The Great American Saloon Series / Frazier's Taproom and Cathouse
Bartholomew, Douglas
"The Great American Saloon Series / Frazier's Taproom and Cathouse" by Douglas Bartholomew Deep within Baltimore's Hampden section, a squeaky-clean, mugger-less, working-class neighborhood, in the...
...Foul thought...
...The turf enclosed by the pen belonged to the German Shepherd in the photo hanging in the bar, except that the dog had grown and was now the size of a Buick...
...An off-duty waitress who'd had a couple too many was discussing aloud her choice of incarnation, should she be fortunate enough to receive a second chance in the hereafter...
...Right off he spotted me for a stranger and engaged me in friendly, if inquisitive, gab...
...I soon learned, however, that at Frazier's, cramped means cozy...
...Ah, I mused, a meteorite that fell near here...
...at Frazier's domestic beers are decanted from the can) minutes ago...
...Eight 50-pound bags of kitty litter were stacked outside the door of the cat-house...
...And if they don't, they'll ask you...
...I followed him out the door of the tavern to an adjacent building with a pen in back...
...They lay sprawled on soft fuzzy couches, or slept on the floor nestled in a deep tan shag...
...Before I could grasp the meaning of this apparent non sequitur, and, ultimately, fathom the reason for the inscrutable lump of black earth before me, the man responsible for it, and for the existence of the saloon itself, stepped up behind me...
...Frazier's crabs are still alive and snipping when he gets them, and his special crab-cake recipe is so good that one man reportedly consumed thirteen of the cakes at a single sitting...
...Like Frank, the outdoor-advertising (billboard space) salesman...
...Yet when there are customers to be looked after, he hops around the bar and between tables with the energy of a man half his age...
...Only a stuffed wood duck and a couple of deer head—a six-point buck and an eight-point shot by Frazier in the Pocono Mountains where he has a summer home—break the feline decorum...
...This is the only real cathouse in all Baltimore," Frazier commented when we were inside...
...The three-legged one whose amputation following an encounter with an automobile cost Frazier $500, Tripod...
...It had two plastic flowers sticking out of it, and it occupied a prime-time location atop the bar only inches from where a man might place his drink...
...Ritualistically and with practiced gusto, he took his seat beneath the TV...
...Christ, we were worried to death about him," said Herb, the insurance man...
...They live here, in this stately pleasure home Frazier decreed for cats, and cats alone...
...The beer smiled...
...Hugh Kenner, for one), for staff from the Baltimore Museum of Art, and for assorted lawyers, doctors, artists, and students...
...when I first learned of Arthur's existence on the planet...
...Tony had been notorious for his habit of retiring early, leaving his customers "on their honor"—meaning they were expected to honor his trust in them by leaving money for their drinks in a cigar box...
...A goodly number of Hampdenites and Baltimoreans had already descended on their favorite watering hole...
...And judging from the TV set hanging in the corner with a prognathous Mery Griffin on its screen and the mini-jukebox on the back wall playing some Al Jolson oldie-butgoodie, judging from the fact that Hampden's own mailman, insurance man, Cadillac dealer, fuel-oil dealer, and weekly newspaper editor were all here having their afternoon brews, judging from the fact that I was the only one at the bar who wasn't a regular and therefore wasn't known on a first-name basis—judging from all this, I had the feeling that Frazier's, without really trying, could be the classic neighborhood bar of them all...
...but at Frazier's the bar is no longer than a Grumman canoe, and I was having difficulty merely getting a hand on the gunnels...
...Purring, licking, scratching, watching, snoozing cats...
...There it sat, on the bar beneath the TV, a drinkerless glassful of beer patiently awaiting its owner while expressing only a few bubbles of condensation...
...A sigh of relief rippled around the bar...
...Now, numbers may not pose much of a problem in pubs where the bar is lengthy and offers plenty of elbow room for standees...
...Last year, Bud tells me, he put his daughter, Flossie, in charge of the bar and restaurant management...
...No one, not even Frazier himself, lives in this house with them...
...Over the years Bud added steaks and ribs—which he cuts himself—and fresh seafood, for which Frazier's is best known thanks to laudatory reviews from local food hacks...
