Saddle Sore: The Eagles Club

Up three stairs adjacent to the sidewalk, hit the landing, push the button, wait a second, and poof! — you’d be buzzed in. In where, you say? Into a world not many Aspenites were familiar with, at least not on a regular basis. It’s called Prada in its latest iteration, or something like that.

The Fraternal Order of Eagles, No. 184, right there on Galena Street. The old Eagles Club, not the new one down on Bleeker. Where, when the volunteer fire station alarm sounded, almost every able-bodied man in the place was out the door, headed to the firehouse. And no one touched their drinks while they were gone.  

My hot girlfriend back when we were 8 or 9, Norma Just, fondly called Naomi by her friends, and I would wander in there on a Sunday afternoon to see what was going on. If there was a dance, my widower grandfather and his girlfriend Jenny could be found, sitting in a booth alongside the dance floor. They’d get Naomi and me a coke, and we’d feel pretty cool for a while, holding hands under the table.

The years rolled on, Gramps died, and since my parents never went there, I never did either, but really, I was pretty busy on my own. When I left for college, Aspen was my hometown, a place I would never leave because, well, because that’s where my heart lived. I hadn’t been graduated from college five minutes before my already-packed car and I were on the road to Aspen.  

Got back to town, and my reaction was “What the hell happened to this place?” It was overrun with kids/people I had never seen before; new bars had sprung up, bands playing grungy rock ‘n’ roll music, more hardcore than what college fare provided. And drugs. There’s more bullshit about drugs and related escapades floating around social media than could have ever happened. Or maybe it did. Most everyone claims they can’t remember those days. Unless they had a personal experience with a celebrity, of course. We sadly remember the ones who didn’t come out the other side alive.   

The Eagles Club became my bar of choice — even though most of the members were older than me, they took me in, wise-guy that I was. They knew my family, had stories about my grandfather, had a great jukebox, and the ambiance was just what I needed at that point in my life. I wasn’t a stranger in my hometown — the nucleus of my hometown was in the Eagles Club.  

The Rainbow Playboys — house band at the Eagles Club — that’s a name from the past that smart alecks would take the wrong way in today’s world. A bunch of local, straight guys playing the best country music floating around the airwaves at the time — plus a lot of Hank Williams classics. The leader was Dub Tacker, who could sing the feathers off an eagle, accompanied most of the time by heavy-hitters Glen Smith, Carroll Whitmire, Jim Hamlin, Joe Carroll, and others gone to smoke. If you recall, Whitmire was a long-time sheriff of Pitkin County, a quiet man who soundly beat Hunter Thompson out for the sheriff’s badge in 1970.

They played almost all of the Eagles Club dances, plus doing a number of fundraisers and memorials all around the Roaring Fork Valley. When the talented Seaton family came to town, it was a music fest for certain. The relationship is lost on me between the Seatons and the Smiths, but there is a strong connection, and although my family is sometimes accused of being large, it’s doubtful we had anything on the Smiths.

Glen Smith, tall guitarist for the Playboys, just recently passed away (May 8), but his stellar performance of “Easy Loving,” a difficult one to sing, is forever etched in my memory. The only person who might have sung it better was Freddie Hart, composer and the singer who took it to #1 in 1971. Glen, unlike some of us, was a quiet man, with a great smile, who exuded great personal inner strength in any relationship one might have with him.

I’d give a lot to be able to stroll into the Eagles Club over on Galena one more time. After the door buzzed you in, you couldn’t walk in the place without everyone at the bar noticing you, either by turning their heads or spying you in the large mirror behind the bar. Bartenders like Dallas Wade and Edie Antonelli kept the place together during the day, welcoming the after-work crowds.

As an occasional weekend bartender, I was told to always keep a bottle of warm Coors behind the bar for Frank Segel who, after his shift at the Conoco, stopped in for a warm one before heading home to Cemetery Lane.

Hats off to the Eagles Club and all its great members.

Tony Vagneur writes here on Saturdays and welcomes your comments at ajv@sopris.net.