TerrieMiller.com
Remembering Larry’s
A friend thought I might have been a Larry’s patron while I attended Ohio State, and sent me a link to Larry’s: ‘Center of the universe’ closing. Not only was I a patron, but I worked at Larry’s for two or three years, and lived in an apartment above the bar during my last year in college. Larry’s was a huge part of my life. For a time it really did seem like it was the center of the universe.
My friend Stephanie took me to Larry’s for the first time, probably in 1985. She thought I’d like the Beatles album they had on the jukebox, Rubber Soul. She was right. For fifty cents, you could play any album side (yes, the juke box played vinyl LPs).
There was a rumor around campus that Larry’s was a gay bar; ostensibly to keep the greeks out. Larry’s was both a neighborhood bar and a place for OSU profs and grad students. Undergrads were welcome but tended to be intellectuals, artists, and musicians. Every Monday would be “Poetry Night”, featuring a reading from a local poet and then open mic…a precursor to the later poetry slams, you never knew what to expect. It could be funny, tedious, moving, or downright violent. Maybe all in the same night.
Larry’s usually had a low-key, friendly vibe. There were three t-shirts you could buy:
- Larry’s Bar, Grill and Seminar
- Larry’s Epistemological and Metaphysical Society of Lower Woodruff Avenue
- E=mc3
I don’t think I ever heard exactly what E=mc3 was all about. One time a patron asked me, “What do you think it would be like if that were the real equation?” I told him, “It would probably be really hot in here.”
I started working at Larry’s as a waitroid, their non-sexist term for the job. I’m not sure why they needed it, as I was the first woman to work there in some time. (Lots of people told me I was the first woman to work there period, but that was completely false…there just hadn’t been any for a while. Alcohol and memory loss…) People had a good sense of humor; for the first time in my life, I felt like I fit in somewhere. That may have been the alcohol, too.
I was thrilled to work my way up to being bartender.
I have so many memories of this place, both good and bad. I made friends I’ll never forget, too many of them already dead, and many lost track of (John Fredericks? Andy Neubauer? Tim Costigan? Paula Higgins? Rick Borg?). We had laughs like you wouldn’t believe. I met my first real boyfriend there. I saw two friends get beat up by men they couldn’t stay away from. We had an annual “prom”, and one year we had a wake of sorts; but any event like that was imbued with a delicious sense of entropy. Alcohol was a muse and a curse. People got on the wagon and fell off the wagon so much, one would think that Larry’s was the wagon.
It’s a little sad that Larry’s is closing, but I know that Larry’s really was more a state of mind than anything else. People from different eras will remember it differently…heck, people of the same era will remember it differently. But I think we’ll all remember it as a special place.
One Larry’s regular from my era was John “Jud” McGrody. He was a DJ at the local classical radio station, with a wry sense of humor. Unfortunately, we lost him too soon, too…but I don’t think that he’d mind if I shared this poem of his I’ve kept over the years. He read it at one Poetry Night and brought the house down, deservedly so.
Larry’s
“A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou…”
–Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat
“Sack of Rome, six pack of Rocks, and a case of Do-or-Die.”
–Larry’s patronFive thousand years ago today
under the endless green primeval midwest canopy
two squat red men stopped here to drink
and got to talking and eating nuts
and stayed till one a.m.
Five thousand years ago today, on a Monday. I got proof.You won’t find this place in the Michelin guide
but it is in the Garcia Marquez Index
of musty, magical, dimly lit places
where people don’t age quite as quickly as they could.It’s the bar with the all-talk sarcasm format.
The all-night quipathon for muscular atrophy.
Where it doesn’t really matter what you say
becasue someone at your table just wrote a thesis
on somebody Great who said it Better
but you don’t care that all the Great Thoughts
have been thought already by all the Great People
because all the Great People are Dead.
And they can’t get us here.Here, where the outlook’s only fashionably jaundiced.
Where pain is only nature’s way of telling you you hurt.
Where death is only nature’s way of killing you.
Where love is a four letter word
and sex is a five letter word
and nobody spells too well around here
though everyone writes or at least edits something.Here, where you are only a stranger
if you are stranger than almost everyone here.Here, where ancient booth carvings tell us
five hundred years ago today
Columbus discovered Ponce de Leon
and they got to talking and eating nuts
and they both drank freely till one a.m.
from the fountain of graceful middle age.
And forgot to leave a tip.–John Judson McGrody, 1/27/1986
Goodbye, Larry’s. Thanks for the memories.
What little of them there are left.
Thanks for the beautiful blog post. I lived in Columbus from 1984 to 1989 or 90 and hung out at Larry’s all the time. I never dreamed it could close.
Tim Costigan, the last I know, lives in San Francisco, where I live. I run into him every now and then. He bartended when he first lived here and now he has a career in the nonprofit sector.
