The OX was open 24 hours a day.  The bar was open from 8 a.m. to 2 a.m. and food was served 24 hours a day.  The OX’s claim to fame was Brains & Eggs and listed on the Menu, as ‘He needs em.’

All the food served was based on the maximum daily requirement for grease.  The food was prepped in the kitchen downstairs and brought up as needed for daily food grease diet.  The menu consisted mainly of hash browns and gravy, fried eggs, pancakes, hamburgers (no fries), toast, steak, and more hash browns and gravy, and double triple helpings of more hash browns and gravy.

The college kids used to come in after the bars closed on Friday and Saturday night and order the hash browns and gravy for $.99.  The dinner plate was literally filled to the edges with hash browns and brown gravy.  The look…ouch…the smell…ugh!  Color me on a diet!

Paul, a graveyard cook, could toss an egg up to the ceiling with just enough velocity to crack the egg, catch the egg on its downward fall and deftly crack it onto the grill.  He was a real crowd pleaser with the drunken, hash brown and gravy crowd and received a standing ovation on some nights.  He lapped the applause up like a cat goes for fresh cream.

There were a lot of Old Timers that practically lived at the OX, the ones that played poker knew my dad from years before.

Remember the beginning of this trip back through time, where we lived in Drummond and my dad went to the OX to play poker.  The old timers at the OX all knew my dad.  Sad as it is, I never knew him but not because he died young.

The Secret Room: Those steep steps led down to the small room described in my last post where the boys played late night when a live one came to town and everything looked like it had been there for years – including the scary looking, dark carpet that had been there for who knows how long…probably since the time my dad played there.

In the old days, before poker was legalized, the old timers would have a poker game whenever they could find a sucker (now days known as a donkey) to feed it and they always posted a look out upstairs.  If anyone came into the OX and started nosing around, the lookout would pound on the floor and anyone playing/dealing poker would take the secret door into the prep kitchen and start peeling potatoes and washing dishes.  The cops rolled around now and then but on the whole, the game was left alone.

The two that dealt most of the games and knew the history of poker in the OX, were Dale Pickard and Squeak.  These two were some of the best snatch artists in the business when it came to raping poker games.  They were damn proud of it.  They were still OX regulars when I started tending bar.  Once they knew who my dad was, they started telling me stories about the old days.

They told me this story, since poker was legalized, throughout the State in 1972; it was prior to that time period:

Dave Earl was the president of his own bank and lived in Spokane, Washington.  Whenever Dave showed up, the game was on…Squeak and Dale dealt and played, along with other locals.

On one particular weekend, Dave lost a fortune in that game…rounded off the amount was close to $32,000.00.  He’d written IOU’s all weekend and when he finally gave up the battle, he wrote a check to the ‘boys’ at the OX.
The banks opened at 10:00 a.m. and he told the ‘boys’ to give him time to get to work on Monday and transfer the amount from his savings into his checking account.  They agreed.

Well as sometimes happens, people become mistrustful and edgy.  The ‘boys’ were guilty of those feelings and they jumped into a car late Sunday night and drove all night to be in Spokane and at the bank when it opened.

As soon as the doors were unlocked, they went in and tried to cash the check.  The clerk knew the account didn’t have that much cash in it so he tried to call Dave at home.  He got Dave’s wife.  The clerk asked her if he should pay the check.

She said, “Most certainly NOT!!!” or something that would resemble, “Hell No!” in any language.

Well the boys went home empty handed, out the $32,000.00 that Dave was good for and would’ve honored, if they had let him.  Amazingly, they broke close to even…that’s how much they raked out of that game over the weekend. They told me the story so true or not, I want to believe it’s true.  I dealt to Earl some years later, what a sweetheart he was to me.

I’m sure my dad played in that room back in the time span we were in Drummond, Montana.  That would’ve been around 1957 or so…maybe he was even in the game with Earl.

The Bar: The old cash register would ring a receipt number up to 9 and then start over at 0.  The lucky customer that ordered a drink, when the 0 receipt hit, got a free drink of the same monetary value as the drink they ordered.  It was always a war between four or five of the permanent fixtures on the bar stools, to see who would get the 0.  They counted the rings, hour after hour, each one trying to get that free drink.

This is where I entered the picture.

What an eye opener.  I went to work on Saturday night at 6 p.m. and closed the bar down at 2 a.m.  We literally put big boards up around the bar at 2 a.m. because the restaurant and poker game stayed open 24 hours a day, but liquor service stopped at 2 a.m.

On Sunday I started my shift at 8 a.m. taking down those same boards I had put up six hours earlier and then worked a 10-hour shift until 6 p.m.; then home for the night and back at 8 a.m. on Monday until 6 p.m. again.

I was never a sheltered child, but this bartending job opened up a new corner of Pandora’s Box that I didn’t even know existed…mankind trying to destroy everything – most himself –  with alcohol and doing it in public.
Come back…