Frenchy's toast

Taverns and road houses were a major fact of social life everywhere in this country for all the time up until just a very few years ago. Their decline to the current state of nearly non-existence closely parallels the progress to completion of the National Defense Interstate Highway System (aka freeways) initiated in the 1950's by the Eisenhower administration. Of course, in the past 25 or so years the concerted campaign against drinking and driving has been a major influence as well.

Our local example of this cultural icon which eventually turned to, first, an artifact of a bygone era and then retaining wall foundation and footprint for an "upscale" Lake Washington view apartment development was the Boulevard Tavern, or "Frenchys" near what is now Gene Coulon Park. "Frenchy" was the owner/bartender who was already in ill-health when I was a kid. He passed on some time in those years, a victim of smoking as I recall hearing, but the place continued under his name, though according to old-timers not at all as gloriously as in its heydays of the 30's and 40's, until the late 60's. As I think about it now, it didn't last long after Carol visited it once about 1967! Hmmm....

Many of we local kids had experiences with the Boulevard Tavern when we became old enough to go there. My own were quite pleasant. I didn't have to wait in the car for peanuts anymore! For others, not so much, as it is popular now to say, for there were always such as the beginnings of marital issues and serious beatings in the parking lot - my cousin, Jack Lindquist's and others.

Typical tavern stuff, actually, writ pretty large. For two, almost three of the "big kids" on our block their experience there would even become their last anywhere. Jack Rogers and Chuck Chapman, Jimmy's older brother, were both killed in separate early morning high speed turnovers in front of Griffins Boys Home as they sped away from the tavern toward home. My brother Jim had precisely the same accident, but walked away from my dad's totaled GMC pick-up. (I might add parenthetically here that Jim walked away from a LOT of bad car wrecks. Train collisions, "not so much.") So, in addition to beer, Frenchys served toast to Kennydale kids.