Looks like is was a nice bar. A good pub/bar is an asset to the community, so many are going in the UK, a big shame, tragic in fact.
Hey Terrie – I just got an email from an old friend telling me Larry’s was no longer – I surprised myself how upset that news made me. I looked into the google and found your post. It was nice to see your picture, cheerfully snagging empties like a good waitroid…or did you just 2-fist them into submission?!
Larry’s was really special to me too – as it was in different ways to the several generations that passed through there I guess. I’m still formulating why exactly, I’ll letcha know when i get a cogent explanation.
The first night I worked there was really stormy, Larry came up and introduced himself (he’d hired me over the phone), then said “it’s a good night for a murder”, and walked away – I knew then I was gonna love that place. It seems unfair that they shut it down without consulting all of us! I really appreciated seeing John’s poem – I remember the night he read it. I don’t know if you remember that Larry himself contributed a bit of poesy to the world – an ode to the cultural milieu that he tried (and succeeded, I should add) to keep at bay outside the doors of his beloved bar. It is after Elliot…alot… (I actually came to love Prufrock because of this, go figure…) he had it printed in a nice font at Kinkos and handed them out for a while. I think there were other efforts, but this is the only one I’ve got.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the drunks are spread out along North High
Like lunatics howling in an asylum;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The vandalized retreats
Of restless nights in roaring campus bars
Of fast food restaurants with noisy cars:
Crowds that follow on like mindless mobs
Of littering slobs
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, “How come it?”
It’s the freshman’s night to vomit.
On the walk the students come and go
Talking of the urine flow.
I miss Larry, I miss Larry’s…
Wow, Tim–it’s so good to hear from you!
I remember Larry’s poem now, but had forgotten it. Thanks!
Now I’m feeling *really* nostalgic.
-t
My cousin PJ, a 16-year-old runaway and self-proclaimed queen of the teeny boppers, introduced me to Larry’s in 1966. When I moved to Columbus in 1972, it became my second home. Actually, more like my first home.
My first group of friends at Larry’s were the international students — Aloy, Antonio, Nasim, Luba and the rest. One night I found myself with a group of them sitting around three or four tables pushed together. There were 12 of us, and at some point that evening I realized that each of us was from a different country. I’m from small-town Southern Ohio, and I loved this interesting new milieu.
It was at Larry’s that I met my wonderful girlfriend Jessie, who shared the years 1974-1977 with me. I was sitting at a table near the bar, alone, when she appeared at the bar in one of those flouncy dresses girls used to wear.
“You look like a 1955 girl to me,” I said.
“Well, I am a 1955 girl!” she replied with lively emphasis. “That’s the year I graduated!”
That was our beginning. Jessie died in 2005. Many of my friends from those days are dead now. Luis, the Puerto Rican who always wore a small-brimmed hat. Greer, the multi-racial elegeant old queen, who told me he had had hundreds of women and thousands of men, and who died from AIDS in 1992. Diamond Jim, whom I played billiards with, until he died when a balcony collapsed under him. And Marty.
Marty was a sad, pretty girl, an artist who invited me to her apartment above Larry’s one night to see her paintings. They were all of her. Marty was of several races and ethnicities, and the paintings were all similar self-portraits, each portraying her as a single one of them. Her Martys were black, brown, red, and white, each in appropriate native dress, depicted in the countries of her various ancestors. Marty eventually moved away, and one day I heard she’d taken her life with a gun while sitting beneath a tree in New York’s Central Park.
Bob Collins was a hard-drinking excellent poet, a grad student and instructor at OSU, and people were drawn to him. He started the Sunday softball games at Tuttle Park. Though beer was the substance of choice (just barely), one day we laughed to see an acid head, who was welcome, too, crawl after a ball hit to him in the outfield. One player who hit balls over the outfielders heads in those days was robust clean-up slugger Lynn Guinn. Lynn, now 57, was still to be found sitting at the bar at Larry’s nightly, right up to the end. Now where will he go?
Later I hung with a different group of Larry’s Sunday softball players, a bunch of tough guys and girls who wore no underwear. Cops in a cruiser would look down at us from a parking lot — jealously, I’ll bet — hoping to catch somebody drinking or smoking dope. They never did. One day they took out their frustration by coming down and driving slowly across the infield and pitcher’s mound, smirking at us. With our beards and long hair, we were what cops called “dirtballs.” Their actions were intended to provoke us, but weren’t stupid. We just stopped our game and waited silently as they drove through our playing field. We knew who the “dirtballs” were.
Sometimes bored cops would come into Larry’s and walk past the booths, staring at the people seated there, patting their clubs in their palms. My cool friends would never look back at them, but I always did.
There was a piano in Larry’s in ‘72, and a girl who lived upstairs would come down to play the most interesting piano I’ve ever heard. People loved her, and would come to Larry’s just hoping she would come downstairs and play. But she soon moved away.
