The Bailout

Greetings and salutations. Today’s subject is one that’s already on everyone’s tongue.

Pass the jar for Mr. Tommy?

In the late 1970’s, I spent a lot of time in Pingree, Idaho. I had found heaven-at-the-time – an establishment called “Joe’s Bar.”

Joe Rossi had acquired the railroad depot building in Pingree and turned it into a bar. For years, the bar was simply a low-key farmers’ watering hole.

Pingree was, and is, a tiny little hamlet on the “back” side of the American Falls Reservoir, inhabited only by a couple of hundred people, many of them immigrants from Italy.

Eventually, Joe’s daughter Deon took over and the bar became something very special and deliciously raucous.

There were bikers, skydivers, hippies, cowboys, the same farm crowd, old guys and young men, humans of every creed, color, race and persuasion. In its heyday the bar hosted hundreds of these people.

Things occasionally got crazy at Joe’s. No, that’s not quite right. Things were always crazy at Joe’s. I didn’t see fighting, though I’m sure it happened. But I saw love and attempted love, abuse and caring, lust, drunkenness, marriages, divorces, fidelity, infidelity, the whole country-music shtick.

The stereo was deafening. The pool tables and air hockey stand were always occupied. Outside there were horseshoe pits, a volleyball court, and the infamous “Pingree Community Center,” an empty shack where folks went to smoke pot.

The skydivers would jump into the parking lot at Joe’s for the free beer Deon would provide. Deon invited the spectacle of the skydivers to build the business.

I was a newly single newspaper reporter. I was dispatched to Pingree from Blackfoot to record the skydivers’ antics for posterity. That’s how I found Joe’s Bar – and I continued as a Joe’s patron until I left eastern Idaho at the end of 1979.

I loved the people I found there. Many befriended me. Many loved me. Even Deon loved me, although she already had a man friend.

At that time, I had yet to learn how to keep from whining – audibly, anyway.

So one night, I was whimpering in my beer, something about my inability to pay the attorney for my recent divorce.

In the midst of a hilarious and loud celebration, somebody got the idea to take up a collection on my behalf.

The empty pickled egg jar went around, and coins and even some bills were collected. The sympathy collection went on until someone passed the jar to Ed, seated on the stool next to me.

In a loud voice, Ed said, “I paid for my divorce. He can pay for his.”

It took the starch out of me. The party went suddenly sober. I looked at Ed. Some prankster had dumped talcum powder from the pool table on his back. Ed was, well, drunk.

But Ed was deadly serious. He paid his own bills, I should pay mine. Summoning up a shred of character, I said, “Ed, you’re right. That was not a good idea.”

That stopped the collection; the jar went out of sight. The party slowly broke up.

Ed is still my hero, for speaking up and speaking the truth, straightening me out in a moral sense.

Trick is, I got myself in that predicament, and I would have to get myself out.

No Joe’s Bar Bailout for Mr. Tommy. Nope. No sympathetic high-finance bailout. Gone were my expectations that someone else was going to come along and solve my problems.

I had to do it myself. It’s the only honest way.

An April Fool’s prank

I was 16 or 17. Driving home after school on April 1, 1958 or ’59, I saw police escorting a handcuffed man into the jail in downtown Brighton.

An April Fool’s Day joke occurred to me. Nearby was a phone booth, so I stopped and put in a dime and called my Mom.

“Mom. I need your help. I’m at the police station, and I need $100 bail before they will let me go.”

Mom said, “You got in, you can figure out how to get out.”

I objected. “Mom, you mean you’re not even going to come bail me out?”

She said, “Nope. I don’t drop what I’m doing to go bail my son out of jail. You got in, you can get out.” Click. End of conversation.

Not a funny April Fool joke after all. No bailout for a pubescent fool such as I.

The sales tax waste

We don’t pay much in sales tax here at Real Leather Company. Never have.

Income from our service projects far outstrips income from retail sales, so we just don’t collect much tax.

Nevertheless, the city’s cavalier attitude about expenditure of sales tax revenues continues to rankle me.

One fiscal quarter, years ago, we had a struggle coming up with about $300 to send to the city and state.

We scraped the barrel and made the payment on time, narrowly avoiding the sure wrath of the authorities had we been unable to pay.

The day our good check went in the mail, I read in the paper yet another story of how the city had openly and brazenly misused our paltry little contribution. And the contributions of many other hard-working merchants.

Some wealthy restauranteurs from Denver wanted to open a Mexican food joint in downtown Greeley. But the poor fellers didn’t have enough money.

So, the city granted (that’s right, it was a grant, not a loan) several hundred thousand dollars to the enterprise. Several hundred thousand dollars, no kidding.

The rationalization for giving away sales tax funds was the bailout of floundering downtown Greeley. Like another Mexican food restaurant would reverse the outmigration from downtown.

The restaurant, the recipient of an illicit and seamy gift from the public coffers, soon went belly up. When it disappeared, so did the free money.

The City of Greeley, influenced by some big-time promoters who have the bad fortune of owning property downtown, had once again tried to put props up under the failing metropolitan shopping center.

Bailouts don’t work. (Is this subject starting to sound familiar?)

Stinky cheese business

Recently, those same City of Greeley authorities gave away a huge volume of city-owned water rights to a private company.

Poor Leprino Foods. They couldn’t afford to pay for their own water, so the city coughed up a big lake for them. It was carefully couched as an “incentive,” but it was nothing but a reverse bailout. A boondoggle. A fraud. A crime.

The city fathers just gave away water rights that belonged to the City of Greeley. It wasn’t theirs to give away.

But the deed is done, and those men and women who did it aren’t being charged with the crime of malfeasance in office. They should be in court, in jail, but they’re not.

The cheese factory is under construction. The city fathers claim all this was done to benefit the Greeley economy.

So far, the only economic benefit has been to Leprino Foods. Just how dumb do these civic embezzlers think we are? It sucks. It just sucks.

But your city councilman can point to his big brothers in Congress and say, “They do it, so can we!”

But. Bailouts don’t work. It doesn’t matter, a few bucks for a lawyer’s fee or hundreds of billions of dollars to cover the graft, greed and avarice of a few financial wizards. Bailouts don’t work.

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Word of the week: Obstreperous. Natch, from the Latin, obstrepere, to roar at. In English these days, it’s used to mean noisy, boisterous or unruly, as in the usual crowd at Joe’s Bar in Pingree, Idaho.

Next week’s word: Vulgate.

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