Arsonist?
As much as I hate facebook these days, occasionally it actually delivers content I am interested in. Last night a childhood friend posted about a couple of beloved barroooms in Sault Ste. Siberia back in the day. The Northview Lounge and the Stable. They were maybe a half-block away from each other.
I didn’t go to the Northview all that often but I went to the Stable a LOT. I turned 18 in January of whatever year the drinking age was lowered to 18. I was a senior in high school. My boyfriend at the time was 20 and a student at the local university. He was also a “local kid”. A very responsible guy who was working his way through college (accounting) at the time by driving a “motor route”, which meant that he drove around the eastern yooperland dropping off bundles of newspapers for paper boys to deliver to their customers. It was a fun drive and my parents trusted him enough to allow me to ride along with him on some of those trips. I think he made something like $100 a week which, believe it or not, was a lot of money for a college student in those days.
So. We started hanging out when we were 17 and 19 and we would manage to get beer from some of his older friends. Then. All of a sudden, we were legal to go to an actual bar. The Stable had barn-like decor and lots of peanuts and it was okay to drop your peanut shells onto the floor. One of my other memories about the Stable was when I was in the bathroom and the woman in the adjacent stall had dropped her snowmobile suit’s hood into the toilet…
A few things… 1) The family that owned both the Northview and the Stable lived about a half block away from my family. 2) Us kids were not really friends with that family’s kids. It wasn’t like there was a feud. It was partly that they didn’t match up to my brother and me in terms of age and sex and we had other friends in the neighborhood. But. 3) My dad was a highly respected town banker and I suspect he didn’t exactly trust the bar owner. And… 4) His son approached me at the schoolyard across the street from my house and made suggestive comments about my body. I was 11, which would mean he was 12. I have to admit that at that age I wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or creeped out. Am I “pretty”? Or not? Does this (not cute) guy “like” me? Do I like him? Eek👀
Both of those bars BURNED to the ground. Arson? I can only guess. I’ll never know what my dad thought about that but I can pretty much guess.
Also, peanut shells all over the floor were probably a fire hazard, right?
January 28th, 2025 at 1:50 pm
Do peanut shells burn? I’d never thought about that $100 a week was a lot back then. My tuition at UW was $188 a quarter!