Tales from behind the bar by Janet Weil

Eric Roemer’s history has been intertwined with the Wooden Nickel’s for the past four decades. After the celebrated tavern sold recently, Eric shared some favorite memories.

By Janet Weil

“In the 1970s, Crested Butte was an opportunity to be a pioneer in the modern day and age. You could wake up in the morning and say, ‘Today, I want to be a carpenter,’ or ‘Today, I want to be a this or a that.’ There were no restrictions or limitations to inventing your future, as long as you were willing to work.” This recollection opens the story of Eric Roemer, who reinvented his future here half a century ago.

Eric came to Crested Butte in April 1971 with his college girlfriend, Lynn Heutchy. After graduation, they were both working in New York City. Eric was a senior investment analyst for Equitable Life doing long-term corporate finance. Lynn had friends who had moved to Aspen in 1969, and they encouraged Eric and Lynn to move out of New York City and come to Colorado, but warned them to stay away from Aspen because it was getting overbuilt. They suggested the two check out this really neat place they hiked to in the summers, a hamlet called Crested Butte.

Movers and shakers: Eric Roemer, Allen Cox, Thom Cox and Bill Crank at the Powerhouse in 1988.

Only about 350 people lived in or near Crested Butte. Dogs reportedly outnumbered people, but nobody counted.

Eric and Lynn came out here the last week of the ski season in ‘71. Eric remembered, “At that time, there were just dirt streets and rundown buildings, but we both liked everything about the town: the old buildings, the antiques and all the vintage things.”

Eric was really taken with the glistening snow, brilliant blue skies and massive green trees. He didn’t see anything like that in Manhattan. After returning home, Eric could not get Crested Butte and all the natural beauty out of his mind. As he became more disillusioned with New York City’s traffic, crowds, noise and congestion, the possibility of living in Crested Butte loomed in his thoughts, but what could a corporate finance guy do there to make a living? Eric came back in July of ’71, camped outside of town and again was quite impressed with the bluebird skies, the mountainsides covered in wildflowers and greenery.

Eric and Lynn decided to take the leap, left New York City behind and moved to Crested Butte. They ended up buying a rundown building downtown (located where Ryce Asian Bistro is now). They lived upstairs in “the old gray house,” as it was known, and thought it was a pretty nice little place. Like many young people, Eric and Lynn had worked in eateries during the summers and figured running a restaurant couldn’t be that hard. They remodeled the interior themselves with old furniture they rehabilitated. In December of 1972, they opened Penelope’s Restaurant. “That’s how I got started,” Eric reminisced.

Two years later, they built a greenhouse onto Penelope’s, and it became a focal place for locals and tourists to meet for Sunday brunch. People sometimes stood outside for an hour waiting to get a table. In the middle of winter, the greenhouse flowers nicely juxtaposed the snow outside. Less than two years after opening Penelope’s, Lynn and Eric split up, and she became a long-time member of the community as well.

As years went by, more young people came to Crested Butte, got involved in the community and built lives for themselves. But at that time, only about 350 people lived in or near Crested Butte. Dogs reportedly outnumbered people, but nobody counted. There weren’t half as many buildings as now.

“Streets were dirt. Elk Avenue had a strip of crumbling asphalt down the center with dirt on both sides,” Eric said. “The level of services was so different from what it is today.”

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Eric remembers how the townspeople came together when a water main froze. Instead of building fires above where they thought the line was frozen (a tactic used a few decades earlier), volunteers built a new water line, using two miles of irrigation pipe, above ground along the Kebler Pass Road, stretching from Coal Creek to the town’s reservoir. They put a hot water heater in Coal Creek to preheat the water before it went into the water line. “It was great to have the whole town come out to help. Having no water in town was a serious issue,” Eric said. A true sense of community existed then, as it does today.

