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One Monday afternoon in 1980, a drunk man named Donald Casey punched a woman who rejected him. Advertising was solely through word of mouth.
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The Andersons kept the bar modest, swapping windows for hazy glass blocks. Visitors faced "gay-bashing" in the parking lots, she said. Though she was Catholic, Gail Anderson became especially "protective of the gay community," Anderson Lux said. But after nights of standing-room-only crowds, the family grew more accepting.
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The Andersons were taken aback, Mike chief among them, Patti Anderson Lux said. Unbeknownst to them, O'Neill was a lesbian, and she invited her friends in the gay community over for drinks. It didn't help that the closest golf course, Clearwater Country Club, was a mile away.Ī year later, the Andersons hired a woman named Nancy O'Neill to tend bar. On the bar, to cement the sports theme, he decoupaged cutouts of star quarterbacks.īut the pub was a dud. It had a deli with hamburgers, hoagies and coleslaw, a football room with a 3-by-5-foot color television, and plans for a pool table and a golf-club repair shop. Instead, he settled for the next best thing: a small parlor and eatery, a kind of golfers' lounge. Mike Anderson had dreamed of running a country club before deciding the job would impede his game, he told the Clearwater Sun. His mother, Gail, recruited Patti to help start the family business. His family had fled the winters of Flint, Mich., six years earlier, and he and his sister, Patti, took classes at Florida State University. In the '70s, it was a sandwich shop named Kountry Kitchen.Įach business left after a few years until, in 1976, a young mustachioed man named Mike Anderson decided to use the building for his first pub. In the '50s, the building held Wings Restaurant, a glass-fronted diner serving the "South's finest ice cream." In the hippie '60s, it became the Confucius Tea Garden.
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The Pro Shop Pub's history is much less revolutionary. Three years later, riots at another gay bar, the Stonewall Inn, sparked the modern gay rights movement. In 1966, activists there declared a "sip-in," protesting state crackdowns on homosexuals in bars. Julius, a tavern in New York City's West Village, is believed to be America's oldest gay bar. They owe that celebration to the humble beginnings of a small, straight Michigan family - a golf lover, his college-age sister and their mother, a spiritual Catholic.