The Great American Saloon Series / Richard's City Club
Eastland, Terry
THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES by Terry Eastland Richard's City Club When Richard D. Levy of 201 Summit Avenue, Greensboro, North Carolina decided to renew the inner city in 1970, he had...
...But Richard's City Club would not be what it is, would not be a Great American Saloon, without the saving remnant, always the bar's steadiest clientele, and Richard himself...
...Williams is nothing if not an ambivalent figure--"more the Peeping Tom and the gossip," says Ousby, than the disinterested solver of mysteries...
...THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES by Terry Eastland Richard's City Club When Richard D. Levy of 201 Summit Avenue, Greensboro, North Carolina decided to renew the inner city in 1970, he had the good sense to go three doors down, to 221 Summit Avenue, to establish his own tavern...
...Richard's other downtown projects have failed, but the once seedy tavern on Summit Avenue has prospered, becoming no less than a Great American Saloon...
...On October 1 it gave orders...
...Such was the man whom multitudes mourned after Doyle hurled him over the Reichenbach Falls...
...The dimensions of Holmes' greatness are just as evident from Charles Higham's brisk and cheerful recounting of Conan Doyle's slightly bizarre career...
...it would henceforth be "Richard's City Club," named of course for Richard, b u t also in ironic commentary upon the Greensboro City Club, a fashionable place three blocks uptown to which almost all of Richard's crowd's parents belonged...
...On a sunny afternoon, you can play croquet on the green in front of Richard's...
...Doyle's publisher, the Strand magazine, received more than 20,000 cancellations...
...the perfect gentleman hero, the embodiment of the values and aspirations of the contemporary middle-class public," as well as "a solitary crusader on behalf of the weak and helpless individual...
...By the time of Dickens, the police were on a public relations upswing, thanks to their increasing professionalism...
...Dickens celebrated them as heroes, although his Inspector Bucket, in Bleak House, has his share of human frailties...
...But so was the age growing cruder...
...Following his literary resurrection a decade later, Holmes became a cruder type, Ousby feels...
...All that cocaine-taking and world-weariness...
...It casts a wholly new light on the man who created the most beloved detective of all time--by showing how far he rose above those who went before him...
...Jefferson Davis' birthday you want remembered...
...O. Max Gardner, for example, a former Governor's grandson, can fill you in on Democratic Party politics...
...Ousby has made it his business to sniff out the changing social perceptions of detectives throughout the 19th century in England...
...Naturally, this group enjoyed its beer, but often someone would hold forth, like the former baseball pitcher from High Point, who would just as soon discourse on Nock's idea of Pantagruelism as on subjects like "Country Music and Self-Pity...
...Thus, if you want conversation, The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977 33 Richard will oblige, or should he be absent, you can seek out one of his circle...
...Alas, the fiction of the '70s and '80s tossed the detective off his throne as "minor cultural hero"--a reward for widely publicized failures by the real-life police...
...Predictably, as more people have come to Richard's, more beer has been drunk, less cerebration has taken place, the Boardroom has had fewer occupants, fewer magazines have there been found, and Pantagruelism has been replaced by womanizing and politicking...
...Yet who looks nowadays at 34 The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977...
...an angry letter writer snarled at Arthur Conan Doyle one day late in 1893...
...Thus Richard, a young entrepreneur and politician, could repair from work to drink to home, in short enough order to go back to drink and to drink and to drink, without it ever crossing his mind that he wasn't also at home...
...At all events, it cannot have done Sherlock's reputation much harm, for the "brutalized Watsons" (such as Bulldog Drummond and Richard Hannay) and the Holmesian imitations that followed have failed to displace him...
...For only a century earlier, as Ian Ousby demonstrates in Bloodhounds of Heaven, the English detective had been a figure scorned and despised...
...Sergeant Cuff may have been "the perfect detective" for T.S...
...The man he spies on is his own employer...
