You look marvelous darling.
Can I get you a short stack?
College hoops coming up this Saturday morning. Missouri v. Memphis, UCLA v. Michigan..and the NFL's Seahawks are down to the wire. Need to beat the San Francisco 49'rs to have chance at post season play.
The picture above is of me working at the New Atlas Bar circa 1976 or so. A photographer stopped by and asked if he could take a few pictures. That was quite a bar at the time. It had a library, tables where old men would play pinnochle or gin, a few tables for poker, lots of stuffed animals and or their heads. Pictures of airplanes. It was an interesting place. I worked for the owner T.P. Mulvihill. T.P. had been an ace fighter pilot in WWII. He would show up at 6 am every morning to do the books and then open at 8. The regular bar tender would come in at 10 to 6 and then I'd work the 6 to 2 am shift.
Through the wonders of the internet I was able to find this token from the New Atlas bar.
Note: I lost that picture of the saloon token. I have one around somewhere maybe I'll take a picture of it if I ever find it.
These tokens were used by the gin rummy players and could be redeemed at the bar. They were worth a bit. Which is 12.5 cents. You've heard the term, "two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar?" Or maybe "shave and a haircut 6 bits?"
Here's some background I googled up regarding Origination of the Term Bits for Units of Money
"Spanish pieces-of-eight were made of soft silver. Because coins were so scarce in the young country, large dollars were often cut into pieces, called “bits”. That practice is recalled today in the chant, “Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar”, or in the song-tag, “Shave and a haircut, six bits.”
Can I get you some more coffee?
I finished smoking that salmon last night. I think it was pink salmon with maybe a blackmouth thrown in. Someone gave it to my wife awhile back and she asked me to smoke it. Did you know there are 5 varieties of Pacific salmon? Chinook, Pink, Silver, Coho and Chum. There may be a sixth variety called the Cherry that lives on the other side of the Pacific nearer to Japan. There are five varieties of Pacific Salmon we can catch in the Pacific Northwest (Washington, Oregon, B.C., Vancouver Island, Alaska).
I love fishing. I think fisherman are eternal optimists. Generally whenever a friend and I were going to go fishing we would think in terms of catching our limits, how we were going to transport the big fish we caught home etc. The fact that more often than not we didn't have to worry about limits or transporting huge fish never really got to us. It's the excitement of the unknown that makes it so fun. Who know's what you might hook into. I used to do a lot of fly fishing, but I'm not adverse to using a worm, spinner, eggs, dynamite (just kidding).
One of my first jobs was selling worms for bait in front of the Kiwana's annual pancake breakfast. The Kiwana's would set up a huge tent in the city park bordering main street on the weekend that river fishing opened up. When I was six I set up a little stand in front of the tent to sell worms I had dug, for bait.
I used to tie flies. I spent a fair amount of time and money at Dan Bailey's in Livingston gathering fly tying supplies. My first try at fly fishing was shortly after I got a cheap fly rod at the local Gambles hardware store. I was just a kid and didn't have money for flies so I took a few feathers off a hat of my Mom's and tied them to some bait hooks. They looked sort of like crickets to me anyway. I was on cloud nine or ten when I actually caught some trout with my homemade flies. I was hooked.
Fishing a wet fly takes no particular skill...using a dry fly on the other hand is tricky. I grew up in some of the best trout fishing areas of Montana and loved to fish from the time I was a little boy using buttons on the end of my line because my Gram didn't want me hooking myself when I was about four.
Missouri is coming back in the basketball game so I'm going to cheer them on.
See you soon.
