Watering holes have a way of drying up

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© St. Petersburg Times
published February 22, 2002

Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland, Calif., "When you get there, there's no "there' there."

Being a Florida native has taught me, "When you go back there, it's been torn down and something else has been built, and you're not sure you are there."

Most of the landmark drive-in restaurants of my Miami youth are Burger Kings and McDonald's now. The hotel where I spent my first honeymoon is a vacant lot. Now comes the news that the last of the three major watering holes of my young(er) reporter days in west Pasco is on its way out.

The Golden Nugget, a landmark (to some of us) for the past 60 years or so, is being torn down to make way for a Hess station.

In the early 1970s there were three places where, on any given evening, you could find a substantial portion of west Pasco's power structure. They would be drinking (which was more popular then) and talking and greasing the wheels for the county's commerce and politics.

Now all three of them are gone.

For me, the circuit began at the Hacienda Hotel in downtown New Port Richey, where one was most likely to find city politicians hanging out. After that I would head either to the Golden Nugget or the Silver Spur and, if nothing was happening there, go on around the circuit. In the course of an evening you would find several attorneys, a cop or three, a county commissioner or two and most of the press corps at one of those locations.

There is now a Hops restaurant on the land where the Silver Spur used to stand. The Hacienda is a residence for mentally disabled people, and the Golden Nugget will soon be the location of the Hess station.

A lot of the stories I wrote the first couple of years I worked at the Times were from notes written on cocktail napkins -- something that used to make editors wince for fear they would be subpoenaed.

There was, it turned out, a fine ethical point to be considered.

When alcohol flows, so does information, sometimes a lot of it. The question is how fair is it to take advantage of someone's condition. The usual answer is: not very. Those who should know better, like career pols, got less slack than those who didn't, and what I would usually do is call back in the morning and say, "You told me at the Nugget last night that . . ." and see what the response was.

The problem is that when alcohol makes information flow, it doesn't always mean it's the truth.

One major story evolved during those days when the forewoman of a grand jury investigating the Sheriff's Office hit the west Pasco bar circuit with a prosecutor and an investigator for the State Attorney's Office -- a definite no-no.

The problem was that while the grand jury and the state attorney were investigating the Sheriff's Office, the guys at the Sheriff's Office were investigating them and took pictures.

End of investigation, well, for a while anyhow.

I met former Pasco County Commissioner Barry Doyle, a really big guy, when he was working at the Golden Nugget as a bouncer. A few years later he was chairman of the County Commission, and I was writing stories about difficulties that eventually sent him to prison. We still speak when we meet -- but we aren't as close as we once were.

There was also the occasional bar fight, most of which I managed to avoid, but you have to remember that we didn't have anything else to do here back then. There wasn't even a mall.

A lot of that has changed these days.

Drinking isn't the competitive sport it was back in the 1970s. Mothers Against Drunk Driving and a health-conscious culture have made heavy public drinking much less socially acceptable now.

And for me, most of the sources I remember from those days are either dead or under doctor's orders to avoid alcohol, and Pasco's current sheriff, unlike some of his more notable predecessors, is more likely to be found in church than a bar.

I might try hanging around the new Hess station looking for fun and information.

But I'll bet it won't be as much fun.

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