...Especially could they be the underwriters later on, when Richard introduced a weekly Hamburger night and a monthly Lobster night...
...In keeping with its tradition, Richard's at least does have the editorial pages of the Greensboro Record and the V/all Street Journal well within reach, and a keen soul can always procure a copy of this humble monthly on request...
...Scions of the area's best families, these young lawyers and businessmen happened to be interested in ideas...
...Although he may have had his hopes back in 1970, Richard probably had no idea that his bar would achieve such status...
...Or you can just be alone, stuck in the corner table with your choice of tune ringing from the juke box, beer, and the gratis popcorn at an elbow...
...The membership fee, in effect, opened up Richard's City Club to folks outside Richard's circle, who, if they didn't have a clue about Albert Jay Nock, could at least enjoy several drafts of beer a week, thus underwriting the bar's rent and overhead...
...Of course, if you'd rather play pinball, you can try the machine in the back or the one up front, with the club ready to give you free games for sufficiently high scores...
...The new name thus ratified the genial elitism that Richard and his group had brought to the old Flamengo...
...Lobsters and hamburgers, in fact, well symbolized the bar's gradual transformation into a mixed regime, a jovial blend of young aristocrats and young average citizens...
...What a thundering irony...
...Returning to town in August of 1974, Richard found his saloon an absolute wreck...
...This was a Terry Eastland is on the editorial staff of the Greensboro [North Carolina] Record...
...Wilkie Collins, in that first fullblown English detective novel, The Moonstone, dealt affectionately with Sergeant Cuff, whom T.S...
...He was equated with the government spy and often rightly suspected of profiting from the same crimes he professed to be combating...
...Eliot would call "the perfect detective...
...Consequently, they started the "Boardroom," a reading room in the back of the bar filled with every conceivable magazine, including National Review and the New Republic, American Opinion and Triumph...
...Or you might be fortunate enough to run into a garrulous foreign celebrity, the publisher Baron Von Kannon, who's been known to duck into Richard's, posturing as a dogooding reformer...
...And frankly, Richard didn't have much to work with, save his own image...
...Thus Richard's, a Great American Saloon smack in the downtown, such as it is, of Greensboro, North Carolina...
...BOOK REVIEW Bloodhounds of Heaven: The Detective in English Fiction from Godwin to Doyle IanOusby / Harvard / $10.00 The Adventures of Conan Doyle Charles Higham / Norton / $9.95 William Murchison "You beast...
...What barbarous offense had been perpetrated by this inoffensive writer of light entertainments for the public prints...
...He had, after all, the task of recreating the place, then called the Flamengo, according to his own image...
...Individual troublemakers were banned, and the bar, which Richard deemed only an avocation, began opening at irregular hours...
...There are stretches in his rather brief (194 pp...
...Nevertheless, few bars could ever hope to survive as intellectual or high cultural centers, and bars that intense are rarely worth a drink anyway...
...Higham's bibliography lists 82 different books of fiction, military history, drama, poetry, and spiritualism published by Doyle between 1888 and 1930...
...Today more than 300 swell the membership lists at Richard's, among them half the city's young lawyers and pols and journalists, several artists and dancers, a few ne'er-do-wells, a number of professional women, and a couple of loose ones...
...It was left to Holmes, who first appeared in 1887, finally to upgrade and stabilize the detective's reputation...
...Especially Richard...
...They plainly reflected prevailing public attitudes toward the police--a body that in Williams' day (1794) was much looked down on...
...Or you can settle down to table tennis, or backgammon, or poker, or even Scrabble...
...Numerous Londoners paraded about town in mourning...
...he wrote while waiting in lines, while traveling, while doing virtually anything, and from his writing he made a lot of money...
...Two years of too many ruckuses, however, the final act being an attack on Richard's very life and limb, persuaded the young owner to change the Flamengo's ways...
...He was the world's only consulting detective, and a gentlemen to boot--altogether a fitting hero for late Victorians in their middlebrow moods...
