From the files: a night out at the local watering hole

THE ARMCHAIR MAYOR COLUMN — Another offering from the clippings file, put forward as evidence that I was once young and fun (sort of), just like Kamloops. This one, called ‘A slice of Kamloops night life,’ was published April 12, 1978 in The Kamloops News:

Everybody over 25 (or maybe 30) should spend an evening at one of Kamloops’ swinging young night spots once in awhile. It will do one of two things: make you feel extremely old, or make you happy that you are.

One of my favourite slices of Kamloops life is the David Thompson pub. I attend rarely, approaching as I am my mid-thirties, a veritable nadir in the eyes of the very young.

The DT Torture Test is not for the faint or old of heart, mind or body. You have to get there early, to have a place to sit. The place literally crawls with braless, liberated young women and macho young guys who love making the most of the liberation of the young women.

While we oldsters figure a beer after work at the Village or Canadian Inn on Fridays is a big deal, at the DT it’s Monday-through-Saturday Night Fever.

The guys — John Travoltas all — line up by the bar in wait for likely prospects, then mosey out into the teeming herd. You’ll see the same sort of action in the cutting horse competitions at the indoor rodeo this week.

If the first try results in a miss, you wait and give it another shot.

“The chances of success here aren’t a hundred percent every night,” I was told one evening by a connoisseur. “But they’re damn close.”

As I feigned mature disgust at the immorality of today’s youth, he added with an elbow in my ribs, “Well, they don’t all dance with you just ‘cuz you ask.”

It was extremely difficult to hear what my informant was saying. The band was playing, a five-piece group that assaulted your eardrums at 20,000 cycles a second and a couple of hundred decibels or more. By shouting directly into the ear of the person next to you, it was often possible to be understood, as long as you kept the message pretty concise.

The sound waves batter your body, and you can literally feel the vibrations going through your bones.

A “break” in the music at the DT consists of the band being replaced for 10 or 15 minutes by the thumping and bashing of disco tapes, only slightly lower in volume.

Young people love the DT.

“I can’t stand the bloody DT,” says one acquaintance (not so young any more but, I guess, young at heart) who goes there just about every night of the week.

“It’s not pain, it’s ecstasy,” insists another regular whose DT stamina I sincerely admire.

For us older types, one evening at the DT calls for congratulations. Two consecutive evenings deserves a Kami pin and key to the city. Three evenings in a row qualifies you to look down your nose at war veterans. Outward Bound could use you as an instructor.

I’m still halfway to congratulations.

There is no deja vu for us oldsters, only a blend of plastic angst and sense of relief that you grew up to the comparatively subdued strains of Elvis.

This is not a putdown to the DT pub or its faithful inhabitants, or any of its counterparts of the city. It is an expression of awe at the energy of our early 20s citizens.

It is also an acknowledgement that Kamloops is not so deprived of entertainment as some people will tell you. The drinking establishments are many and varied.

Per capita, nobody can come close to us in choice of watering holes.

They range in theme from Old English to old riverboat to themeless, and in the intensity of activity from quiet to booming. If you want a casual, working man’s atmosphere, it’s the Village or the Plaza. Authentic atmosphere, the Tudor Rose. Friendly neighbourliness, the Westsyder. A little elegance, but action, Tiffany’s. After work, the Canadian Inn. Relaxed, the Franklin or the Central.

And on and on, and I’m probably in trouble for not naming them all.

All this is leading up to more than a review of pubs and lounges.

The city is currently in the middle of some vociferous debate over teen discos. Most people favour the idea. I’m not against it myself.

But the thought strikes me that most of the inhabitants of places like the DT and even Tiffany’s and the new Mickey’s did not have the benefit of teen discos. They were in at the start of a particular entertainment style.

Teen discos seem to be the coming thing. At least two people have been trying to establish them here and it looks like one will open on Victoria Street.

I also heard during my Friday-night-after-work-beer last week that another disco is being planned for the North Shore by a couple of sharp young businessmen who know exactly what they’re doing.

What happens when the teen disco grads hit the young adult scene? Will the mind-numbing noise and activity of today seem like church? Should the school board be more worried about what disco music does to their kids’ bodies than junk food and smoking?

I dunno. Myself, I’d rather be in Barnhart Vale.

THE ANNUAL indoor rodeo gets cranked up tomorrow night, and last week some of the KXA and Indoor Rodeo Association types threw a do for the press to get them thinking about it.

It was the most blatant kind of PR bribery, and the press loved it.

A couple of dozen of us piled into cars and went out to the Hook Ranch to watch how the cowboys do it. Helping show us where Canadian steer wrestling champion George Butterfield, All Round Canadian champ Ben Hern, and Kamloops’ own Harley Hook (second ranked calf roper in the nation), and a couple of the boys from the Hook Ranch.

In the media competition, each entrant had to drink a bottle of beer, jump on a wooden horse and rope a bail of hay.

FM disk jock Al Seville had the fastest drinking time, 7.5 seconds. Yours truly had the slowest, 7.5 minutes.

Then it was back to the Dome for a feast that would give a vegetarian nightmares. But it was great stuff and, as one of the organizers put it, “it shows the media we’re people.”

Well, I always figured that cowboys were people. But after watching all that booze disappear I’ve conclude them sumbitches is really human holding tanks.