Neal Cassady:

Drinking in Denver

 

 

 

 

by tom christopher

copyright 2003

all rights reserved

 

 

 

...in 1947 in fact, right after I met Cody, and had all those

anticipatory dreams of me and him drinking and grabbing at bars in the

construction worker night; I came to feel that the alleys, the fences,

the streets were the ‘holy Denver streets’ I called them...

Tom Christopher's site has been updated and improved. For the most recent version, please visit: http://www.tomchristopher.com

Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody

           

 

Denver was built on taverns. Wagons full of whiskey joined the settlers

and prospectors who followed the Arkansas River Trail or the Smokey Hill

Trail to the new town of Denver at the confluence of the South Platte

River and Cherry Creek. A series of roadhouses had grown along those

trails and they were often the first buildings or public buildings of

new towns. Wagons arriving in Denver with liquor were often dismantled

and the wood and canvas reused to make crude saloons, and many early

farmers converted their buildings to roadhouses. Four Mile House on the

Cherry Creek route to Denver, described as ‘a neat little tavern’ with

cold well water and strong drink in 1866 is now a museum and state park

 

            Denver was founded in 1858 and by 1860 had a population of 5000. The

town was described as being an exceedingly primitive collection of

shacks and tents, with as many rum shops and taverns as cabins. Indeed,

there were 36 taverns scattered around the old downtown in 1860, the

year the first churches (Roman Catholic and Southern Methodist) were

built. A contemporary diary notes that many travelers became

disheartened at the site of this ‘dismal village’ and immediately

returned home.

 

	Denver 1864

 

 

 

 

            But some liked it here. Richens Lacy Wootton, called Uncle Dick,

visited Denver on Christmas Eve of 1858 with eight wagonloads of

merchandise including some Taos Lightning, a potent brew made by

mountain men near Taos since 1825, using a wheat base and such legendary

ingredients as pepper, tobacco and gun powder. Uncle Dick set up camp,

tapped a barrel and invited the town to celebrate Christmas. The town

later gave Uncle Dick free town lots to set up a business and his story

and a half building of hewn logs, shake roof and glass windows was

considered the grandest structure in town. Even Thomas Pollack, the

first elected sheriff and hangman, augmented his salary of fifty cents

for each jailed prisoner by opening a boarding house and saloon. Denver

House, a notorious tavern, hotel and gambling den was 130 feet by 36

feet, with a bar that ran the length of the building.

 

Denver 1864

 

            Saloons were the largest buildings in town and they did double duty as

banks, as they often had the only safes available, theaters and even

churches, with the bars being used as alters. In 1859 residents met in

Uncle Dicks tavern to vote on succession from the Kansas Territories.

Two years later this was accomplished, but legislative sessions were

held in taverns, halls and hotels until 1894. In September 1860

townspeople gathered in Apollo Hall, a saloon and billiard hall to draft

the city?s first municipal constitution.

 

            Even in frontier bars there was a natural segregation of various groups

depending on language, past residence or social experience. This

continued as the city developed and neighborhoods began to take on

characteristics of specific immigrant cultures and taverns continued to

act as cultural centers for these groups.

 

            By the 1870s the arrival of the railroads had guaranteed the arrival of

easterners with more genteel appetites and a call for reforms. New, dry

suburban housing tracts were developed, and this further concentrated

taverns in the older downtown areas. A certain amount of wildness was

tolerated downtown because of the amount of civic income that was

derived by special business taxes leveled on the taverns. Saloons

continued to serve all classes of people and liquors, and Denver became

the commercial and amusement center for the Rocky Mountain region with a

reputation as the wildest city in the West.

 

            Denver and Colorado had a healthy brewing industry, with 23 breweries

in 1893, including Zang Beer, the Denver Brewing Company, Coors, Rocky

Mountain Brewery, and Tavoli-Union. Domestic beers such as Budweiser,

Pabst, Schlitz and Blatz came with the railroads as did a full selection

of American and European liquors, wines and champaigns.

 

            At the turn of the century pornography was available in penny arcades.

Prostitution was legal until 1941, and when prohibition of liquor began

in 1916 there was no less alcohol around.

 

            It was during this time that Denver was first visited by its most famous

drunk, Neal Cassady Sr. Some people gain celebrity and are known to also

have a proclivity for drink, but Neal Cassady Sr is unique in his

celebrity for being a drunk.

 

Father’s morning sobriety for work was guaranteed, for it must be said that in the depression years he seldom missed a day’s work when there was one to be had; equally assured, whether achieved often throughout the week or not, was his Saturday Night Drunk   Neal Cassady, The First Third

Neal Marshall Cassady is on the left. Circa 1962, Denver Colorado

 

 

 

            Neal Marshall Casady was probably born 1 Sept 1893 in Queen City

Missouri. No birth certificate can be found in this rural farm town, and

looking over documents one never sees the same birthday twice. He left

home about age 15 and seldom visited. He married a woman named Ethel in

1914, and is listed in the Des Moines Iowa directory as a barber in

1919. By 1921 he had deserted his wife, having failed to ever support

her, according to 1924 divorce documents.