...He becomes progressively more Watson-like, more charming and personable...
...Ousby's book, originally a Harvard Ph.D...
...A Republican esteemed enough at age 29 to be a trustee at North Carolina A&T, he can hold forth on any topic and move among an evening's customers with consummate ease...
...He had murdered Sherlock Holmes by tipping him over the Reichenbach Falls, that is what he had done...
...and he has a point...
...Doyle, though trained as a medical doctor, was a compulsive writer...
...In those hours, fortunately, Richard and a dozen or so of his best friends convened for beer and conversation...
...Eliot, but for almost everyone that niche belongs to Holmes...
...Apparently, though, only with Bud or its equivalent does an urban renewal project succeed...
...Richard, at heart a nice guy, tried to maintain the Flamengo as basically its country bar self, which was almost incidentally a place where his cronies could drop in...
...book as boring as the moors ranged over by the Hound of the Baskervilles--as for example Ousby's scrutiny of William Godwin's forgotten novel, Caleb William Murchison is on the editorial staff of the Dallas Morning News...
...But what else should one expect of Richard's ? Nothing is spared in order that members might have the gentle repose they seek...
...Across the short front wall of this domino-shaped tavern ~tand plenty of lockers for liquor...
...Williams, a book no modern reader in his right mind would open...
...Granted that the early Holmes displayed "overtones of Decadence...
...A point that Ousby emphasizes is that fictional detectives existed in no social vacuum...
...dissertation, makes good reading, not just for Sherlockians but for detective story buffs of all shadings and persuasions...
...but now it could neither be what it might easily have become, sans the Flamengo rift-raft: a beery preserve for young Greensboro patricians...
...The change in name, of course, wasn't the only one that October...
...But this he did, not because he was a better policeman than Bucket, but because his creator, in a gesture that would have gladdened the heart of Murray Rothbard, set him up in competition with the state lawenforcement monopoly...
...crowd much different, of course, from ones in the Flamengo's earlier days, and much different, obviously, from ones at other bars around town...
...but more importantly, the membership fee settled once and for all the sort of club Richard's would be...
...State law forbids liquor by the drink, but this hurdle doesn't stop regulars at Richard's, which has, of course, a brownbagging license...
...No longer would the bar be called the Flamengo...
...Gradually, the bar became a break-even concern, all Richard ever wanted it to be...
...Had he been born in Georgian instead of Victorian England, Holmes would have had a prodigiously hard row to hoe...
...Never, of course, could it at all resemble the old Flamengo...
...A capitalist and thus a democrat when the subject is dollars, Richard was so disturbed at running a deficit in this, a sideline enterprise, that he and his board inaugurated a truly brilliant change: they began charging yearly membership fees ($5 in 1974, $10 in 1975) to Richard's...
...Holmes, says Ousby, exerted a scientist's control over the physical world...
...Thanks be to Richard and the saving remnant, who wisely understood that ideas have consequences, but more wisely fathomed that good times, spiked with beer, have much more immediate ones...
...And yet how is it possible fully to understand and appreciate Holmes without first knowing something of Williams, who was the first English fictional detective...
...Well, yes, now every Tuesday night...
...It was no mere fictional character who had perished--it was a national hero...
...The Flamengo had been a watering hole for Lumbee Indians and quasi-gunfighters and their horses, acquiring through the years a reputation statewide for meanness and raucousness...
...That is clearly what Ousby would have us wonder...
...or Jim Burnley, the chairman of the county Republican Party, can do same from his perspective...
...Things, even urban renewal, go better with Bud...
...Country musicians, you ask for...
...Consequently, Richard organized from the remnant a board of directors to chart a new course for the Flamengo...
...Though Richard tried to oblige as many of the Flamengo's old ruffians as possible, even a few rowdies proved too many...
...But this is played down in the later tales...
...All right, next Lobster night will honor his birthday...
...It was only natural that Caleb should be looked down on, too...
Vol. 10 • January 1977 • No. 4
