Career Path
By Linda Carpenter
February 2007
My parents had little education and spent their working lives in restaurants. When I was 15, they became their own bosses by managing the lunch counter in a bar that was just slightly on the right side of the tracks. My 14 year old brother and I were cheap labor at less than minimum wage with no benefits. We had ten stools at the counter and two booths. We also served food at the 60 foot bar and sent sandwiches to the back room where Montana’s legal card games kept men occupied at all hours. At times the bar owner would feed all of the players in a particularly hot or potentially profitable game. I washed dishes, did some cleaning and food preparation, and watched the interesting characters who made the place their second home. My experiences there turned out to be much more educational than reading Silas Marner or dissecting frogs. The teachers at my Catholic high school would have been astounded to know where I did my homework in between sinks full of dishes.
One day a well-dressed Black woman ate at our counter. In the late ‘60s there were not a lot of Blacks in Billings, much less any who looked affluent. My mother told me that she was Della Mae. Since around the age of 12, I knew of Della Mae as the local Madam. I did not ask how my mother was able to identify our customer.
There was a retired lady of the evening who ate there most days. She was an amiable drunk, but her raspy voice and cadaverous appearance influenced me to choose a career in which “professional” had a different meaning.
The bar staff experienced the occasional armed robbery and people got stabbed or shot there sometimes, always after we closed the lunch counter at 8:00 p.m. But even in the afternoon, there was no shortage of entertainment from the regular bar customers, who talked mostly about what they once were. In spite of the sporadic violence, they saw the place as a safe haven where they would watch out for each other.
A thirtyish couple ran the card room. Sometimes as they prepared to do a count they would leave piles of cash in the locked storeroom where I had to get supplies. This really bothered me. I reasoned that if any of it disappeared, I would be a suspect.
The place carried on its reputation of rowdiness long after I went off to college, then moved to Arizona and ended up working as an auditor. If anything, it got progressively worse as establishments across the tracks closed down. It went from attracting mostly harmless working class customers happy for a comfortable place to unwind to being frequented by drug addicts and known criminals who contributed to the almost daily police calls.
Just four years shy of 100, the building was sold to a group of downtown renewal supporters and demolished in 2006.
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