...Dwight, the day cook...
...The one having a recent litter, Mama Cat...
...Somehow I managed to appropriate a miraculously vacant barstool, a seat so suspiciously empty that I knew something had to be wrong...
...Seconds seemed to linger like days...
...What makes this Baltimore saloonkeeper's love of animals (he also owns a German Shepherd whose color photograph hangs in the bar) so unusual is the extreme to which it is lavished...
...Everybody knows one another...
...The big tomcat was dubbed General Ike...
...THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES by Douglas Bartholomew Frazier's Taproom and Cathouse Deep within Baltimore's Hampden section, a squeaky-clean, mugger-less, working-class neighborhood, in the cellar of- a tidy, attractive row house at West 33rd and Elm, is a one-room tavern where the Michelob and the Jack Daniels and the Bloody Marys flow as freely and as steadily as the waters of the mighty Chesapeake...
...There I got the picture...
...The tables are tiny, the Douglas Bartholomew is a free-lance journalist in Princeton, New Jersey...
...Ten years later he quit the coal business and headed south for Florida to make his fortune...
...The only men I saw employed at Frazier's were in a decided minority: Don, the night bartender who mixes a mean cocktail...
...I was well into my fourth or fifth in a long line of draft Michelobs, which appeared regularly before me in frosted glass steins —courtesy of Barbara, the slender brunette behind the bar—when I noticed for the first time the tavern's most curious curio, a lump of anthracite coal the size of a volleyball...
...Later on, I was sitting at Frazier's bar, minding my Heineken's and munching the tasty underbelly of a soft crab, when someone mentioned Frazier's cats...
...Someone told me it takes a year of making one's presence known at Frazier's to qualify as a regular, but that once achieved, such status can be rewarding: You'll be treated like a king...
...I wasn't certain what he meant until we got to the living room...
...The American Spectator May 1978 23...
...She'd poured his beer (a sufficiently domestic brand...
...He shortened the bar to its present size to make room for tables and chairs...
...But that would be selling the place short...
...His father, a mine superintendent in Scranton, was killed in an auto accident when Bud was eleven, and the boy went to work in the mines to help support his family...
...I arrived at Frazier's shortly after noon on what certainly was one of the most intemperate Good Fridays on record...
...Finally, someone spotted the old bird on his way in...
...At first, Frazier's sold only beer, burgers, and hot dogs—it didn't even have a license to sell liquor...
...More than a dozen cats, too many to count because they were constantly in motion, filled the room...
...Another, with hair like a llama's and an uncertain ancestry, is called 'Coon Cat...
...Arthur's jacket and tie and pin-striped, red-and-white shirt looked so natty, I thought he must have put them on just for this occasion, his nightly visit to Frazier's...
...After a couple of false starts in the meat 22 The American Spectator May 1978 and grocery trades, he bought Tony Let-singer's Saloon, a rough-and-tumble stag bar with spittoons on the floor, guns and sabers on the walls, and fishnets draped across the back of the bar...
...Frazier's draws a nonlocal crowd, too...
...They are surrounded by photos, paintings, and sculptures of their likenesses, as if they had done their own decorating...
...Looking the rest of the place over, I noticed the bar isn't the only thing small about Frazier's...
...Had I dared to voice such blatant cacodoxy aloud, surrounded as I was by regulars in a saloon where regulars rule the roost, I have no doubt they would have thrown me to Frazier's cats like a piece of T-bone into a pool of barracuda...
...Its motto is the modest claim, bestowed by a Baltimore Sun food critic, "worth keeping to yourself...
...Thus uncomfortably ensconced, I rolled up my sleeves, eyed the barmaid squarely, and prepared to do battle with whatever legions of primeval elixirs she might place within my thirsty grasp...
...Take, for example, old Arthur...
...The all-black cat, Charlie Brown Watson...
...Frazier's Tap Room and Restaurant is a Baltimore institution whose specialties are fancy mixed drinks with exotic-sounding names (Khyber Pass, Gold Cadillac, Flossie's Special Dream Cocktail, etc...
...Secure, complacent, warm, happy, well-fed, fat cats...
