The Bartenders

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My roommates and I spend a lot of time in bars back in our single days. Perhaps this is why we made pretty good bartenders when we were asked. Here’s the story...

 

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The Bartenders

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In 1968, when I was living in an apartment with Bob and Rocky on South McGee Street in Borger, Texas, we were all single guys always looking for something different to do. In those days, every year all the vendors supplying Phillips Petroleum would donate cases of all kinds of booze, hams, turkeys, beer and the like for the Phillips Petroleum E&P groups Christmas party. Someone asked if I would like to be a bartender for the party and I told them I would do it if they would also allow my roommates Bob and Rocky to bartend the party with me. They agreed to this and we were in.

 

This is the apartments we lived in on 700 S McGee Street. We lived in the apartment labeled on the second floor. There was a pool right behind that fence.

 

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The party was held at the Frank Phillips Mens Club in Bunavista every year. The party was casual so we just wore Levi’s and sports shirts. Every one at the party hit the booze pretty hard from 8 to 10 PM, but they hadn’t even put a dent in the vendor supplied booze we had, so we started giving everyone doubles when they asked for a fresh drink. We had been sipping drinks along when the bar was a little slow so we were all feeling pretty good. About 11PM, Rocky, who was the wild one of our group, had started slipping a bottle of booze out to our car every once in a while.

 

 

We turned out to be pretty cool bartenders and we were a big hit with the crowd. We were very loose with the large variety of free booze provided by the vendors. Eat your heart out Tom Criuise.  

 

 

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Around midnight we knew who the heavy drinkers in the crowd were and we were giving them triples. By far the heaviest drinkers were the three area superintendents for the Panhandle Region. Their jobs were by far the most stressful in the Region and they had left all their stresses blowing in the wind that night. In fact they had gotten a little too rowdy that night.

 

 

Be careful with those triples or they will get you into trouble.

 

 

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When the party was over, the powers that be told us each to take a bottle of our favorite booze for tending the bar. When we got to the car we saw that Rocky had slipped out 6 bottles of booze already, so we had 9 bottles of Scotch and Bourbon to stock our apartment liquor cabinet. We all had a great time watching all the bosses at work get drunk and acting like fools.

 

 

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Thanks for reading The Bartenders,
Bill