BRATTLEBORO — Emil's Pub, the little barroom tucked away in the Fort Dummer neighborhood of South Main Street, closed for good on April 27.
The owners, Tim and Mary Beth Grover, sold the building where the bar is located, but the new owner has not yet applied for a liquor license.
With that, another piece of old Brattleboro disappears.
The bar had been the oldest continuous holder of a liquor license in Brattleboro.
Emil Kozlowski, who died in 1999, was the Emil that the bar was named after, according to Bill Holliday of Dummerston, who went to Brattleboro Union High School with Kozlowski's children.
The building where Kozlowski opened a bar in 1948 had previously served as a barber shop, a pool room, and a Polish-American Club.
The Fort Dummer neighborhood was originally established to house the mill workers at the nearby Berkshire Fine Spinning Associates, now the Cotton Mill, which opened in 1912. Hundreds of people worked at the textile mill until it closed in 1958.
In all of its incarnations, Emil's was a hub for the mill workers who lived in the neighborhood.
“It was a hard-working neighborhood,” said former Brattleboro Police Chief Richard Guthrie, who was born on South Main Street a few blocks away. “Everybody knew everybody back then. It was like a community within a community.”
Emil's and the now-defunct Pine Room, owned by Eugene Semeraro, were the bars that hung on the longest in the Fort Dummer neighborhood.
Biz Dana, who now works at the Brattleboro Retreat, remembers being a bartender at Emil's in 1977.
“I worked the day shift,” she said. “What I thought were old men would come in at 11 a.m. and drink all afternoon. They were sweet to this 19-year-old 'Brattleboro Girl.'
“I made a lot of money. I cooked burgers on the grill and sold the pickled eggs each weekday afternoon.
“One of my favorite customers was an uncle of a former BUHS classmate of mine. My classmate warned me that all his uncle ever said was, 'Some do, some don't.' Well, it was true. Every day he'd walk in at noon, I'd say, 'Hi, Ernie!' and like clockwork he'd say, 'Some do, some don't.'
“Dino [Chakalis] owned it back then. He'd have us take Polaroid photos of the customers and hang them on the wall. I can still smell the sawdust from the shuffleboard table.
“He'd meet me downstairs (he lived upstairs) at opening time, make sure I was all set up, and then he'd sleep all day. He'd come down at 6 and tend bar for a few hours and then someone else would close up.
“Dino was one of the nicest bosses I ever had - paid a good wage and treated me with a great deal of respect, considering it was the late 1970s, and being a waitress was tough in this small post-mill town.”
The Grovers bought the bar in 2001 from then-owner Marcia Mears. Mears and her husband, Russ, bought it from Chakalis, who bought from Kozlowski.
No matter who owned the place, it remained a neighborhood bar where memories big and small were made.
“My dad actually used to take me there, much to my mother's horror,” said Brattleboro native Sue Storey, who now lives in Hinesburg. “I don't think one could see from one end of the bar to the other, the air was so blue with smoke.”
“I remember that is where I told my parents I was joining the Air Force in 1977,” said Karen Flanagan, who now lives in Gloucester, Mass.
“Michael asked me to marry him at Emil's Pub,” said Betty Henry of Brattleboro. “There was a rather inebriated gentleman on the stool at the bar between us who did not make any effort to move and give us a romantic moment of privacy, but then we probably had enjoyed a sip or two ourselves.”
“The pickled sausage was lovely - then,” Henry said. “Now, I don't think I could get one down.”
“I spent many evenings there after my husband's softball games,” said Lois Wisell Dunham of Hinsdale. “Lots of great food and friends.”
But the neighborhood bar, the place where workers unwound after a hard day on the job, or celebrated a win after a softball game at Memorial Park, has nearly vanished from Brattleboro. Sportsmen's Lounge on Canal Street is the last of the species.
Tougher drunk-driving laws and the ban on smoking have taken their toll on bars around town, but Emil's managed to hang on, until now.
“Back in the 1960s, there were 42 bars in Brattleboro,” Guthrie recalled. “We had more bars than Burlington. We used to have an extra patrol car on duty on Friday nights just to handle the bar crowd.”
But Guthrie, then a patrol officer, rarely had to answer calls at Emil's or the Pine Room.
“As a police officer, I don't recall any major problems on that end of South Main Street,” he said. “The bars usually took care of the problems themselves.”
There aren't as many bars in Brattleboro today, and Guthrie said that's probably a good thing. But he said he remembers bars like Emil's not as trouble spots, but as places where working people went, back in the days when Brattleboro was a manufacturing town.
“Things are a lot different now,” he said.