“The thing that made me feel comfortable here was a real cadre of the oldtimers who were such wonderful people,” Eric added. “They helped their neighbors with anything they needed. They would give you advice on how to get the old coal stoves working, so you could heat your place. They were always willing to offer a helping hand.”

The town continued to grow, the ski business improved, and Eric’s restaurant demanded more attention. He gave up his construction business and started making his living as a restaurateur.

Meanwhile, Dave McMillan and Ron Gott owned the Wooden Nickel, which wasn’t doing well. They were forced to close it in March of ’81. Eric discussed with them the possibility of managing the Nickel when his non-compete agreement, signed after selling Penelope’s, was up in the middle of July ’81. They agreed, and Eric ran the bar for the next forty years.

When he took over, the bar served two sandwiches, a hamburger and a chicken sandwich, and that was it. The owners gave Eric complete control. “The bar business was something I thought I would be good at,” he said, “and I’ve enjoyed the business.” Nine years later, he bought Ron Gott’s share of the Nickel. The McMillans and Eric remained partners to the end. “It was a good relationship,” he said.

Eric also opened a restaurant in Glenwood Springs and spent three or four months there getting the business started. “During that time, I met Ruth, who was a surgical nurse in Valley View Hospital. We dated for two years and got married in 1985,” he said. They raised their two children, Pearce and Alexis, in the Butte.

After Eric had managed the Nickel for four years, a devastating fire hit in August of ’85. “The building was built in 1929 with different standards from today. It wasn’t

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Eric and Ruth Roemer with daughter Alexis, son Pearce and his new bride Paisley.

Sharky kept his business jumping by firing a .45 pistol into a stump behind the bar whenever his customers started nodding out.

insulated or fire protected the way buildings are now. Behind the kitchen stove, which had been in the same place for a long time, the heat generated from the stove continued to dry out the studs inside the wall. They ignited spontaneously, and the fire went up the inside of the wall and got into the attic. It took the whole top of the building off,” Eric said.

On the night of the fire, Eric and Ruth were at a friend’s house in Aspen. They got a phone call at 10 p.m. after they’d been out on the town.

“The Nickel’s on fire,” the caller said.

“Is it out?” Eric wanted to know.

“No, not yet,” the caller replied.

“How long has it been burning?” Eric asked.

“About four hours.”

“Four hours!” Eric shouted.

By 5 a.m., Eric and Ruth were back in Crested Butte to check things out. The fire was still smoldering. Within a day, they started to clean things out. The insurance company wanted to send an adjuster and get three estimates. Eric told them he was in the building business and he wasn’t getting any estimates. He was starting to rebuild that day, so the insurance adjuster better get there or they should be prepared to start sending money. With the help of the insurance agent, Eric had no further problems.

Amazingly, many local builders that Eric had come to know jumped in to help rebuild the Nickel. They wanted their bar back. The day after the fire, they began working, and nine weeks later, the doors opened again. “It was really quite remarkable on a lot of people’s parts to get the doors reopened so quickly,” Eric said. They did the best they could to recreate what was previously in the building. They had pieces of the molding and all the woodwork milled to match. Fortunately, when the ceiling fell during the fire, it covered and protected the bar, which sustained only water damage. Eric had the bar removed, refinished and reinstalled. It was the original bar that had travelled by train from Philadelphia to Leadville and then in 1895 was transported by horse-drawn wagon to Crested Butte.

One afternoon, Eric’s friend Jimmy Clark brought in a small sign: “The Liars Corner.” Eric hung it in a corner of the bar. People started congregating there on Friday nights, just chitchatting. If there was room in the Liar’s Corner, they would squeeze themselves in. There was no particular rhyme or reason to it. Like the local taverns of old, the Nickel was a place where people were accepted,

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where they felt comfortable. They could gather and tell stories, recount memories, or discuss politics or town happenings or how lousy their golf game was that week. Any topic could lead to lively banter.

