Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, June 29, 1995 TAG: 9506290017
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAN CASEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
MARIE Crowder was in the kitchen mixing chicken salad for the lunch crowd that day. It was midmorning, and The Coffee Pot on Brambleton Avenue hadn't yet opened.
A married couple from Norfolk was passing through town on their way home from a vacation.
The obviously pregnant woman was feeling poorly.
"This couple comes in, and she says, `I know you're not open, but could we please come in here and get something to drink, maybe set awhile?'" Crowder recalls.
Why sure, she obliged.
The next thing she knew, the lady was in labor. Acute, this-baby's-gonna-be-born-any-minute labor.
Crowder and the husband carried the woman into the restaurant's dance hall and put her on a table.
Minutes later, before paramedics could get there, the woman gave birth to a baby girl.
"I tied off the umbilical cord with dental floss - there was nothing else to use," Crowder recalls. "The baby went to the hospital wrapped in tea towels."
On the way out the door with the ambulance crew, "the husband shouted back, `what are your names?' I said, 'Marie Louise.'''
Crowder never found out what happened to the baby or her parents.
But someplace, she believes, there's a now-middle-aged woman named Marie Louise whose mother's water broke unexpectedly in a little, log-ribbed roadhouse on the edge of Roanoke.
A legion of yarns
Baby Marie Louise - if that is indeed her name - was born sometime in the mid-1950s. Crowder, the young short-order cook turned emergency midwife, is now 65 years old.
Her tale is just one in a legion of yarns about The Coffee Pot, a watering hole for generations of Roanokers, where friendships blossomed, romances kindled, and probably a few livers were ruined.
Now, the bar and restaurant is nearing its 60th birthday and is seeking official status as a National Historic Landmark.
"It's already a landmark," says owner Carroll Bell, whose family bought The Coffee Pot in 1979. "But it's unofficial. I think it deserves official recognition."
Helen Hill, a local preservation planner, agrees. She's launched the landmark designation effort by filing papers with the state Department of Historic Resources.
Bell and Hill are seeking Coffee Pot memorabilia, old photos and stories about the building and its former owners that can be used to support documentation in their final application.
There is little question that The Coffee Pot is distinctive.
Besides its vertical-log architecture, one of its most notable features is the giant red coffee pot looming above Brambleton Avenue from the southwest end of its roof.
It's a classic example of road-style signage from the 1930s that dotted America's landscape.
Back then, many buildings incorporated advertising into their design. Most were on main roads to towns and cities. Unfortunately, many of them were torn down as the roads were widened or replaced by highways.
"Another thing that makes the The Coffee Pot so unusual is what it is: a roadhouse," Hill says. "It goes back to the 1930s, and it's still being used as it originally was. Most roadhouses are gone. If they're still there, they aren't being used as what they originally were."
Back in those days, there were two kinds of roadhouses, depending on whether there were small cabins out back for romantic rendezvous.
"Some of them were `nice' roadhouses. Others ... were `bad' roadhouses," Hill says. Exactly which class The Coffee Pot falls into is still in some dispute.
There were a number of small cabins behind the bar. Only one, which is now a hair salon, remains.
Some people swear that the original operator, a Mrs. Brown, never would have tolerated hanky panky in the huts, Hill says. But some Coffee Pot regulars say it's so.
Developer Dave "Mudcat" Saunders, a regular at the bar since the 1960s, says he's always heard the cabins were frequented by local judges and their mistresses.
"They were shack-up cabins during the Second World War," insists Bill Arnold, who's frequented the bar for 40 years. "Plain and simple, that's what it was."
From `society music' to rock 'n' roll
By most accounts, The Coffee Pot was built in 1936 by Jack Kefauver. Hill says it may have been earlier.
That makes it younger than the Hotel Roanoke, another establishment seeking designation as a historic landmark, but older than the Mill Mountain Star, Victory Stadium or the Roanoke Regional Airport.
Roanoker Homer Clemens recalls the construction well: He was a kid at the time who helped cut and skin the pine logs used in the building's facade and superstructure. As he describes it, the operation was as rustic as the dance hall's log trusses.
"I was working for 25 cents a day, and we cut those logs out at Bill Grisso's farm," Clemens recalls.
"It was late in the spring or early in the summer. It must have been, because I got covered with pine pitch. Bill had two big old Roman horses - Doll and Dan. We hooked them to a wagon and hauled those logs down there. I used a drawing knife to skin them."
A couple named Brown - nobody can recall their first names - were the first operators. Back then, The Coffee Pot was a beer joint outside town where locals used to drive for drinking and dancing.
Harold LeGrande bought the restaurant in 1944. LeGrande had left town at age 17 with $2 in his shoe and a hankering for the big city. In New York he took a fancy to "classy" nightclubs such as Sans Souci and the Latin Quarter.
A few years after he returned, he bought The Coffee Pot and turned it into one of Roanoke's first modern nightclubs, booking live music. He Combos played what was known as "society music," classical jazz and tunes from Irving Berlin and George Gershwin. Many of the patrons came in ties and jackets.
LeGrande closed the nightclub on Mondays so churches and community groups could hold meetings there. Disputes with neighbors were rare, but one area minister objected to the bar's freely flowing beer (which cost 10 cents for a draft).
