July 1, 1977 nightlife: Mickey Rats Club

 

The undisputed king of the Lake Erie beach clubs, freshly geared up for a very long reign.

July 1, 1977

Mickey Rats 

          The kids were climbing snowdrifts and touching the tops of telephone poles along Old Lake Shore Road outside Angola when the shipment of T-shirts showed up the first week in February.

          At that point, they were the last thing anyone wanted to have on their minds. Or on their chests either. The shirts proclaimed: “Summer Starts at Mickey Rats March 1.”

          Nevertheless, Mickey Rats opened March 1. And in spite of the weather, 800 people showed up that first night. As far as this burgeoning beachside bar is concerned, it’s been summer ever since.

          Actually, the log-cabin-like location was a warm-weather favorite long before it became Mickey Rays three years ago. As Lerczak’s and later as the WMU Club, its big L-shaped interior always seemed to be the spot where most of the late teens and early 20s crowd ended up when they went out to “The Lake.”

          Other places have regularly contested its supremacy, but somehow they never came out on top. Miller’s next door could never handle as big a crowd under its low ceilings. The Outside Inn, further down Old Lake Shore Road, is about as commodious as Mickey Rats, but it doesn’t have a beach of its own.

          The most impressive new contender, Mulligan’s Beach Club a few miles down the shore in Sunset Bay, has the size, the sand, the strong sound system and a game area besides, but suffers from a sort of penned-in atmosphere that’s further emphasized by the chain link fences that surround it.

          There are no fences on the Mickey Rats beach. The feeling is light-hearted. Even prankish.

          For instance, there’s that full-sized sailing boat – a lightning – that someone spent two weeks hoisting to the top of that big tree at the end of the sandy parking lot. And then there’s the beer bottle out front – salvaged from an old Iroquois Beer sign and painted – that stands as tall as most of the customers.

          Inside, there’s two bars. The main one is right inside the front door. The second one in the rear corner is staffed exclusively with barmaids – one of them being proprietor Richie Alberts’ girlfriend.

          The rear bar is where the food is – chicken wings and such. It’s also where they sell an incredible assortment of clothing – shirts, shorts, halter tops, even socks, all bearing the inebriated wreck of a rodent that serves as a namesake for the place.

          Go out the sliding doors and you’ll find this year’s addition to Mickey Rats. It’s a spacious patio bar, drenched in sun by day and electric light at night and enclosed with rope netting.

          “This is the only open-air bar I know of in the state this side of Long Island,” Richie reports.

          Weekends see as many as 1,500 customers a night passing through the front doors. There’s live bands every night of the week. Tuesdays are “craze nights” with reduced prices at the bar, a tradition Richie’s carried over from when he ran McNally’s down the shore.

          Next Thursday may get even crazier. Richie has a 7-7-77 party planned – 77 cents to get in, 77 cents a drink. Also on the July calendar are pig and ox roasts, a volleyball tournament on the 17th and Christmas-in-July and New-Year’s-in-July parties.

          “We try to give ‘em the best of everything here,” Richie says, standing on a beachside overlook in his Mickey Rats shorts and a pair of thongs. “We give ‘em good bar drinks, good bands, good sound. We could have had no band at all on stage half the time and it wouldn’t make a difference. But as far as doing the typical things that would cheapen the place, I won’t do it.”

          Mickey Rats Club’s summer lasts until Sept. 30. Then it closes for the winter. But Richie and his partner, Joe Herc, have plenty to keep them busy year-round. In all, they hold six bar licenses.

          Three of them are for the club – one for the front bar, one for the back bar and one for the patio. And then there’s Mickey Rats South, a year-round bar on Second Street in Jamestown across from the Jamestown Community College campus.

          Then there’s two more (one upstairs, one downstairs) in Mickey Rats Lounge down the road, a year-round operation in what formerly was McNally’s.

          Richie and his crew remodeled the place in their favorite décor – stucco and natural wood – to make more of a neighborhood-type tavern with a bigger menu for an older clientele. During the blizzard, workers from the nearby sewage plant stuck out the store there.

          It wasn’t so long ago that Mickey Rats Club looked like a bigger gamble than those T-shirts. Back in 1974 when Richie took over the club, it was not licensed for alcohol. He ran it as a teen club and waited more than a year for state approval.

          “I did it all on a risk,” he says.

          Richie comes from the Angola area and has worked in the club since 1968, when his older brother took over Lerczak’s and changed the name. After his brother’s death a couple years later, it was sold and Richie was left to start all over again.

          “Emmit,” Richie says to Emmit Swann, former roadie for Big Wheelie and now Mickey Rats publicity director, “I was 17 then. I was parking cars in the lot, just hanging around. I didn’t know anything. What a difference now.”

          In all, Richie worked a dozen different bars before he got one of his own. He and his crew have done all the remodeling themselves, which at Mickey Rats Lounge meant knocking out walls between eight rooms upstairs.

          It’s a stalwart crew and there’s a strong camaraderie at Mickey Rats. They look after each other. Any given sunny afternoon, prime time for enjoying the beach, will find many, if not all of the bartenders at the club.

          “That’s spelled L-O-R-E-T-T-O,” says senior bartender Mike Loretto. Others include Richie’s brother Mike, Brian O’Keefe, Mike Bennet, Tommy Hyer, Rich Inglert, Chip Spitler and Joe Laud. Working, they report, is just about as easygoing as the off-duty atmosphere.

          They look after each other. Consider Maria, upstairs barmaid at the lounge, when Richie requests a match to light up one of his specially-embossed Mickey Rats cigarettes.

          “If I had some matches, I’d be happy,” he remarks.

          “I wouldn’t,” she says, “because then you’d be smoking and that’s not good for you.”

          Richie, Emmit and three others of the clan sport Mickey Rats tattoos on their hips. The fraternity also shares a penchant for big luxury cars. There’s only one thing he hasn’t managed to do in the past 10 years, Richie says. He hasn’t had a summer vacation.

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IN THE PHOTO: Mickey Rats in an aerial photo from the 2010s.

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FOOTNOTE: Richie Alberts sold the property in 2016 to conservative politician Carl Paladino’s Ellicott Development, which has plans to turn the property into a mixed-use place with single-family waterfront townhouses, shops and a 3,000-plus square foot restaurant with an indoor and outdoor bar, a rooftop patio and access to the beach. Last year Captain Kidd’s next door was demolished and Mickey Rats had one final summer in the sun.

            Richie Alberts has outlived the club. I spoke with him last year when I wrote the obituary for Gino Grasso, one of his bartenders with whom he became co-owner of Mickey Rats City Bar, another very successful oasis near UB at Main and Minnesota streets. 

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FURTHER NOTE: All of these transcripts of my old feature articles can be found in a somewhat more legible and searchable form on my Blogspot site: https://www.blogger.com/blog/posts/4731437129543258237. They also can be seen in the Buffalo News archives on newspapers.com.