To Eric, the Nickel was special because “it was really an assemblage of all aspects of the community, both locals and visitors. It was always welcoming, whoever you were. I didn’t want it to be limited to one segment of the community, but rather available to everyone. I’m proud to say that over the years, I feel it worked out that way.”

In a tavern initially constructed around 1880, the Nickel has had its share of colorful characters, and over the years it changed hands many times. Long ago Bill Starika bought it and named it Bill’s Tavern, better known as Sharky’s. Sharky kept his business jumping by firing a .45 pistol into a stump behind the bar whenever his customers started nodding out. The pub had a coal-fired stove in the rear of the front room and a pool table during Prohibition. The elk head, still mounted on the wall, is Lyle McNeill’s trophy that he shot out Brush Creek in 1939.

“Jim ‘Suitcase’ Simmons was another legendary owner,” Eric recounted. “He was a wild guy. His nickname was Suitcase because he never stayed in one place. The joke was they called his son ‘Briefcase.’ Suitcase was the most notorious ski bum in the Elk Range.” His winter regimen was to ski all day, bartend until midnight, lock up the Wooden Nickel to the public, hold a private party with friends until 4 a.m., then stumble home to sleep, unless there was fresh powder. If it was snowing, there was no sleep; it was right back to skiing. He was always the first one on the lift. It was a hard life, but if you were a powder hound, it was the reason for everything. Mysteriously, Suitcase disappeared from Crested Butte.

Another much loved owner and friend of Eric’s was Don Bachman. Don was also the ski patrol’s avalanche expert for many years. When Eric was remodeling the Powerhouse in ’88, the building was just a metal shell with a dirt floor. It had once housed the electrical generation for the town, and several concrete motor mounts were embedded in the ground to hold equipment.

“I wanted to get rid of those concrete motor mounts and tried a backhoe, but that didn’t work,” Eric recalled. “Bachman offered to blast them out with dynamite. I was doubtful Don could blow them out, but he talked me into letting him try. Don put some dynamite under one of the concrete motor

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mounts, blocked off the street, and everyone left the building. When the dynamite went off, all you heard was a horrendous noise, which was gravel hitting the inside of the tin building. The building actually wobbled to the point I thought it might collapse. The concrete motor mount didn’t budge. Don wanted to try again with more dynamite, but after seeing the building shake, I thought one shot was enough. If you go into Bonez [formerly the Powerhouse Grill], there’s a step up from the entry level to the dining area. I raised the floor to take it above those concrete motor mounts. They’re still there. I never could get them out.”

Eric was deeply rooted in Crested Butte and wanted the town to grow and prosper. He served on several boards (such as Crested Butte State Bank, the Center for the Arts and the Crested Butte Academy) and as a town councilman for seven years. “It was a great council, and we got a lot done. We got all the streets paved, which was huge, and we got the town’s streetlights put up.”

He recounted that story: “I was out in L.A. visiting my father. We were driving around Burbank and went by the municipal yard, and I saw all these streetlights stacked up. When I came back to Crested Butte, I suggested to our town planner, Myles Rademan, that he call Burbank and see what they were doing with those old streetlights. Myles followed through, and Burbank offered us all the streetlights for free. There were a couple of hundred. We didn’t need a couple of hundred streetlights, but the deal was too good to refuse. There was a rancher delivering hay to the L.A. area and he was coming back empty. We got a good deal with him. He loaded the streetlights onto his flatbed and started bringing them back. We realized it was going to cost us some money to install them, and to offset that expense, Myles put an ad in one of the municipal magazines offering streetlights for sale. With the money generated selling streetlights, we basically recouped all the money we spent hauling them back and having them installed. REA [the Rural Electric Association] actually wired them for free. That’s how we got all the streetlights in town.”

The memory has a happy ending. “One night, after all the streetlights were installed, the town council stood up on the hill and we turned the switch on. The lights went on. The town lit up.” Though the Nickel sold last year, Eric and Ruth will remain rooted here – because for him “the magic of Crested Butte still shines brightly.” b

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