 

            By 1925 he drifted to Denver  and married the widowed Maude Schuer

Daly, who called herself Jean. Their son Neal Marshall Cassady was born

in 1926 in Salt Lake City and they lived together until 1932 when Neal?s

drinking and the dissipation of the family’s property proved to be too

much for Jean. Neal moved to The New Metropolitan Hotel on the corner of

16th and Market Streets.

 

            The New Metropolitan had never been a great hotel. Denver had great

hotels. The Windsor was the first and was followed by the Tabor, and the

Barclay, with The Brown Palace the last of the great ones. The

Metropolitan, which was apparently renovated in the early 1920s and

renamed, was always a second class hotel, but even as such it had the

high ceilings and large windows of a spacious older building, though by

the time Cassady was there the rooms had been subdivided with partitions

topped with a roof of chicken wire often covered with broken glass to

prevent thefts.

 

            Cassady apparently settled into his new life pretty easily. It probably

Wasn’t much different than it had been previously. It was the middle of

the depression and Denver was hit hard. Jobs were scarce but he worked

at least part time as a barber and made the rounds at the Citizens

Missions or Father Divine’s (24 and Larimer) for free meals when down.

The rest of his time was apparently spent drinking with his friends

 

.

           

 

He has been described as being charming and gregarious, and women found

him attractive even years later, and it’s interesting to note he and

Jean were married by Judge Ben Lindsay, a prominent figure in Denver.

But Neal’s real love was drinking. His family knew him to drink Sterno,

an alcohol based fuel, or kitchen extracts such as vanilla before

resorting to sobriety, and those who met him only once comment on his

drinking.

 

            Young Neal spent the school year with his mother and the summers with

his dad. In 1932 the two of them hitchhiked and rode the rails to the

family home in Queen City. In 1933 they traveled to Salt Lake City,

where the elder Neal was arrested for being drunk in public, down to

Albuquerque and then through Sacramento,and San Francisco on their way

to LA before stopping in San Jose, where young Neal was left with a

kindly stranger while the elder Neal went with a work crew to pick

fruit. While there he met a woman and when he picked up his son they

traveled to LA to meet her. They lived in LA about 6 months before

returning to Denver

 

            In 1934 the two stayed in Denver, the elder Neal having become friends

with a dimwitted German alcoholic and his wife living in a barn in the

Barnham district before dad was thrown out for screwing the wife.

 

            In 1935 The two traveled to Nebraska with a friend of Neal Sr’s, with

whom they made fly swatters and sold them door to door, sleeping in the

other guy’s car and drinking the profits until the two men quarreled and

father and son set off for Denver with the supplies, continuing to make

flyswatters and sell them along the way.

 

            This was the last trip the two would make together for years, but the

elder Neal kept up this pace for years, joining work gangs in Utah or a

WPA project in Texas. For a guy who didn’t like to work he often did

some hard physical labor.

 

            Back in Denver the younger Neal went to live with his mother. His

mother lived in the Curtis Park area. Curtis park was the earliest

suburb of Denver, serviced by mule drawn trolleys in the 1870s. They

lived in numerous houses and apartments in the neighborhood, and often

in a huge old rambling building on the corner of 26th and Champa Streets

called The Snowden Apartments.

 

            One of Neal’s earliest friends was Art Barlow, whose dad Blackie Barlow

was a successful bootlegger who employed Neal’s older brothers, Ralph

and Jack. Blackie was a slick good looking guy who drove a large car

with the glovebox full of money. He rented a farm outside of town and

was so successful that he was paying the farm owner a hundred dollars a

week, and his two sons sixty dollars a week in 1930. In addition, there

was a neighbor, a truck driver and Blackie?s brother also on the

payroll, as well as Ralph, Jack and probably others back in Denver. The

Queen City of the Plains had an appetite for liquor.

 

            Blackie’s ranch was searched, and a large amount of whiskey mash was

found, but unfortunately when the Federal Prohibition Agents returned to

their car, they discovered their car had been burned and their overcoats

stolen. At his arraignment Blackie expressed regret that the officers

had experienced such a streak of bad luck, but denied knowing anything

about either the car or the whiskey mash. The charges seem to have

eventually been dropped.

 

            Later, Ralph and Jack went into business for themselves, and set up a

distillery in an apartment by the Puritan Pie Company, where the smell

of the cooking pies would disguise the smell of the liquor. The Puritan

Pie Company is still on Champa Street between 26 and 27 Streets, and

many other buildings that Neal describes in his autobiography The First

Third are still clearly recognizable in the neighborhood.

 

            Bootlegging was common in this part of town and those involved are

matter of fact about describing pay offs to the police, and supplying

high ranking officers with booze.

