appearing in — brace yourself…the R-rated Linda Lovelace for President — was showing.

Once Micky and the Alice Cooper crew met backstage, they started to party, and they worked out something to surprise the audience at the IMA. The final song of the show was Alice Cooper's "School's Out," and if you remember the song there's a long guitar note/semi-feedback noise at the end. But on that night the long guitar note went into another familiar song — the theme to "The Monkees.”

Once they went into the theme song, Micky bolted out on stage and sang the song with the band. Well, that was how it was planned, but Micky had a hard time doing anything because he was completely plastered after consuming mass quantities of alcohol backstage. They did the song, sort of, but Alice literally had to pick Micky up and carry him off stage. He was that plowed.

Now, that's rock n' roll at the IMA that I remember!

Welcome to Burton, Spice Girls!

BURTON, Mich. (AP) -- A 911 call from the driver of a Spice Girls' tour bus about a possible drunken driver led to the arrest of a suspected carjacker.

The bus was heading south on Interstate 75 on Saturday night when its driver noticed a man weaving in and out of traffic. Police in suburban Detroit later arrested a 36-year-old Burton man.

He was turned over to police in Burton, about 50 miles northwest of Detroit, in connection with a carjacking at a gas station. Authorities say he also had been stopped earlier in the day on suspicion of shoplifting.

The man was being held in the Genesee County Jail pending arraignment.

The Spice Girls were in the Detroit area to perform at The Palace of Auburn Hills.

Flint Portraits: Ben Hamper

For any exiled Flintoid longing for a taste of home, look no further than "Rivethead," Ben Hamper's brilliant and profane look at life in the auto factories of Buick City. Here's an excerpt, courtesy of Michael Moore's website:

I was seven years old the first time I ever set foot inside an automobile factory. The occasion was Family Night at the old Fisher Body plant in Flint where my father worked the second shift.

General Motors provided this yearly intrusion as an opportunity for the kin of the work force to funnel in and view their fathers, husbands, uncles and granddads as they toiled away on the assembly line. If nothing else, this annual peepshow lent a whole world of credence to our father's daily grumble. The assembly line did indeed stink. The noise was very close to intolerable. The heat was one complete bastard. Little wonder the old man's socks always smelled like liverwurst bleached for a week in the desert sun.

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.