The Elegy for a Dive Series, Pt. 3

Dusting off this recurring segment which actually recurs, a couple of years later. Thanks to OBX Dave for contributing the elegy for one of his College Park haunts. To the rest of you . . . sod off.

The "Elegy for a Dive" Series

Wherein we pay tribute to dingy bars of yesteryear which served us well on many long-forgotten nights of revelry-cum-debauchery.  Three at a time, like shots of Jäger.

The Texas-Wisconsin Border Café
Richmond, VA
Closed 1999

Ah, the Tex-Wis. The cream of the crop in dive bars in The Fan in the 90's. Lone Star beer in the bottle, widow-maker chili in the bowl. Badger-State-born VCU Arts school profs (later a Dean) and Texan named Donna built a place where you could get Tex-Mex plus brats and cheese and all the cheap swill you could guzzle, Animal heads and license plates adorned the walls, and they had bands quite a bit. It was written that "The Texas-Wisconsin Border Cafe’s divey, eccentric nature attracted everyone from musicians to judges, and rockabilly and blues bands, including Drive-By Truckers, played for cash and unlimited PBR."

We used to go in there for the cheap suds and the chicken-fried steak.  The place was often packed, always loud, and you could count on getting yelled at by the waitresses. Our buddy Coby was a budding attorney then, and this was his dive of choice. He's a partner with a large national firm now, and he'd give quite a bit to have this gem still nestled in the edge of the Fan. 

So sad, the Texas-Wis
A place that we all miss
Though our arteries do not
With Rolling Rock on tap
Lord, I hated that crap
Especially served hot

Whitlow's on Wilson
Arlington, VA
Closed 2021

WOW! That's what the mugs they'd give you used to say. Whitlow's-On-Wilson. This staple of the Clarendon neighborhood of Arlington was a good little family bar . . . that kept buying up parts of the block and expanding until it was a big one. It was a strange combo of seeming a half-step up from our greasy spoon super-dives but never really classy in the least. It was a plain old neighborhood bar. And often packed to the gills.

Rob and I spent a good amount of time there. We shot lousy stick and talked to a (very) few females with lousier shtick. Our Cowboy barkeep Manny quit the 'boy in the early 2000's and defected to Whitlow's, where our fraternity brother Jay's fiancée was already catching shifts. Hence, our increased attendance there. Thursday nights were Mug Nights, $5 for the mug and $2 refills on the cheap stuff all night. 

Whitlow's was never one of my favorite DC area bars, but it was always solid, and it was always there. Any people I'd meet who lived up that way in the 17 years since I vacated the area would always have been Whitlow's drinkers at some point. It was a mainstay . . . or at least it was until a year ago.

So sad, my Whitlow's mug
And the beer that I would chug
Gone for evermore
I'll miss the drunk times spent
But I shall not lament
That long line out the door

The Weeping Radish Brewery
Manteo, NC Grandy, NC
Closed 2022

Okay, okay. So the Radish was never a dive per se. It was a brewery, and it was a German restaurant, and it happened to have a little barroom. That little room was our dive, a hideaway in which you could congregate a group of knuckleheads once a year to drink between 1 and 3 liters of rather strong German beer, throw darts, play Ms. Pac-Man, gather in a circle for a xenophobic drinking game, and ultimately fall down and get pinned under a tiny cup of horseradish made of lead. You know, the usual kind of joint.

Dave, rob, and others spent the summer of '91 in Nags Head, and they came back with stories about this microbrewery (North Carolina's oldest, 1986) with super strong beer, and you drink a big mug of it and get hammered. Real juvenile stuff. So then we graduated from college and got jobs and girlfriends and came down for a summer vacation with friends . . . and drank big mugs of the super strong beer and got hammered. Dave like the Blach Radish blend, while Rob and I enjoyed the Fest. Lesser palates would get the Corolla Gold. Evan asked for PBR every year.

Oh, the stories. Many too esoteric to enjoy, but just know that the 12-24 of us would leave the comfy confines of the Martha Wood deck mid-sunny afternoon -- after drinking for hours -- to drive over the bridge into Manteo, annex the barroom, and drink a couple of beers before returning home. Wrecked. On those special occasions, we wouldn't go straight home, as the go-karts were en route, but we wised up after a handful near-incarceration/death experiences. One year, we traipsed in to hear the bartender say, "Oh, lord, has it been a year already?" It was a ritual.

Sometime around the turn of the millennium, about the same time that a sect within the OBFT crowd called Brothers Against the Radish (BAR) won favor and negated our annual death sojourn, the Weeping Radish moved out of Manteo and full-time into its farmhouse on the mainland in Grandy. We never went. And this article I read yesterday indicates that the Radish is closing its doors for good. Fare ye well, Radish Weepers, and keep 'er between the lines on the way home.

The Radish packed a punch
One time rob e'en lost his lunch
Liter mug in hand
The tale we'd later tell
We told the Radish, go to hell
We were actually banned