Welcome back to Thebeerchaser. If you are seeing this post through an e-mail, please visit the blog by clicking on the title at the top to see all of the photos so the narrative is not clipped or shortened. 

This post is about two outstanding guys and an excellent dive bar with a friendly and memorable bartender. The topic begs for some editorial digressions so you will see one or two additional posts which allow me to wander.

Before I tell you about the bar, let me tell you why I admire the two friends who Beerchased with me.

David Dickson

I’ve known David since about 1991 – both of our daughters went to grade school together and on Father-Daughter Hikes for years on numerous Oregon wilderness trails.  These continued during the girls’ high school years.

They included reaching the summit of the 10,363 foot South Sister in the fall of 1997, when the girls were about 12 and 13 years old.

The moms of this group would argue that the Mom-Daughter Book Club during these same years, will have a more lasting impact on these now fine young women. 

The girls will never forget the memory of hiking out from our camp on the slope of the South Sister by flashlight, the sight of a mouse which drowned in our pot of coffee left out overnight or the penetrating nasal-cleansing smell of the latrine at the head of the Jefferson Park Trail.

I submit that these will yield a more substantive legacy than discussion of the passage of Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March from childhood to womanhood in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.  (External photo attribution at end of post #1 – #2)

David is a Stanford grad where he came close to being a right-handed pitcher on The Cardinal freshman baseball team, but washing dishes for tuition and beer money won out. 

His subsequent career as a Development Director in higher-education and long-term civic civic contributions are considerably more notable than his earned-run average would have been in Palo Alto…..

I admire David for his perpetual optimism, his concern for the homeless (to be discussed in the next post) and his spirit of high adventure such as shown while he was demonstrating his skill at Big Buck Hunter while Beerchasing with Adam Davis and me at Portland’s Belmont Inn in 2013.

His venturous enthusiasm led him to solo exploration of far-flung regions after college and before graduate school at the University of Oregon.

He traveled through Central America (Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Costa Rica) and South America (Columbia, Venezuela, Equator and Peru). To my knowledge he was not involved in any insurgencies or surreptitious attempts to tamper with voting machines in Venezuela. 

I asked David about his post-Stanford adventures and enjoyed his response:

“After getting my BA at Stanford in 1972, I spent two years as a VISTA volunteer/community organizer in Cherokee County, Oklahoma.  When I returned, I took off with a loaded backpack and $800 in travelers checks, purchased with the money I had saved from VISTA. 

My transport was 3rd class bus (accompanied by chickens and machetes); hitchhiking on the back of pickups and getting lost in the Andes; hitchhiking on merchant ships, hiking when no-one would pick me up and flying once from Panama City to Colombia.

I probably stayed in hotels about 4 nights total (some flea infested), but generally set up my tent in people’s yards or nearby hills or stretched out my sleeping bag in bus depots.”

He showed this same wanderlust on our Father-Daughter hikes which is why we usually had him walk at the end of our group rather than lead it.

Matt Love

Although I only met Matt in person in 2021 while Beerchasing at the wonderful Falls View Tavern in Oregon City with Jim Westwood – a former Beerchaser-of-the-Quarter, and like Matt Love and me, a fellow Oregon City High School graduate.

Among other traits, I admire Matt for his meaningful and ongoing efforts to help the homeless and downtrodden, his deep love for canines, his perseverance in the face of hardship, his creativity and dedication as a former high school teacher. 

Last, but certainly not least, he’s a fellow-letterman in basketball for the Pioneers at OCHS – a number of years after me, but it should be noted that his team did not win the TYV Title and go to the State Tournament……

But my feeling of kinship with Matt originated in 2012 when I came across his blog “Let it Pour.net”  – right after I started my Beerchasing hobby and was researching dive bars on the Oregon Coast.

“Let it Pour” originated as a popular column in Hipfish Monthly, an alternative magazine in Astoria on the north Oregon Coast. He maintained his blog from 1999 to 2011 and unfortunately a number of the watering holes he chronicled are no longer in business.