"A minister came to give Harold a speaking-to," his widow, Evelyn LeGrande, recalled on the bar's 50th anniversary in 1986.
"Harold said, `Reverend, I'll make a bargain with you: If you don't sell beer, I won't preach.'''
LeGrande sold the bar in 1956. Ownership changed five times until Bell bought it Jan. 1, 1979.
In the 1970s, The Coffee Pot began developing a reputation as a local hot spot for rock 'n' roll, blues and the odd country musician. Its bar area is dotted with 8x10 photos of big- and small-time rockers who've played there.
When it was featured on a music show on cable TV's USA Network a few years ago, "I got calls from people all over the country," Bell said. Because the show was repeated 10 times, "I figure we got exposure in about 100 million homes."
The Vikings, a popular local band that evolved into the band Roanoke before going national, got its start at The Coffee Pot.
Willie Nelson showed up for an impromptu jam session one night after his show at the Roanoke Civic Center in 1978. According to legend, he was charged the $5 cover just like everybody else.
Allman Brothers guitarist Dickie Betts hauled most of that band - minus the Allmans - to the nightspot.
Other big names who've played there include Johnny Copeland; the Dixie Allstars; Mighty Joe Young; Richie Havens; New Riders of the Purple Sage; Savoy Brown; Wet Willie; and Matt "Guitar" Murphy, the lead guitarist for the Blues Brothers.
The Nighthawks, a Washington rock and blues band that plays big and small venues up and down the East Coast, still makes a couple of stops at The Coffee Pot each year.
The club has seen its share of rock 'n' roll also-rans.
Root Boy Slim, a now-deceased rocker whose outrageous act got him banned from a number of college towns, played the Coffee Pot in the late 1970s. Slim's distinctive trademark was to barf on stage at the finale of his best-known tune, "Boogie 'Til You Puke."
Another is the Rev. Billy C. Wirtz, a rockabilly pianist with a mail-order divinity degree. He sings songs like "Mennonite Surf Party" while banging his keyboards with a sexual appliance.
Louisiana musician Bill Wharton's gimmick was to cook up an onstage pot of jambalaya during his act.
Over the years, The Coffee Pot has undergone countless revisions.
A kitchen was added on back. A pool table was installed in the old kitchen. And the front door has changed a number of times. Regulars say it's nicer than 20 years ago. For instance, the smell of sour beer is gone.
But its walls are still dotted with hand-lettered signs, headache powders and a hodgepodge of tavern paraphernalia, some of it old, some new.
Bell says he's selling less liquor and beer than ever now - and more food. His daily lunch buffet attracts a steady flow of customers beginning around noon. He's open until midnight Sunday through Thursday and until 2 a.m. Friday and Saturday.
The poll-hustling scene
The number of Coffee Pot stories, it seems, is about equal to the number of people in the Roanoke Valley - squared.
Some are heartwarming. Others are hilarious. A few verge on scandal.
Bootie Chewning of Vinton remembers hanging out at The Coffee Pot with a gang of friends in the mid-1950s and early 1960s.
"I can remember my mother talking about going to The Coffee Pot," she says wistfully. "So many crazy things happened there. So many people fell in love there - whether it was for a night or forever."
There's one tale about a former owner who died of a heart attack while snuggled up in his sleeping bag during a fiddlers convention. According to the legend, he wasn't alone in the bag - and the other woman wasn't his wife.
In the late 1950s, a group of Roanoke-area Korean War veterans chose the place as their local hangout. For sport, they held impromptu shooting matches in the bar, blasting away at its wooden logs with rifles and handguns.
"We put a target on the big log over there," says Bill Arnold, who sold insurance, counseled veterans, and helped run political campaigns from a seat at the end of the bar for the better part of four decades.
"We had M-1s [rifles], .45 pistols," he said. "We were pros. We knew what the hell we were doing. But that didn't stop the neighbors from going apeThe Coffee Pot was also the scene of some heavy duty pool-hustling back in those days, Arnold says. It wasn't unusual for $500 to change hands over a single game.
"I'll never forget this one night, this guy - he must have weighed 350 pounds - pulled up in this big old Cadillac," Arnold says. "He was such a hotshot he had this boy carrying his pool cue for him.
"He walks in the bar, and announces he's a hustler. And he says he would take anybody in town on. Well, I got on the phone and made some calls, and before long, we got $10,000 together. One by one, he took us on. He cleaned us out."
Arnold also recalls scores of fights and arrests over the years. He says he personally watched as a couple of patrons drove their cars through the front door.
Saunders, a former sports writer for the Roanoke Times & World-News, remembers the bar as the center of Roanoke's counterculture scene in the 1960s and early 1970s.
"I had my first drink here, and I was drunk here every day for 14 years," he boasts. The binge ended a dozen years ago, when Saunders quit drinking. But he still shows up for lunch a few times a week.
A lot of things have changed over the years. The bar that was once out in the boonies is now surrounded by commercial sprawl, and the city has annexed the area.
For a while, liquor by the drink boosted business. But most of the really wild days are past, Arnold says with a tinge of regret.
"The bar business is really cleaned up now. This is a place people come to socialize, but they also bring their children, to show them off. It's kind of strictly a family bar."
by CNB