Page 55 - WTP VOl. X #6

vado to an entirely new business. But most of the work at the store was handled by my mother and her sister Kay, all the more so after its failure seemed likely and my father began mentally run- ning away from it. Inside of a year the business want bankrupt, and in the meantime Pa had gotten a job as a home fuel salesman for Mobil Oil, which my mother might have taken as a sign we could now settle down. But no, he was already looking around for another bar to buy.
Soon rumors about me spread at St. Jude’s, that my father owned a tavern, something unheard of in Wauwatosa. There was only one bar in the entire community, something my father often lamented. All these Irishmen and nobody drinks? “A bunch of hypocrites,” he would declare and then head toward Milwaukee for a few rounds.
I couldn’t figure out how the rumor had spread. To goad me, some kids sang “in the cellars of Murphy’s saloon,” to the tune of “when the caissons go rolling along.” I laughed it off as irrelevant and explained, only if asked, that my father worked for a very big company, Mobil Oil. As for the tavern he had recently bought, and where we kids hung out on Sunday afternoons after the tavern league baseball games,
I couldn’t imagine any boy from St. Jude’s venturing down to 31st and North in Milwaukee to see who owned a certain establishment where my parents were putting in long hours.
The new bar was most certainly not in a cellar and “small but cozy,” as described in the latest letter to all those faithful followers of Irv Murphy’s entrepre- neurial exploits:
No one thought it was possible! Murphy’s done it a third time! He’s opened up another jumping joint — MURPHY’S RED LITE—Fun -Fun - And “more” fun.
If you’re looking for the time of your life—a real good time—We’ll see you at Murphy’s Red Lite.
I thought the name referred to a stoplight: custom- ers, stop here. But the spare boxes of tavern match- books we found in the kitchen drawers suggested something shameful. Each matchbook featured women with nearly naked breasts, larger than I had ever imagined possible, with winking captions like “Just Laugh It Off!” or “Have a Ball!” It was the first time I had seen women in bras, much less one with
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“Why was she afraid to go out in pub-
lic because he’d given her
a black eye? It all mixed up with those stories of the martyred saints so revered by the nuns who taught us catechism and pious lessons in life at school.”
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