Death of G's Pancake House is sort of an obituary on some damn nice nights. And damn the flood

 

 

I wasn’t made for these times.

Oh, I’m not talking about the flood of 2021, which for the second time in 11 years, has altered my lifestyle.

Not that my lifestyle is all that great, I suppose, but I do take for granted things like dry shoes, floors that don’t bubble and a good night’s sleep. All of those things vanished at about 1 a.m. Sunday, when 8 inches of rain fell on my nice, fairly pastoral, little section of Nashville.

Within moments, it seemed, water from the rainfall – it had been raining for three days, really and the ground was saturated – snuck into my basement. It spread quickly. And for the last three days now, we’ve been cleaning up, drying out, praying for no rain for awhile and dealing with insurance (Allstate does not return calls or show much compassion… and my contractor, who is going to try to figure out a way for this not to happen again.

Since the last flood I survived was 11 years ago, well, if that cycle continues, I’ll be 80 next time or just a fistful of forgotten ashes. In either case I don’t want to go through this crap again.

But really what I’m lamenting today is that one of my life’s favorite places, a greasy little all-night pancake and coffee joint, on Riverside Drive in Clarksville, Tennessee, is closing.

If you know me or have read anything by me over the years, you may know about G’s Pancake House.

Forty years ago, and for a few years on either side of that mark, it was a 2 a.m. Sunday destination for me and my best friends, fellas with names like Badger and Death and Chuckles and Flash. The Stranger made it occasionally. Tony Durr, occasionally. Those last two, like the pancake house, are dead.

Well, Badger didn’t make it much back then, as he wasn’t a newspaperman – which is all I ever wanted to be until the corporate bastards took it from me and sent me out into a world where no one hired 56-year-old men who refused to backstab to stay on the right side of corporate politics.

But you’ve read that story before (and it is available in book form). This little essay is about G’s Pancake House.

When Jerry and Rob and I finished up the Sunday Leaf-Chronicle newspaper in Clarksville, we’d generally go to a little place called “Camelot” to let the local cops try to loosen us with good Scots whiskey and where DJ Jimmy in the Morning lay face-down on the front table.  He’d often raise his head long enough to buy us a round.

Often Chief Sheriff’s Deputy Eddie Patterson – a foil during working hours, but a helluva good friend when he had his pistols packed in the trunk of his car – was the most generous guy when it came to buying drinks. Since he was pumping us to see what we knew, perhaps he turned in the receipts to Sheriff Billy Smith.

We pumped Eddie and the other 15 or so cops and deputies who joined in the all-night frivolity among a mix of college students (not that many, really, as this was a pretty rough bar, the kind where a dispute over arm-wrestling might send a fellow through the air and landing on a table, which would break.).

We would applaud and hope it didn’t happen to us. There were a few members of the nearby 101st Airborne as well.  

They were hoping not to get into fatal wrecks on Fort Campbell Boulevard while returning to post. My publisher had decided that there were so many of those dead GIs littering the sides of our roads, we shouldn’t report them anymore. Bad for city image.

That’s beside the point in this story, which is about the closing of G’s Pancake House. It wasn’t just those of us who stayed out all night who ended up at G’s.

Sometimes, other, less-desperate and desolate folks, would join us if we went right after work, at midnight or 1 a.m., on either a Friday or Saturday. There is a “famous” picture of me holding court with a bunch of newspapermen late on one Good Friday.  We broke flapjacks and drank coffee, and, of course, prayed over these sacramental elements.

Anyway, there really were countless nights at G’s. It’s where I got my name, still valid among many of my old friends, or at least the ones still alive (a diminishing breed) of “Flapjacks.” We all had names. Dumbo. Flash. Chuckles. Death. StrawBilly. Street. Larry (too stiff a butt for a nickname, but a good guy nonetheless). If our friend, Scott Shelton, a radio newsman was with us, his nickname was Badger.

I moved out of Clarksville back in the very late 1980s, on the cusp of the 1990s. I didn’t go back to G’s often in the last three decades.

There were a few, perhaps even a dozen, gatherings of the so-called “News Brothers” (again, see the book) there over the years.

For many years, we held an annual reunion in Clarksville. Those pretty much stopped when Scott died.

Oh, he wasn’t one for all-night frivolity. He was too busy at home with his wife, Elise, or admiring his Beatles statues. Me, I was trying to stay away from home for much of that time back then in what was a different life of melancholy and asking “Why?”

Our gatherings generally would be at G’s. The last one actually came after Scott died. Following his funeral, all of us who didn’t have to beat it back to Nashville, Hoptown or New York City (none of us were from New  York City), ended up for a three-hour wake of sorts. Again, flapjacks and “Flapjacks,” with his best friends.

Laughing about Badger and about our old times together.  I remember Frank “Wuhm” White, an occasional News Brother, telling me on that afternoon nine years ago that I really hadn’t changed over the years.

I guess I hadn’t. Still haven’t. Which, as my old friend the Pilgrim said, is a blessing and a curse, but the goin’ up really has been worth the coming down.