There was other live music, though. One night a prominent local guitarist was booked at Larry’s. He was late, so an impromptu trio — a guitar player, a flautist, and a violinist — played while we waited for the main attraction to arrive, and magic ensued. I’m no musician, but I know that sometimes musicians will find themselves “in the zone,” and that night, they were. The place came alive with their great music, and when the prima donna local star arrived, shortly after they ended their set, he wondered what had happened. There was such a buzz in the place, and it wasn’t about him. Everyone knew he couldn’t match what they had just heard. He must have wondered why people were looking at him with enigmatic smiles — those who paid any attention to him at all — as he set up. I’ll bet he was never late again.
I think the end came for Larry’s not in December 2008, but a few years before, when they brought the television in. Larry’s kids who ran the bar (not Danny, who probably knew better, but was shut out of the operation) didn’t understand that Larry’s was where people went to escape all that. It was never the same for me after they brought in the TV, and I rarely dropped in. Lynn was always there when I did, so I’d talk to him for a bit and leave, while cable news and football games droned on, there in my refuge, the home of my youth and so many memories. In truth, Larry’s died when Larry died. All things must pass.
Linda and Lee, thanks for posting your own remembrances. I have a feeling I’d probably remember both of you, although it’s true that if your memories of Larry’s aren’t a little foggy, you probably weren’t really there!
I definitely remember people you mention in your post, Lee.
Does every neighborhood-institution-bar have this many suicides, or just the ones I worked at?
Thanks for commenting on my Larry’s memories, Terrie. I also should have mentioned Rick Borg, whom you mention in your post. He is, of course, the artist who still lives upstairs, who gave up a pro golf career for his art. Rick’s paintings were on the wall the second-to-last night I visited Larry’s, but were gone the night it closed. You no doubt also remember Bill Klos, the great guy from New Jersey who lived upstairs and worked at Used Kids. Bill returned home after 9-11 to “be with my people.”
Bill and Rick used to care for Bamaco, the tough little tomcat with a tough-funny little face who lived in the hall and roamed the traffic-heavy neighborhood for at least 10 years. He has probably passed on by now.
For the record, my story about the police driving through our softball game should have read “Their actions were intended to provoke us, but WE weren’t stupid.” I left out a word, and it changed the meaning.
I hope more people will tell us their Larry’s memories. That’s all we have left now. Adios.
I just woke up from a dream where I was passing through the Ohio State Campus on the Chicago El (It was a dream, ok?) and I was telling some folks new in town to make sure and go to Larry’s. Which woke me up. Now it’s six in the morning and I can’t stop thinking about Larry’s.
I worked there in the middle 80’s with Terrie, Andy, Paul, Mike Moulk, Ralph, Gary, Tim Costigan, and a bunch of others.
Does anyone remmember the guy with frizzy hair (and no shirt?) who would come in tripping his brains out and stair at the pictures on the wall?
I would totally love to have copies of some of the entries that Larry made in his little black book (there was a long one about weird craziness upstairs one night). Between Andy’s daytime bartending and Larry’s hands off style I saw a lot to admire.
Some memmories from those days:
cutting off my roomate Doug when He got too loud and obnoxious. He calmed down immediately and then loudly proclaimed how cool it was that I cut him off
getting summoned upstairs buy some friends of a tenant, who failed to make an appointment. The TV was blaring from inside the apartment, no one responded to our knocking. A feeling of dread swept through me as I went in. I saw her stretched out on the bed right beside the front door, bathed in the light of the TV. Then she woke up…
From the women’s bathroom:
“my mother made me a lesbian”
“If I give her some cloth will she make me one too?”
“I think the patterns in Simplicity”
“No, It’s in Vogue”
Beside the men’s room mirror (the John Macrody memorial mirror)was a graffiti that said “Warning! objects in mirror are closer than t
hey appear!”
Thank you for doing this Terrie
Hi Terrie,
Joe Diamond was killed in a traffic accident this week when he turned left from Olentangy to King Avenue and was hit by a northbound car.
I first met Joe in the mid-70s when I took my shoes to be mended at his Son of a Cobbler shop. When my girlfriend Jessie and I broke up, she started going with Joe. He was her last boyfriend, to my knowledge, and became like a part of Jessie’s family. I visited with Joe a couple of times at Jessie’s. They were close until her death in 2005.
Jessie admired Joe’s kind heart and cool toughness. Once he was attacked after playing with his band at Dick’s Den. With the robber on top of him, Joe stabbed him in both sides. The robber ran away with nothing.
RIP Joe and Jessie — two more special people we’ll not see again.
wow, I frequently Larry’s bar in the 90’s and loved the quiet hole in the wall. I met great friends there and had many many memories of the pool games, the music and the patrons.
I loved talking with Bill, bartender at the time and the nicest guy in the world. And Mick always made me laugh.
I didn’t realize it closed. I will miss it.