Trump-lovin' Tin Lizzy in news again

(795 words)

The avalanche of world-wide media declaring the Tin Lizzy is a bastion of rabid Trump supporters is clearly fake news.

How can it be a bastion of Trump supporters?

I’m still here!

Sure, on many Friday nights I’m outnumbered about 250-to-1 — but don’t believe the polls. And winning the popular vote is so overrated. Bigly.

Since just before the election, the Tin Lizzy and the nearby Trump House have been featured in news around the globe. That’s no exaggeration. Just last week, there was a film crew here from Germany.

To much of the world, Youngstown, Pa. (pop. 320), is Ground Zero for Trump supporters.

And Sunday, a front page story ran in my old newspaper, The Tribune-Review, under the headline: “Trump voters take inventory after his first month in office.”

The article quotes many of my Trump-loving friends and included two pictures that drew scornful remarks in the lively reader comments section including this: “These photos above are exactly what I've always imagined for a Trump supporting environment. So many racist hickabillies & elderly people.”

I take exception to the prejudicial jibes for personal reasons.

I’m in the picture!

That’s me on the right. 

Now, regular readers know I’m not a racist hickabilly. And I’m not all that elderly as long as you’re comparing me to someone like Santa Claus. 

I love the arts, baseball, my family, apple pie, philosophical conversation and politicians more apt to build bridges than walls. I love that my town produced both Fred Rogers and Arnold Palmer, the latter a Tin Lizzy regular.

And I love the Tin Lizzy. 

To my left is Buck Pawlosky, the man who’s owned the historic Tin Lizzy since 1982. He’s one of the world’s greatest guys — and I’m not just saying that because he could on a whim send me home in tears by announcing he’s turning my 3rd floor office into the neighborhood Hookah Hut.

And even if he wasn’t a great guy, he oversees three great bars and a kitchen that never disappoints.

Spending one night in the Tin Lizzy is like spending one day on Pittsburgh’s South Side. 

There’s the basement Rathskeller, the Main Street bar and Flappers. On a really good night I’ll hit all three.

Each bar is unique, each has something special to offer.

So the Tin Lizzy bars are like the people who drink here.

Sure, there’s a racist hickabilly here and there, but I’m not going to let their knuckle-headed ignorance spoil my tavern time.

As I’ve always said, if I confined my conversation to purely enlightened and sophisticated folk mine would be a very lonely existence and I’d have to stop talking even to myself.

Many of the people who are opposed to building physical walls along the Mexican border are more than happy to construct truly ugly mental ones between themselves and the neighbors they see every day.

Some of my friends were surprised I didn’t talk to reporter Kevin Zwick. Honest, I didn’t even see him or the photographer snapping pictures.

Had Zwick asked me for insights, I would have wisely told him all the ways I used to finesse the Tribune-Review expense account when I had his job and was given an assignment involving talking to bar patrons. 

But if he’d have asked me what it was like to be a liberal in the land of Trump, I’d have said I’d prefer it to being stuck on a bus with a bunch of New England Patriot fans. 

I foresee Trump either getting bored or overwhelmed when his evident neediness to be adored goes unfulfilled. Or maybe congressional Republicans will assert themselves when they sense future endangerment.

Or not. I’m no fortune teller. 

Until then, I’ll be happy here at the Tin Lizzy, now emboldened by an artful comparison a Facebook friend posted after seeing the story.

“I imagine you’re like Marlow, the protagonist in Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness,’” John K. wrote. “He’s an intellectual, philosophical and world-weary guy who goes deep into Africa and encounters Col. Kurtz, a European who has set up his own Kingdom of sorts among the natives. As Kurtz recalls the terrible things he's seen and done while living among the indigenous people he utters,'The horror, the horror.'” 

“Your forays deep into the heart of Youngstown calls to mind Marlow's own journey.”

“Apcalypse Now,” is based on “Heart of Darkness.”

I’ll take it.

So come visit. I’ll introduce you to Buck and some of our friends. We’ll have a great time, I promise.

Some mornings, I’m the first one here at 6:30 a.m. It feels like a privilege to be entrusted with the keys to a place so fun and interesting.

And I love the smell of taverns in the morning.

Related …

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Is The Tin Lizzy haunted?

Excessive traffic lights drive man to drink

The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation is making a sassy liar out of me. I’ve spent the past 15 years or so bragging that I live in Youngstown, Pa., a town with “one stop light, five liquor licenses.”

I love just how much information those six words convey about Youngstown, pop. 937. It says we’re small town America. Just one stop light. No traffic. No congestion. Just folks.

But there’s much more to that part of it. This is the birthplace and residence of Arnold Palmer. He could live anyplace on the planet, but he still chooses to live in tiny Youngstown for about seven months of the year (he flees for Florida in the winter and we don’t hold that climatic wisdom against him).

And it was here that Fred Rogers was born and kept a home until his 2003 death. He modeled his endearing and enduring children’s show after nearby Latrobe where he attended school.

Small towns all over America are the birthplaces of other cultural and historical giants, leading to the popular local jibe, “A lot of smart young men and women have come from here and the smarter they were, the younger they were when they left.”

But we’re not leaving Youngstown, and that’s where the part about the five liquor licenses comes in.

Crowded around our charming little stop light is an authentic and satisfying Mexican restaurant (BYOB), and two fine taverns, Falbo’s Rainbow Inn and the Tin Lizzy, which features not one but three distinct bars. The main floor has a great townie bar on one side and Chef Dato’s upscale restaurant on the other. Upstairs is a posh martini bar with an outdoor deck, and rathskeller has fireplaces, exposed stone walls, a long oak trunk bar top, and a pool table that still provokes the occasional brawl among those disposed to such feistiness. Yep, the Tin Lizzy has it all.

In addition, there’s a great volunteer fireman’s social club and the historic Latrobe Country Club’s just 1/2 mile up Arnold Palmer Drive.

So I’m taking some liberties with the five liquor licenses part, but you get the point. We’re a convivial people. There’s also has a quaint little market and a tiny art gallery. It’s a great spot to call home.

Now PennDOT, in defiance of all logic and fiscal sanity, is going to force me to declare Youngstown a place with “eight stop lights and five liquor licenses,” a ratio that could describe any number of Utah towns filled with equal portions of backsliding Mormons and their teatotaling brethren, for heaven’s sake.

During a still ongoing construction project, workers are installing two confounding stop lights, a total of eight, for each avenue of on-coming traffic in a place where one really proud stop sign would suffice. Understand, there are no turning lanes of funky turns. It’s just cars heading to the four points on the compass.

That means a total of eight stop lights atop four stout poles when one four-sided stop light has been doing the job.

Can anyone calculate the expense? Let’s say each light costs $200 and each pole $1,000. That’s a $5,600 total that is, I’ll wager, on the conservative side of cost.

Maybe a four-sided sign strung between already existing utility poles would cost about $500.

And it’s the felonious assault on common sense that really gets to me.

Who needs to stare at two stop lights to get the message? Maybe if drivers had eyes on the sides of their heads like cattle, I could understand. But there’s no real point in cluttering up the intersection with two lights per lane. Plus the four poles add new sidewalk hazards whenever one our town drunks wobbles off on foot.

Is this sort of unnecessary duplication is being done all over Pennsylvania? All over America? Just how much money is being wasted?

Everyone says we’re about to enter an era where logic will be restored and excess is banished. I hope that’s the case.

And it just galls me that if the gods had to monkey around with Youngstown’s delightful little ratio, they couldn’t have seen fit to enhance the liquor license side of the equation.

You see, reflexively disdaining all forms of abundance would be unnecessarily excessive.