San Clemente-Not Even a Nice Place to Visit?
Bakshian, Aram Jr.
"San Clemente-Not Even a Nice Place to Visit?" Aram Bakshian, Jr. Vulgarity has always fasci- nated me. It's an easy interest to indulge—there's always so much of it around. But, occasionally, one...
...Which was one reason why I agreed to spend a month in San Clemente, the pastiest jewel in Southern California's tawdry diadem...
...she embroidered a miniature Douglas Bartholomew is a free-lance journalist in Princeton, New Jersey...
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...a small publication like The American Spectator will certainly not achieve a conservative summer but there is much that says that it is bringing a message of change...
...But that is another story...
...And, in some respects, discovering a little seaside town like San Clemente was like stumbling on an updated, animated, and oddly captivating Norman Rockwell exhibition in the heart of the French Riviera...
...Everything they say about Southern California is true...
...Old John McSorley cherished her friendship and regularly served her an ale on hot days...
...For me, at least, there are no such things as deep roots on enchanted isles...
...Item: On December 7th, a particularly shabby, phony-looking dummy at the "Long Beach Funhouse" was discovered to be a real corpse when one of its rotting hands fell off, revealing human bones rather than wire armatures beneath—the mummified remains of a small-time Midwestern train robber who, like so many Aram Bakshian, Jr...
...never was I more happy to return to the cold, sobering slush of winter Washington...
...I had been called there by a combination of business and duty...
...Box 877, Bloomington, Indiana 47401 PLEASE PRINT ^ New subscription ^ Renewal Zip X71 The American Spectator February 1978 27 relaxed families window-shopped along a main street that, aside from the sunshine and the plastic, was a mirror image of the idealized Middle America that everyone dreams about but that seldom, if ever, existed...
...Item: On December 6th, a gun-wielding Afro-American loon in a three-piece suit forced a janitorial hostage onto the roof of a downtown Los Angeles office building to "deliver an anti-smoking message to the world...
...Item: On December 8th, in nearby Ontario, Pomona, and Lancaster, authorities started digging up enough concealed arms and munitions to reenact the Mexican Revolution—hoarded by a deceased fundamentalist clergyman who apparently intended to be armed to the teeth when, to the sounding of the last trumpet, the real war to end all wars kicked off...
...The result was thirty days of outward seriousness and inward grinning, and a now unshakeable conviction that there must be life in outer space—and that it's probably less bizarre than what I saw in Southern California...
...But in fact, the first woman ever to drink at McSorley's was a guest willingly admitted to the tavern by the founding owner himself...
...A writer once described Old John as a "rather puritanical man," a teetotaler who insisted that "ale was strong enough spirits for any man...
...San Clemente Not Even a Nice Place to Visit...
...When Bill realized the utter gravity of what he'd done—he'd sold a drink to a woman—he let out a moan and a howl and began jumping up and down as if he'd been struck a blow with a shillelagh...
...and the unabashed openness and friendliness of the people of all ages,colors, and conditions paid tribute to a voluntary melting pot that seemed to work without giving off as many toxic social side effects as older communities in the East...
...Other women who chanced inside the bar received a different treatment from Old John, whose motto was "Good ale, raw onions and no ladies," the latter a condition, he believed, of peaceful, satisfyingly uninterrupted drinking...
...Needless to say, not even the ghost of Old John could hold back the forces of equality forever...
...True, it was on the heels of a much-publicized court battle that NOW successfully forced the admission of women to the pub in 1970...
...the important thing is that, regardless of the reason, fate drew me to San Clemente and Southern California for several weeks in December of 1976 and January of 1977...and I have lived to tell the tale...
...She was a goddamn woman...
...She was Mother Fresh-Roasted, a babbling old peanut-peddler who went from saloon to saloon on the Lower East Side hawking her wares direct from her apron, and who claimed her husband had died from the bite of a lizard in Cuba during the Spanish-American War...
...Galway-born Irishman John Coyne, now a McSorley's waiter, remembers that day...
...Admittedly, I did not visit San Clemente merely to write about it...
...he bellowed...
...Then she called theson of Old John, Bill McSorley, a chauvinist, proclaimed the equality of the sexes, and ran out...
...the lack of sidewalks so neatly complementary to the number of drunk-driving Marines careening back and forth between San Clemente and a neighboring base...
...It was the warm little touches that meant the most to me—the blast of rock music issuing from the open door of a funeral parlor on San Clemente's main drag...
...Weirdness, an old screenwriter friend had told me, is the most natural thing in that part of the world and, on the first few days of my visit, the regional kinkiness was in full flower...
...A cardboard Santa Claus, complete with sleigh and reindeer, baked impassively in the sun atop the San Clemente Inn, gazing calmly toward the desert as if anticipating the arrival of a good Christmas snow flurry...
