Baxter Lomax

 
The Maplewood Tavern is some junkie bar in the middle of no where run by this ninety six year old lady named Clarise Grzenkowicz. Some news sources decided that this woman and her bar in Alpena, Michigen should be newsworthy because she is so old and they need stories to fill newspapers and be on websites. This bar hardly qualifies as a bar and only exists in name only being so remote and in farm country. I really don't know how it can be profitable and operational likely costing more just to ship beer over there from the major labels as I doubt this woman homebrews her own beer over there. Clarise is so old I think she may actually be the oldest bartender in the world if they even do a check on shit like this and for generations she has been serving stiff beer at this place. Alpena, Michigan most probably does not have many international investors coming into the region so I was not surprised when I read this bar shack looks much the same as it did ninety years ago when it first opened up serving farmers and field hands as the only place within miles for going out. Clarise has been here since 1940 when she married the son of the owner and they took over when his dad died in the same year. The Maplewood tavern is a dump but people travel throughout the state to see this old bar with this old woman in the shoe still playing bartender for a few hours out of her boring day. I suppose if this bar was in Illinois, Indiana, or Wisconsin I too might go and see this dump and this bag behind the counter thinkki ng its still 1940 and she belongs in a bar. I imagine most of the regulars are in their seventies long knowing Clarise and her late husbands through the years as most likely all you have in this rural town are old deadhead beatniks from the sixties. Young people have no future in this town with ninety year old bartenders unwilling to step down fro a rare bartending job and most of your rural young people in Michigan long left their jobless counties for bigger cities no different than the economic situation in Europe forces so many youths to move out of the country. This Clarise Grzenkowicz story when I read it is more of a story how the young people have no opportunities in these rural towns including a fucking job for a bartender because these old people hold on to the economy so much denying opportunity for those born in the are by their stubbornness to open things up for the local economy for young people.