Some twenty years ago, back when I was near the end of my bad old drinking days, I found myself in Kelly’s Olympian, a venerable Portland bar I equated with being the last stop on the road to total oblivion.  Standing at the bar (there were no stools but only a rail in those days), I grimaced beneath the harsh fluorescent lights, admitting amid a swirl of cigarette smoke that I had touched bottom and was in a position similar to a raccoon considering the nighttime crossing of a wide boulevard.

Fortunately I made it across, though on an infrequent basis I have returned to Kelly’s seeking memories of times gone by. On these occasions I am accompanied by a former newspaper colleague whose real name is Kent Clark; a name that has stymied many plans I have had to write
reminiscences of my former career.  Once upon a time, when Portland was a smaller, kinder place, Kent and I were police reporters--he for the now defunct Oregon Journal, me for The Oregonian--sharing a space in the cop shop press room at Southwest Second Avenue and Oak Street--the old police station known more familiarly as “Two and Oak.”

In that grim, green-painted room (beneath harsh fluorescent lights), we endured blaring pre-scanner police and fire radios, and intermittently made our routine phone checks to police agencies around town.  As you can imagine, for Kent this was somewhat challenging. He might begin, “Hi, this is Kent Clark at the Oregon Journal. . .” Only to hear, “You‘re kidding me, right?” 

After a time of considerable frustration, Kent was forced into becoming an anonymous public relations “flack;” returning some years later to work on The Oregonian copy desk-- where there, too, nobody knows your name. 

Several years ago, after we had become “civilians,” we began meeting in Kelly’s, there to shoot the breeze and recall the old neighborhood of dive bars and denizens that kept Two and Oak in business.  Places like the once-grand and legendary Erickson’s, which loggers and other workingmen sought as a surrogate heaven; the Alaska Card Room and Lunch, the Valhalla, Clover Club, Stockmen’s, Dahl & Penne’s, the Apache Club, Parmenters, the Caribou club, the Lotus, Old Glory--and more; places smoky, dank and with the occasional back-bar bullet hole reminding you that these were places frequented by desperate and dangerous men, and those kind of women attracted to them--denizens--though Kelly’s, until relatively recently, had no women’s john.

Still, being young and working cops on a newspaper, the ambiance was appropriately Runyonesque.  These places would provide the texture of the novels we would write someday; saloons like Kelly’s where we could sit, drink and wait, as a friend once said, “for the world to reach out and pull us in.”

Kelly’s Olympian has a long history that began during Portland’s gilded age, in the early years of the last century when John Kelly and a group of partners opened the original saloon a few blocks away. It has been at its present location, Southwest Washington Street, between 4th and 5th avenues, since 1957.  “Olympian” has little to do with athletics, but was suggested by an old fellow named Brown who was an accountant for the Olympia Brewery in Tumwater, Wash., the brewery, as they did then,
bankrolling the saloon with the requirement it sell their beer.

For Kent and I, and for the dwindling denizens consumed by the years, booze and smoke, many of whom had their portraits over the bar, Kelly’s has been a holdout. Food from the kitchen has always been cheap, plain but good and filling; there was until recently a shoeshine stand and, opposite, in a kind of foyer, a classic old wooden cigar counter where the hardcore could buy their Camel straights.  For old time Kelly’s denizens, like the booth full of little ladies who regularly lunch over straight shots and beer, the very walls are steeped in “remember whens?”

It’s that way with Kent and I, remembering past achievements and failures, doing head counts of old friends and colleagues, the dead and walking wounded; stunned by how short a time it took us to evolve from youngsters to old men; how now we discuss aches, pains and dyspepsia, long past a
time either of us has been considered promising.  Change in our lives, inevitable of course, but then a change in Kelly’s that was like the Great Pyramid shifting ever so slightly. Ferns and an evolvement toward an atmosphere that some might interpret as “touchy feely”--though some derided the inclusion of a ladies loo. Then a disappearance of the cigar counter, the shoeshine stand, replaced by some tables where yuppies could look out on Washington Street, sip aperitifs and discuss their “relationships.”
 

(When I was a boy I overheard my uncle say there were more drunks on Washington Street than on Burnside, Portland’s traditional “skid road.”)

And the music? Awful. Loud and cacophonic, stuff that made us old-time denizens wince; spinning CDs, surely, that would cause John Kelly to spin in his grave.   Still, like the few remaining denizens around us, Kent and I endured, hoping for the best. That this might be as far as Kelly’s would take us into the future, that the past might still hide itself in remote corners--say back where the old retired guys used to gather and, for endless hours under layers of roll-your-own smoke, play Pan.

Kent and I were to meet there for lunch two weeks ago. A sunny day, I whistled down 4th Avenue in pleasant anticipation, having not seen Kent in a while. I rounded the corner onto Washington Street, passing beneath the big inflated octopus above the Greek restaurant, and noticed something strange:  Kelly’s neon light was out, there was old stuff on the street, debris; inside, work was going on, never a good sign.  Like a man sneaking up on a bomb, I approached the door and peeked in. There were motorcycles
parked inside--Motorcycles?! And a gutted interior, new zappy signs ready to mount, young men working with grim determination, dollar signs in their eyes.

I staggered against a parking meter in shock, only to see one of the little old ladies who lunched and drank standing there aghast. “My God! What are they doing to Kelly’s?"  “It is no more,” I said, and then to Kent, who had just arrived from the other corner. “the last good place is gone.”

And the little old lady left beneath a cloud of disappointment. And Kent and I walked off and up the street, wondering where we would go now; someplace where we could sit amid smoke and boozy laughter, where the ambiance was a welcome to drifty denizens and we could share conversations that began, “Remember when?”

©2003 Paul Pintarich