...On a winter night in 1924, a feminist from Greenwich Village donned trousers, a man's topcoat, and a cap, propped a cigar midlips, and strode confidently into McSorley's...
...One year (ten issues) $10 ^ Two years $18 ^ Three years $25 ^ Payment enclosed ^ Please bill me "With its humor, idealism and charming style...
...In recent years prior to this occurrence, the entry of a member of the fair sex into McSorley's was heralded by the bar28 The American Spectator February 1978...
...Even the cab drivers (with the exception of one would-be political messiah who wanted California, under his leadership, to secede from the Union) seemed to be at peace with themselves and the world—and they are the ultimate stress barometer of any community...
...But it was not to be...
...the acne epidemic, no doubt fostered by consumption of large quantities of greasy "fast food," that seemed to have ravaged the usually sleek complexions of the town's numerous, nubile Mexican maidens...
...s essays and criticism appear frequently in The American Spectator, National Review, the Wall Street Journal, History Today, and other American and European periodicals...
...She ordered an ale, drank it, and thereupon doffed her cap, letting her long brown locks fall down about her shoulders...
...For a moment, I considered hitching a ride with them...
...the unpotability of the area's tapwater...
...American flag and gave it to him one Fourth of July as a memento of their friendship...
...In a quiet but uncertain tone, he refused their soprano-voiced demands for entry, but to no avail...
...He'd seen them coming from his guardpost at the door, and quickly threw the deadbolt in place...
...But, occasionally, one wearies of the Washington variety, so abundant and so predictable, and strikes out in search of a fresh vein of the stuff...
...Likewise, her admiration for him was unbounded...
...An old employer of mine—an eclipsed former public servant now working on his memoirs—had asked me to lend an editorial hand on some of the earlier pages of his opus...
...Please check the appropriate boxes and mail this form to: The American Spectator, Subscription Department, P.O...
...He had it framed and hung on the wall above his brass-bound ale tap, and there it remains to this day, a reminder of Mother Fresh-Roasted's special place in the 123-year history of McSorley's...
...As for women, well, suffice it to say that for Old John, who took his drinking seriously, they were already sufficiently spirited...
...If she persisted, he took her gently by the arm and led her off the premises with the admonishment, "Make haste, or I'll be obliged to forget you're a lady...
...He would rush forward to head them off and say, "Madam, I'm sorry, but we don't serve ladies...
...I'll probably never be sure, but I do know that, as I packed my bags to return East, a definite sense of relief swept over me...
...others before him, finally found fame, if not fortune, in California...
...Already, Southern California—and the city of San Clemente—had begun to weave their strange spell, Circe-like, on yet another East Coast swine...
...She was a woman...
...Smiling little old ladies with blue hair lounged under exotic palms...
...I immediately hid my cigars and went out in search of a bulletproof vest...
...Actually, it wasn't all that bad...
...Moments later, brandishing a copy of a newly-enacted city law and flanked by a sheepish pair of New York's finest, they burst through the front gates and swaggered across the sawdust-covered floor to down a few mugs of ale and gloat in their victory...
...Was it all just a little too good to be true, or am I still suffering from residualdeposits of Eastern jaundice...
...THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES by Douglas Bartholomew The Legacy of Old John and Mother Fresh-Roasted Women are not so much interested in actually drinking here as having the right to do so if they wish...
...Item: On the same day, perhaps reacting to all the bizarre happenings, the porpoises began swimming north...
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...A little bit of sunny paradise is all right, I suppose...
...Forty-six years after his son had been duped by the male-garbed feminist, the first brigade of dressed, skirted, pantsuited, and culotted patrons, representing the Syracuse Battalion of NOW, bellied up to the original mahogany bar to down a few cold ones and lay to rest Old John's most steadfast legacy...
...After all, this is an ale house and it takes a certain amount of stamina to down pints all evening long...
...onion soup the color and consistency of phlegm and reName Address City Statecycled port served up at a local "gourmet" restaurant...
...The soft pull of the desert breeze and the steady shimmer of the Pacific are not to be discounted, even by one who ordinarily feels more at home east of the Potomac than west of the Mississippi...
...And Disneyland, even more than New York, is a nice place to visit—but I definitely wouldn't want to live there...
...But perpetual summer palls fast...
...Daniel O'Connell Kirwan Present Owner McSorley's Old Ale House, Lower Manhattan The first female to enjoy the illicit and theretofore unfeminine pleasure of quaffing an ale at McSorley's Old Ale House, Manhattan's oldest tavern, was not, as many believe, a skirted member of Betty Friedan's National Organization for Women...
...Old John's taboo was broken on another occasion as well...
Vol. 11 • February 1978 • No. 4
