Travels with Barley Read Online Free Page A

Bama and other nearby venues at a time when lots of places around here used to roll up the sidewalks and wait for spring. In fact, the whole thing came about because Gilchrist (again) had a knack for listening to the quasi-commercial instincts of his employees. The festival is named in honor of a lovably cantankerous African-American who, well past his ninety-first birthday, was the Bama’s night watchman. Mr. Frank, as he was called, died at age ninety-five a few years back. But for years, he patrolled the bar after hours with two six-guns slung low on his hips; he never had to use them because people seemed to know Brown wasn’t a man to mess with. All he usually had to do to prevent fights was to tell the would-be perpetrators: “Now, you boys don’t have to be like that. What would your mommas say?”
    Looking around the Bama one incorrigibly slow November night, Brown decided the bar didn’t have to be like that (i.e., empty) either. An enthusiastic fan of live music, he came up with the notion that a slow-month festival featuring local songwriters could be fun and help pay the bills by attracting crowds. Gilchrist defines the Bama’s ethic as “doing well while doing good.” This was right up his alley. It’s also turned out to be a key building block in constructing a legendary beer joint.
    If you spend any time with Joe you realize he could talk this stuff—music, songwriting, and songwriters—all day long. He’s basically obsessed. He’s such a Mickey Newbury fanatic that he convinces me to drop by the Bama’s gift shop and buy the complete Mickey Newbury seven-CD collection, with the promise that if I don’t like every single song he’ll send me my money back. (He doesn’t tell me it’s $110, plus tax.)
    Gilchrist can also discourse on a variety of other subjects—history, art, politics, and sports—with the ease and practiced manner of the high school history teacher he used to be back in Pensacola forty-five minutes away. He quit teaching because it just seemed too passive for a man of his inclinations; he wanted to be in on the action somehow. For a while he thought the action might be in selling booze wholesale, so he signed on with the Lewis Bear Co., an old-line beer and liquor distributor owned for generations by the family of a Pensacola high school chum, Lewis Bear Jr. Gilchrist, by his own reckoning, just wasn’t very good at jaw-jawing on the phone or cold-calling on bar owners or the managers of package stores set in their liquor- and beer-buying ways. So his liquor-selling tenure ended abruptly when “they kind of fired me,” he recalls. Still, he worked at it long enough to become charmed and familiar with the bar business. Well, true, he had some previous experience. “Having spent much of my misspent youth hanging out in various and sundry barrooms,” he says, “owning a bar seemed a natural fit.”
    And twenty-four years later, guess what? The Lewis Bear Co. sells about seven million cases of Budweiser and other Anheuser-Busch products a year and the Flora-Bama is its biggest bar account—astonishing since there are beachfront beer joints in nearby Pensacola and Panama City that dwarf the Bama in size. Gilchrist tells that story (which the Lewis Bear people confirm) with the same kind of understated relish that Bill Gates probably feels when he gets to mention that he never finished college.
    Gilchrist’s employees will tell you that beyond his business savvy and gift of gab, his other notable trait is a wry, sometimes anarchic sense of humor. One example: rumors that the Bama is for sale sweep the beaches from time to time, a legacy perhaps of the fact that the bar originally sat on four sandy acres until Gilchrist and partners a few years ago sold off a goodly chunk on the Alabama side to a developer. A high-rise condo called the Phoenix 10 and its parking garage now cast long