But Matt’s descriptions will live on as he is a keen observer of both the ambiance of dive bars and the interactions that take place among the patrons – he’s an expert in describing those in entertaining style. 

Matt is a prolific and talented author and now owns a small Astoria publishing house he founded in 2003 – The Nestucca Spit Press.  You’ll hear more about Matt’s books in the next post The only problem I have with Matt’s prose is that it forces me to highlight many paragraphs so I can come back and quote his stuff (with attribution, of course!)

The descriptions in his books of emotional interactions sometimes bring tears to my eyes. His bar chronicles were a key factor in motivating me to pursue my Beerchasing adventures, which have continued for over twelve years.

This guy is a master of observation – not only human relationships, but the trappings and character(s) of these dives. He coined the term “Oregon Tavern Age” (OTA)

Matt spent hours in bars converting the notes he took “jotting down observations with a pencil on a golf score card” and his conversations with the regulars into a captivating collection of stories and anecdotes with great graphic illustrations – “courtesy of his ex-wife.”

For example this one from a bar – Pitch’s East – a dive in Port Orford:

“One day, many years ago, a woman sat in Pitch’s Tavern in Port Orford. She saw a horse drinking beer from a saucer on the counter.  On another visit, she saw a live boxer crab holding an unlit cigarette in one claw and a glass of beer in the other.”

Take this one which made me check out the Old Oregon Saloon in Lincoln City as one of my first Coast dives – “Where Friends and Family Meet.”  It was a great bar and I have returned many times:

“(It’s) a damn fine gritty place to drink beer – a lot of beer….The regulars call it The Old O and after spending time there over the years, I feel it is not too outrageous to suggest the nickname stands not only for The Old Oregon Tavern in Lincoln City — which it does — but really some of the patrons’ last long ago orgasm.  Maybe in the Johnson Administration.”

Now I know that Matt, who coaches writers, would advise against excess, but indulge me, because these are so good, I love to share them – so just two more brief ones – both from the Sportsman’s Pub and Grub in Pacific City.

It’s justified.  After all for a number of  years, Matt served as the watering hole’s “Writer in Residence.”

“A man blasted through the door and obliterated the tavern’s somnolent mood.  His hair was feathered….and perfect.  He appeared anywhere from 40 to 70 years old.  Many years later, I coined the phrase ‘Oregon Tavern Age’ or ‘OTA’ to describe the condition….

The man’s name was Larry or Wayne, both solid OTA names.  He sat down with us at the bar.  He was loud.  I struck up a conversation with him and learned he had $10,000 in cash stuffed into his pants pocket…..

He had cashed a check the previous afternoon – a settlement from an injury suffered in an automobile accident and was ready to party down – hard.  He bought the house a round, screamed an encouraging profanity, and then bolted out the door.”

Lastly:

“So the story goes, a veteran patron requested that upon his death, he wanted his wake held in the tavern. Well, the old timer dies, he was cremated, and of course the management obliged him. 

So his drinking buddies crowded in the men’s bathroom, hoisted their pints for a second…and flushed his ashes down the toilet.  Top that drug testing, antiseptic, bottom line, unfunky, God fearing, screaming baby, corporate brewpubs!”     

But What About Jake’s Place?

I  have more to tell you about both David Dickson and Matt Love and our discussions while Beerchasing which involve some significant Portland issues.   

Also why Jake’s Place is a bar you should visit and more importantly, why you should talk to Cassie, the Bartender.  (By the way, I’ll relate why I initially thought Matt made a mistake when he named the bar where we should meet).

But that will wait for the next post.  Stay tuned.

Cheers!

External Photo Attribution

#1.  Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Outhouse_1.jpg)  Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.  Author: Steinsplitter  11 July 2016.

#2.  Public Domain – Wikimedia Commons (Houghton AC85.Aℓ194L.1869 pt.2aa – Little Women, title – Little Women – Wikipedia)  This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or fewer.  Author: Louisa May Alcott – Source: *AC85.Aℓ194L.1869, Houghton Library, Harvard University”