Bottoms Up!

The Green Door.  That was the name of the one and only college bar located about one and a half miles from the small liberal arts college I attended in the early 1980s.  There wasn't much to the place back then-by the time I started hanging out there the dirt floor had been upgraded to wood.  There were stories passed on about the guy who found a hole in the floorboards, stuck his hand in it and fished out a bottle of Bud.  Of course, no one ever knew the name of that guy.

The Door, as it was known, didn't have tables.  There was one long bar that stretched pretty much the length of the building and enough open space to house a small standing room area, a ping pong table, and two pool tables.  By late in the evening the ping pong table became a huge bench for drunken conversations.

Drinks were cheap and the owner was accepting of all kinds of payments.  I wrote more than one five-dollar check to the owner to pay for my night of drinking.  Yes, I said a five-dollar check--drinks were cheap back then.

On a recent trip back to the area my sister (who was apparently known to walk on top of the bar to move from one conversation to another when it got too crowded) and I stopped in for a nostalgic look-see.  It was early on a Saturday afternoon- the college kids were back on campus- so it wasn't quite the crowd scene I remembered from my younger days. 

Jeen and I posted up to the bar and ordered 2 Miller Lites.  We looked around and took note of the changes that had taken place over the years.  Really, it wasn't much.  The bathrooms were a little nicer and the ping pong table was gone. 

But the same old beer smell, the smell that permeated many a sweatshirt of mine back in the day, was still lurking in the air.