We Thought The Heritage Foundation Was A Neighborhood Bar (Really)

One of the several books that I have written is prefaced, or introduced, or just plain started with a handwritten letter that I had written when I had been where it was that that book had been written about.

It was to my close friend and fraternity brother, Tom.

I had forgotten about ever having written it, so when Tom's widow, and my close friend Betsy gave it to me years ago, it was quite a time travel windfall.

I mention this because if you want to have any idea of what this post is REALLY about, you will need to buy Saigon 1967 and read that letter at the front end of the book and the book itself; it's short.

But this post will stand on its own two legs, sans letter to Tom.

It's just better with all the nuance that that letter and the book, add and make possible.

Once upon a time, in the 1970s, in Portland, Tom and I were out for the night on what we called a "street drunk".

I had heard my parents talk about something called a "pub crawl" but had never really known - or cared - what that might have been.

Turns out, street drunk and pub crawl are the same thing.

It was an early evening in the beautiful Portland Autumn, and we were traversing, I think it was Grand, down in the near East Side vicinity of Sears and having a beer in every tavern or bar that we could find and then moving on to the next one we could find (Sears in those ancient times was a huge retailer).

As I remember that street, I can't remember one bar or tavern, but there definitely were some because we had been in several.

Maybe we weren't on Grand.

In any event, we were moving on for more.

We were on the left side of whatever street it was, going north.

We came upon a retail-like street-facing store front with a sign.

It was hanging on a davit extending from the building and lit in a sickly yellow pall.

"Heritage Foundation".

We looked at each other.

We whispered, "is this a bar or a tavern?"

I don't know why we whispered.

But we did.

We both - we revealed to one another later - had an "I-don't-feel-good-about-this" feeling about that tavern or bar, and its sign.

But we went in.

It was dimly lit in the same sickly yellow pall as its store-front sign. 

We were not in there long enough for me today, a half century later, to give a detailed description of the clientele, but they were all old white men, many of whom looked as if they would have been better shown if they had been wearing the hoods and the garb of the Ku Klux Klan.

I've never known what to think about that.

We found another tavern and agreed to forget about it.