...To make matters worse, the ceilinghalf-paneled and half-covered with some ersatz soundproofing material—is so low you can almost feel it pressing down on your head...
...fresh seafood prepared by the owner himself, and good conversation...
...Or, more ingeniously, perhaps the low-slung ceiling was no accident—could the anthracite be a souvenir of indigenous extraction...
...Flossie presides over a hardy, sweet-and-sour-tongued crew of females, many of them older, maternal women who habitually treat their customers the way most women treat their sons...
...Arthur is a retired executive of the Noxell Corporation, inventors of Noxema skin cream, Farrah Fawcett's fame, and the inane jingle, "the closer you shave...
...The barmaid was especially concerned...
...It was 4:35 p.m...
...When Bud Frazier asked if I'd like to visit his cathouse, I said I most certainly would...
...Frazier's cats are a sequestered phalanx of ex-stray, homeless, formerly ill or auto-stricken, three-legged or otherwise handicapped felines...
...Frazier said that each day, someone from the bar is assigned to feed and groom the cats and, if necessary, change their litter...
...Likewise, workers from the John D. Lucas Printing concern nearby and from other mills andplants in and around the Hampden area have adopted Frazier's and selfishly choose to "keep it to themselves...
...He's never this late...
...And I couldn't help thinking that this exNoxema "cream ya" exec looked more like the Old Spice type, or perhaps he'd been a closet Aqua Velva man in his day...
...He hadn't even shown his face and already they were talking about him, wondering what was causing his tardiness (a full five minutes), speculating on the chance he may have been a) hit by a car, or b) taken seriously ill, or c) worse...
...chairs modest, and the whole place couldn't hold more than fifty customers at once...
...But instead of employing religious canards to fatten his congregation, Frazier entices the wayward beasts with such powerful opiates as food, shelter, and affection...
...Who are you and what are you doing here drinking beer in Hampden's proud little pub...
...That's the way neighborhood bars should be: congenial, easygoing, their patrons ever-ready to demonstrate their loquaciousness to newcomers...
...With its stellar reputation as one of the finest seafood houses in a city renowned for them, it is a favorite dining and drinking spot for a group from nearby Johns Hopkins University (a Mr...
...A fat tosspot at the end of the bar said the coal "came out of Bud Frazier's lungs...
...Over the years he has collected this motley horde with the zeal of a soul-saving missionary in a land inhabited by cannibals...
...Each had a name, usually corresponding to its most pronounced physical trait...
...I'm going to knock on Frazier's door and let him take care of me...
...I declined a demonstration of his prowess as a watchdog, and we went inside the house...
...and, of course, Frazier himself...
...Intimate...
...The one that looked like Morris on TV was named Morris...
...Bud Frazier tells me the lump of coal is a black reminder of his years as a youngster in the coal mines in Pennsylvania...
...If I ever come back," she said, "I hope I come back as a cat...
...At the sight of Frazier behind me, they came loping up, like fat leopards, from all corners of the room, to lick his hand, rub against his trousered shin, plop like balls of fur at his feet...
...White cats, black cats, calicos, fat tabbies, slothful toms...
...Elmer Robert ("call me Bud") Frazier is 62, has black lung disease, is hard of hearing, walks with a stoop, and is supposed to be semi-retired...
...He never made it to Florida—Baltimore was as far south as he got before his money ran out—but he did just fine as a businessman, barman, restaurateur...
...The door swung open...
...After all, hadn't someone told me that Frazier recently denied a TV news crew's request to film the inside of his famous "cathouse" ? I felt honored...
...He comes here twice a week for lunch and a few cold ones...
...That's okay by me...
...And, had the little beggars a taste for booze, he would use that, too...
...No one knows how well or how poorly the honor system worked, but when Frazier took over in 1949, he renamed the place Frazier's Tap Room and threw out all of the "atmosphere" associated with Tony's that was not conducive to the warm, neighborhood effect he wanted...
...A quiet, pasty-faced little man entered, nodded to a couple of fellow patrons, and removed his hat and coat...
...In fact it was one of those stiff-backed, swivel-seat, naugahyde jobs that are about as friendly to the body as a dentist's chair...
Vol. 11 • May 1978 • No. 7
