Sept. 2, 1977 Nightlife cover story: Rock 'N Roll night on Allen Street

 

A Nightlife story lands on the cover of Gusto. Those who are able to remember anything at all about these boozy nights on Allen Street consider them some of the best times of their lives. 

Sept. 2, 1977 

Allen Street Boogie 

If you wanta know a secret,

You’ve got to promise not to tell.

And if you wanta get to heaven,

You’ve got to raise a little hell …

– Ozark Mountain Daredevils 

          Buffalo’s longest-running barroom revel was born of the need to get to heaven on a Monday night. Mondays, you see, have traditionally been known as saloon-keepers’ Sabbaths – the day when the wreckage of the weekend is shoveled aside and the customers stay home.

          In the crazed, combative summer of 1970, a group of newly returned Vietnam veterans concluded that this arrangement was just too slow. Clearly, something had to be done about Monday. If the city’s most ebullient bartenders and hardiest hangers-out had nothing else to do, why not get them together?

          The rest of the ingredients were easy enough to gather under the roof of Mulligan’s Brick Bar on Allen Street. First came a soundbooth deejay, the redoubtable Tommy Howard, with his collection of rude and rowdy 45 rpm singles dating back to the ‘50s. Next the order went in for upwards to 100 cases of seven-ounce bottles of O’Keefe’s Old Vienna Lager Beer, to be given out three for a dollar.

          The result was Rock ‘N Roll Night on Allen Street. After seven years, the neighbors will testify that it is still the baddest night of the week.

          The invitation to inspect this phenomenon came from one of its perpetrators – Bob Hens from the Outside Inn in Angola, who was working in Milligan’s in 1970. Hens now is co-proprietor of a saloon that’s only one boarded-up storefront away from Mulligan’s, Birdies 19th Hole (formerly the Allentown Café), which offers Monday nighters a second stop en route to oblivion.

          Hens proposes to begin the journey by warming up at the Locker Room, Delaware and Delavan, another of his interests. He’s among a crowd of half a dozen Birdie’s stalwarts at the electronic bowling machine with several samples of the elixir of the evening nearby. Vodka and iced tea.

          “I like it because it goes down easy,” says Jaybird, the other co-proprietor of Birdie’s. And as it goes down, so do tales of Mondays past.

          Among them: Barbara the barmaid recounts waking up after once such lost evening, cradling a zucchini squash as if it were a baby. Such is the fate of those who don’t last till dawn. Those who do last usually come to other ends, like the fearless driver who took his Volkswagen over the Scajaquada Expressway pedestrian ramp and got stuck.

          “I’ve heard all these stories a dozen times before,” Barbara observes as the party drinks up and hits the sidewalks. Parking being scarce around Allen Street, a few cars are left behind.

          It’s not quite 10:30 and things are well warmed up when the party reaches Birdie’s, where it’s another dollar, another vodka and iced tea. Or, if you wish, three seven-ounce splits of beer. The sound system’s big beat throbs heavy from the bouncers at the front door to the king-of-the-mountain foosball doubles in the rear. The pool table, however, is closed and covered.

          A most amazing thing happens about the time Channel 7 is asking if you know where your children are. A near constant stream of fresh-faced young women in slacks and dungarees come through the front door, literally scores of them.

          One of them is the daughter of a family on this writer’s street. She’s 20, she’s got a job and she moved into an apartment on the West Side four months ago. This is the fourth Monday she’s come out. She guesses she likes it. Some of her friends are here too.

          Another most amazing thing happens shortly after the young women get their first drink and take a look around. A steady stream of young men in slacks and dungarees enters the place, dozens of them.

          One of them is a burly old buddy in a baseball cap who’s worked at the door of several Elmwood Avenue taverns. First time he’s been down here on Monday in six months, he says over the music, but he used to make it all the time. He sees someone else he knows and excuses himself.

          Barbara and others of the party have been induced into tending to the thirsts of the customers and they seem to be having the most fun of all. They augment the scheduled barkeep, Clifford, a grinning imp in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, just back from California.

          Hens and Jaybird have settled in amid a knot of friends at the head of the bar, within easy hailing distance of the door. One of the folks they hail is dark, curly Mike Militello, proprietor of the neighboring Mulligan’s.

          Monday nighters routinely hop from Mulligan’s to Birdie’s and back again, or vice versa. Mulligan’s tends to have a dressier clientele – fewer dungarees, more styled hair – and a larger one too. By the height of the festivities, the Brick Bar is wall-to-wall people, with a few more waiting in line outside.

          Allen Street gets its heaviest quotient of lingerers, slow-moving cars and motorcycles parked at the curb during this time. The gendarmes know it too. Blue and white police cruisers are much in evidence.

          This writer secured passage to the rear of Mulligan’s by following in the wake of a guy built like a fullback all the way through the mob until he walked through a door that said: “No Admittance.” Without a blocker, it took twice as long to get back downfield.

          Hens and Jaybird note that they used to let the 19th Hole get as full as Mulligan’s until they reckoned that it was costing them sales at the bar.

          Birdie’s isn’t exactly full of elbow room itself until after 2 a.m. By then, the young women are abandoning their drinks and extracting themselves from whomever they’re talking to. Soon after that, the young men with jobs in the morning are clicking their digital watches and deciding they’ve seen enough. Some of them wander to the sub shop or the restaurant at Elmwood and Allen.

          As for the rest, a certain heavenly spirit sets in and the night rides out on an intoxicated note. The records don’t stop until the bartenders do. Jaybird disappears on what may be another legend in the making. Hens makes sure all the empties are gathered. Time to lock up. If it wasn’t for Tuesday butting in, Monday night could easily last forever.

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IN THE PHOTOS: Cover illustration by the late great Dick Bradley. 

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FOOTNOTE: Aside from Bob Hens and Mike Militello, surnames were suppressed to protect the not-so-innocent. Jaybird, through, loaned his name to that Allen Street bar in honor of his other love – golf. Since then, the place has become the Pink Flamingo, or simply “The Pink,” and it still stays open late.

          My recently-retired colleague Milt Northrop wrote Jon “Jaybird” Benson up in 2015 and noted that he’s a former Class AA club champion at Sheridan Park Golf Course and a member of the Buffalo/Western New York Bartenders Hall of Fame. After he got out of the bar business, he played on minor league golf tours for 25 years and became a golf instructor at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Northrop wrote that Jaybird continued to come back to Buffalo every summer and was giving golf lessons at the Airport Driving Range.

Bob Hens also went to Florida and died in Sarasota in 2011.

Mike Militello is still among us here in Buffalo. Now listed on LinkedIn as a gaming and hospitality consultant, he also had an upscale place on Hertel Avenue, Mulligan’s Museum of Fine Arts Café, through the ‘70s and ‘80s. O. J. Simpson used to hang out there. With his sister, Bea, Mike took over the Bijou Grill, right across from Shea’s Performing Arts Center, in 1990 and it has been a Theater District mainstay for the past 30-plus years.