Chambers Famous Bar

CHAMBERS FAMOUS BAR / James McKinley FiAULINE WAS ALWAYS THE STRONG ONE as far as I knew. And I knew pretty far, from '47 when I got off that train from the VA in Wichita and first went to Chambers Famous Bar. Coming out of old Union Station in Kansas City, it was about the first thing you saw if you turned toward downtown on Main. Big sign: Chambers Famous Bar. Guys from St. Louis would kid that they thought it was a department store—they got one there called Famous-Barr—but then people from St. Louis like to brag. Nobody could mistake Chambers Famous Bar for a department store. Right next to it was the Main Street Hotel. I never really got much farther than them two places in nearly thirty-five years. The Main Street Hotel was OK back then. Clean and respectable. Politicians used to bring their girls there. Later it got seedy. Changed names, changed owners, but never changed sheets. Girls kept coming and going. Travelers got to have girls, I guess—and políticos. Soldiers, too. I did, long time ago. Sometimes Td get it free from drunk hookers, or if I didn't have the scratch, old Earl, that's Pauline's husband, the Chambers of Chambers Famous Bar, would lend it to me. That is until all the girls got to be black and didn't want nobody like me. Earl, you know, didn't mind the whores. Said everybody had to use what God gave 'em. Pauline'd give him a sort of stare, but she never called him down in public, far as I saw. Yeah, Chambers Famous Bar was the place to be. Really a kind of home from the time I got off the Iwo Special from the Wichita, VA. I always called it the Iwo Special 'cause coming up from Wichita was a bunch of us on it that got shot up on that piece of tropical paradise. I left most of an arm, all of an eye and, the VA doctors said, some of my head there, courtesy of Hirohito's Nips, bless their little kimonos. Earl sure liked us vets. He fixed Chambers up real good after the war. He loved to make signs. Made 'em out of silver and gold paper. He painted dozens, too. "Veterans Welcome," he'd hang up. "Beer, the Best, 1Oi . . . Beer, the Very Best, 15i." All kinds for Pauline's cooking. As time went on he made more and more. And he did other things to make Chambers famous. Like around 1950 when the Santa Fe and the U.P. and the Katy were pouring people into Kansas City faster than Pendergast poured concrete , right then, Earl got a whole orchestra installed in Chambers. Yeah, a whole orchestra. The vote-buyers and the girls and the cops and the gandy-dancers and hobos and just about everybody who heard about it came to gape and drink the Very Best Beer (politicians always had a shot The Missouri Review -222 alongside and the cops drank free). Everybody'd watch and listen. It was a hell of a thing. 'Course us regulars could tell Pauline had two minds about it. She was proud all right that Earl'd gotten it, and she liked the music, but it fretted her that he'd be fool enough to lay out good money just because he wanted us to be happy. 'Least that's what I thought then. Even so, when that orchestra played, Pauline lit up. Earl would take her out from behind the bar where she was piling boiled eggs or pumicing the grill, and whirl her around amongst the customers on that linoleum until you got dizzy watching. She just glowed. Earl's orchestra got so famous he made a huge sign for it, a "frieze" some guy called it, that shouted out in big silver letters "Chambers Famous Bar Band, Known from Coast to Coast." That was pretty near true. Earl wouldn't ever tell where he got his orchestra. My guess was it came from one of those companies that used to make things for carnivals, back when there were...