Anyway, enough about me and my meanderings. This is supposed to be about the death of a pancake house.

One of my former bosses, Dee Boaz, sent me a link to a Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle story today that says that G’s is shutting down after business ends Friday.

G’s Pancake House was begun in 1972 in the Riverside Drive location, according to the little feature story.

This week, the owner decided to close the restaurant begun by her father. “On Friday, the original location of G'S Pancake House at 803 South Riverside Drive will serve its final charbroiled burgers, fried catfish, steak and potatoes and of course, G’S Super Breakfast with pancakes,” according to the story by reporter Gary Estwick.

I spent the best part of my life in Clarksville, as far as I can remember. Although my search for personal happiness and sobriety came here in Nashville, beginning in 1988. So I don’t know the reporter, and I do know that the newspaper is nothing like it used to be.

No crazy associate editor, chain-smoking, wearing shades and a Hawaiian shirt and urging everyone to laugh, even as we put together stories about teenage killers, the Full Moon Rapist (I made up that moniker) and Manson-style killings. And, of course, the tragic saga of Chico the Monkey.  

What once was a huge and historic building housing the oldest newspaper in Tennessee now is the D.A.’s office. I think the newspaper is put out in a closet. I know the printing presses are long gone and the pathetic little product (not blaming the reporters here, but corporate greed) is printed, I believe, in Knoxville.

Or Louisville. Yeah, you really can get breaking news in a paper if you print it three hours away … another issue. Of course, it’s all about websites now. I wonder how many website stories are clipped out and put in family Bibles and Little League scrapbooks? They don’t even run free obituaries anymore. We used to hold the presses to make sure all the funeral homes in Clarksville and surrounding cities got their obits in to us. We’d type them up and typeset them. And it made families feel part of the newspaper.

Well, The Leaf-Chronicle did run sort of an obit on G’s, of course, this week.

And it hit me almost as hard as if a person I know had died. Like I noted earlier, the last gathering I call recall there was after Scott “Badger” Shelton’s funeral nine years ago.

The time before that was perhaps two months earlier. Scott’s wonderful wife, Elise, a long-time friend of mine, as well, had worked hard to get Scott to that year’s reunion of the News Brothers.

He was dripping with oxygen hoses and cancer death was in his eyes. But there also was a gleam of happiness. Sure, he knew his time was coming, way too soon. But he was there. At G’s. Eating flapjacks with his old buddy, Flapjacks, who used to drop in on Scott’s news programming decades before at WJZM Radio in Clarksville.

I’d drop in before I showed up for work at 5:30 a.m. or take a smoke break and walk over there to play with Badger and Jimmy in the Morning.

I should note that none of us took our work lightly, but journalism used to be a deadline-heavy occupation, filled with caffeine and nicotine, Scotch, beer, lies and sad truths.

When sane people were in their beds, thinking about how early to get up for church or for Junior’s soccer match, we were still at work.

When we got off, we needed a place to go to blow off the stress, to laugh. Yes, there was a lot of death and destruction with which we dealt. And there were gory photos we had to look at and size for the pages.

And sometimes when we saw those photographs, we just had to laugh.  Not out of disrespect, but to keep our sanity.

Well, sometimes I just have to write to blow off those stresses, like figuring out how to keep my house from flooding and which of the soggy stacks of old newspaper clippings should go in the trash or recycling bin and which can be saved. Not many, by the way.

As I said, being a newspaperman was all I ever wanted to do. I was not prepping for some horseshit P.R., 9-5, job.  I also loved my colleagues in the news business. I didn’t mind that people viewed me as a “free spirit” as long as they judged me factual and honorable and compassionate.

I also love, perhaps more than anyone else, the traditions of a newspaperman.  Hard-drinking is in my past, of course, but I sure as hell enjoyed it, after deadline, most nights. The smoking, cigarettes sending their trails of white up into the air of the newsroom or the Camelot or G’s Pancake House, also were of that profession, of that era. Of bygone times.

I’m decades past my G’s years. But it always has been reassuring to think about those time, those nights. That particular Good Friday. Christ you know it ain’t easy to be an old-fashioned newspaperman (or newspaperwoman) anymore.

In fact, I really think that these younger people, as good as they are, have missed out on the most fun and meaningful parts of that culture.

Like going through a half-pack of smokes and a short stack of flapjacks and maybe 12 cups of coffee while laughing into the night and waiting for dawn to break while having good newspaper fellowship at G’s Pancake House.

It’s closing.

I’m cleaning up from another flood.

Many of the folks mentioned in this story, from Chief Deputy Eddie Patterson to Scott Shelton and Jimmy in the Morning are gone.

The News Brothers are old and scattered.  Donald Trump is partly to blame for that, but that’s another long story.

I’ll never love a group of guys, collectively, as much as I loved the News Brothers.

And I never laughed into the night, after dealing with the horrors of reality and murder, as hard as I did at Camelot and G’s.

Camelot closed long ago.

Now G’s is going away.

I’m 69, not 30 or 35.

And I wasn’t made for these times.

Christ, you know it ain’t easy.