The Great American Saloon Series/Frenchy's of Roselle Park
Mysak, Joe
"The Great American Saloon Series/Frenchy's of Roselle Park" Witness the poor pilgrims who long to visit a good saloon. Not an impossible quest, this; but they do not want high prices, fake elegance, chic interior decor, radical politics, or Beautiful...
...The walls are half-paneled in authentic knotty pine, above which runs a continuous mural...
...The masterpiece revolves endlessly and many a patron has lost himself in its beauty...
...You can even wear your cleats inside...
...There is never an answer, so the query is ritual...
...There are a half-dozen plain tables, two glass-doored refrigerators for package goods, a jukebox, two televisions, a pool table, an electronic pinball machine, bowling shuffleboard, and two public telephones...
...summer Sunday slow-pitch softball team...
...For its ministrations, the Thursday Evening Club charges no fee, b u t the introduction of non-natives to Frenchy's is by invitation only...
...He is a consummate professional in a veritable frontier of amateurs...
...Just beer...
...Needless to say, the Club returns again and again to the scene of past revels...
...The official bartender to the Club is Danny Sullivan, a young man who has taken to bartending as, in ano'ther age, he might have taken to the priesthood...
...but they do not want high prices, fake elegance, chic interior decor, radical politics, or Beautiful People...
...The bar takes up half the room and is shaped like a racetrack...
...In its early days, when the members were mostly pink-cheeked delinquents, practice games were held on Thursday nights in back of a nearby high school, and sessions of beer guzzling naturally followed...
...It is the greatest spot in North America to drink beer--a judgment that must show how admirably suited I am to becoming Rosalynn Carter's speechwriter...
...What the pilgrims want is a beer hall of ample size, and this is rare indeed...
...Here we have the East Coast's largest refinery, an automobile assembly plant, a spectacular illegal chemical dump where rocket fuel, nitroglycerine, and God knows what else have been found, a nipple works, minor slums, rolling mills, and oak-shaded Victorian neighborhoods mixed in a fine suburban gumbo...
...No history, no relics on display, no priceless photographs on the walls, no archives, no memories of famous folk...
...The first activity of the AC's is softball...
...Over the bar hangs an illuminated, cask-shaped Budweiser ornament, featuring the Clydesdale-drawn beer wagon chased by a dog or two, in miniature...
...But the interior is fit for a beeriad, and claims no more...
...Which is why the Thursday Evening Club undertakes to initiate pilgrims such as these to Frenchy's, legendary beer palace of Union County, New Jersey...
...The brew must be: cold and cheap, in order to encourage the downing of heroic quantities...
...If asked, he will provide counsel...
...Not only that: It raises the batting average...
...The only thing the place lacks is a moosehead...
...Fill it again...
...It puts to flight tension, anxiety, and depression...
...The origin of the Club is murky, but under a different aegis, namely the Cranford AC (Athletic Club), it runs a Joe Mysak is an editor for the Access Daily News and Intelligence Service in New York City...
...And nothing is funny to the AC's unless it is worth repeating 8,000 times...
...They do not want a boutique bar--nor do they want a tiny corner bar, of the sort regularly appearing on network news shows as the natural habitat of American grassroots...
...a pitcher, three dollars, and the pitchers are of the large glass variety, not the smaller plastic models which seem to be gaining favor in certain quarters...
...The question is invariably raised: How do they breathe in there...
...Mugs of beer, pitchers of beer, kegs of beer, oceans of beer...
...From tile outside, Frenchy's resembles a brick bunker...
...P, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1980 25...
...Here is a Great American Thing, a brewer's objet d'art of the first order...
...It apparently depicts some mythical medieval landscape, replete with castles and forests...
...F r e n c h y ' s , in a stroke, foils all thc myths of health nuts, Naderites, and Communists...
...A typical July Thursday night crowd included, according to one AC, "300 guys, in a dozen different softball uniforms, and maybe five girls...
...For its purposes, the Club favors Pabst Blue Ribbon, with occasional draughts of the monkish yet tasty Cream Ale...
...A wide variety of beer in bottles is on ice, including the regional Rolling Rock...
...The first and foremost of their Thursday Evening Club's activities is beer drinking...
...Beer is beneficial, and absolutely meant to be consumed by the gallon...
...Frenchy's is in Roselle Park, on North Avenue, also known in quaint Jersey parlance as Route 28...
...The AC's have won three times as many games the days after beer fests than when stone-cold sober...
...nevertheless, there is the: fact...
...Union is the most quintessentially New Jersey county in the (;arden State, typifying an almost romantic 19th-century Dickensian sprawl...
...This would not seem to be the ideal spawning ground for a great saloon...
...A mug of Pabst is 40 cents...
...Cuisine runs to pizza and the local delicacy, Taylor ham and cheese on a toasted roll...
...A good place to say, as Mencken did saluting the end of Prohibition: "Not bad...
...Adversity, a sage once wrote, fuels the fire of artistic genius...
...This mural is the subject of ceaseless speculation: Some patrons claim it is in the style of John Sloan, or James Glackens, while others believe it to be the work of some WPA artist...
Vol. 13 • May 1980 • No. 5
