R Bar

is the one establishment I've had experience with (under 3 different names) over 2 (2 1/2?) decades. It came up in conversation today because Janett ran into an old friend and former owner at Target and he said he was reaquiring the bar and asked her to let any of the former clientele she ran into know the old management would be returning. His name is Stan, and he was the fourth owner in our experience there. He sold the bar 4 years ago to Ernie, the week-end disco guy, and we haven't been there since. Ernie's purchase of the bar was a small, but not insignificant, part of our detachment.

In the year and a half prior to his acquisition Ernie would DJ at the bar on week-ends, I wasn't sure why they needed a DJ since they had a pretty good juke box. Maybe because guys like to visit bars where girls hang out and girls like to dance and the girls couldn't dance to the music I'd play on the jukebox, so maybe it was all my fault.

But Janett missed the juke box music, too. And she would request Ernie play some of her favorites and was always disappointed. She had accepted that his hoochie mama dance retinue didn't include songs like John Deere Green or David Allen Coe classics like the Rodeo Song or You Never Even Called Me by my Name, but it didn't seem right not to be able to hear the Rolling Stones reminisce about The Girl with Faraway Eyes or Wild Horses. So I'd have to go over to Ernie a couple times a night and remind him he'd told Janett he was going to play some such song. We kind of got on each other's nerves.

When Ernie took over we assumed he'd like to attract a younger, maybe a more hispanic crowd, not native to West Dundee, but drawn from near-by towns, and we and a lot of the old patrons probably would not be missed. Also about that time we'd moved from Dundee to Elgin. We'd lived a short block from the bar in West Dundee and that contributed to our identification with the place. And about that time Janett's closest friend and partying partner, the wife of my good friend, became very ill and subsequently passed away. Then they made it illegal to smoke on the premises. So for a lot of reasons the bar lost our patronage, and we missed it less than we might have expected.

I've observed that the crowd frequenting a bar seems to turn over every five or so years, so in our 20 plus years I guess we'd gone through three or four generations, and I'd survived the shifts in pretty girls and young scrappers pretty much with my grand old man status in fact. I'd even given up the pool table for the Golden Tee Game. But even without the advent of the Ernie years, maybe I was beginning to feel like it wasn't really my place any more.

Still, we'll probably call a few friends and go back to congratulate Stan, and to lift a glass to Larry and Celia, the spirited 30 somethings who owned the bar. then the Scot's Inn, when we'd first dropped by. They sold the bar and moved west because Larry wanted to be an actor, and legend has it, Larry even got a part in a movie, The Banger Sisters, I think. The legend goes on that they were killed in a car wreck not long after. The movies credits identified Larry as "Man in bar" Fair enough.

PS I think Rule 1 in Stan's "How to Run a Bar" book would be to hire really pretty bartenders, so if you like really pretty bartenders drop in and see.
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