 

            When prohibition was repealed in 1933 Blackie used his profits to go

into the gasoline transport business where he was successful until the

1950s.

 

            Neal continued to go back and forth from his mother?s to his father?s

house until her death in 1936. After that he stayed with half’ brother

Ralph or Jack’s families or with his father. School records note Neal

prefers living with his father, whose whereabouts are unknown.

 

            Ralph and Jack tried to keep him. Neal’s half brothers have sometimes

been portrayed unkindly, possibly due to the negative way Jack Kerouac

referred to them, but they are a tight, loving family. They worked

during a time when jobs were scarce and supported not only their mother

but the elder Neal. In the absence of these parental figures they

continued to support not only the younger Neal, but his sister Shirley

Jean. But Neal was a handful. He was very bright and already physically

mature by age 14 and used to being self sufficient. He started skipping

school, stealing cars and staying out all night, even being caught in

young girls? rooms.

 

            A Catholic Charities assessment of the family notes in 1939 that the

elder Mr Cassady is living with a Mrs. Bleek and her two sons.

Apparently they met while working together at a Works Progress

Administration project. Shortly after, Mr Cassady was noted to be caring

for his daughter Shirley in a cheap rooming house and to have been drunk

for some time. Shirley was taken by the courts and sent to Saint Clara’s

Orphanage. The document states that Mr Cassady has been known to the

Denver Police for some time and picked up frequently on drunk charges.

 

            It was recommended that Neal be sent to the Mullen Home for boys, where

he stayed briefly before running away. While attempting to place Shirley

in a private residence, Mr Cassady was noted to have kept the house up

all night making a drunken racket. Catholic Charities were called and Mr

Cassady was described as extremely drunk and not able to tell the day of

the week.

 

            Mrs Bleek, who according to her son was also a heavy drinker, had lost

her WPA job because a neighbor had reported her being paid to take care

of Shirley, and Mr. Cassady had apparently lost his due to a three day

drinking spree.

 

            The Catholic Charities document, which covers the years 1939 - 1941

notes again that Mrs. Bleek and Mr. Cassady are drunk during another

visit and later that Cassady is in jail for several weeks.

 

            School records during this time tell the same story. Mr Cassady on a

spree, and later noted to have a bad black eye.

 

            During this time Neal started taking off on his own, hitch hiking to

Indianapolis to see the Indy 500 race, and leaving Denver by bike with

his buddy Chuck to see LA. Chuck turned back after a day, but Neal kept

going.

 

            About 1941 Neal met John and Lucille Briarly. John and Lucille loved to

drink. John was a descendant of a noted Denver pioneer and quite well

off. He was very generous with the less prosperous during the depression

years and his house was always full of people. Once, an ice delivery man

came by and got sucked into a party. The ice company found him and his

truck a day or two later at the Briarly’s house with a huge melting pool

of water running down the street. The more sober members of the family

had to regularly chase out transients and loafers.

 

            And so it was that Justin Brairly, lawyer and school teacher discovered

the shirtless sixteen year old Neal in Uncle John?s kitchen in 1941.

Who are you? Justin asked. The question is, responded Neal, who are

you?

 

            Justin was impressed with Neal and arraigned to get him into East High

School, the most exclusive school in town serving the capitol area.

 

            Neal never went to East High much, he worked an adult job as a tire

recapper, read on his own and kept up an active social life. He

continued to travel to California where he was arrested a couple of

times and eventually he did 10 months in a Colorado reform school for

receiving stolen property. While in Buena Vista Reformatory Neal wrote

Justin asking him to pick up a bar tab of three or four dollars at a bar

called Paul’s Place at 15 and Platte where his brother Jack used to

bartend. There is still a tavern in that building

 

            When he was released in June 1945 he met the group of kids that Jack

Kerouac would fictionalize into the Pederson’s Poolhall gang. This was

during the last days of World War Two. All able bodied adults had been

drafted and it was common for mature 15 year olds to join the services

and even more common for kids of this age to be working. Neal’s first

wife, LuAnne Henderson remembers that when you turned the corner of 16

Street off Broadway that there wasn’t a face over 21 years old.

 

 

 

           

Lloyds of Denver Cocktail Menu. Mid 1940s

 

This group used to hang out at Lloyds of Denver, where they could buy a

low alcohol beer at age 18, but nobody checked your ID if you were 14 or

15. Lloyds had a bar downstairs, a poolhall upstairs, and a small hotel

above that. Lloyds was at 15 and Glenarm, and Pederson’s Poolhall at

1523 Glenarm. Other hangout spots on that block were Soloman’s

Restaurant known for it’s cheap beef stew and the Mir - O Bar. The area

was ringed by small hotels such as the De Whitt and the Kensyington, and

Neal was legendary for his ability to have two or three girls in

different rooms and making the rounds of each room and stopping by the

poolhall for a drink or a quick game of pool in between. Neal also

mentions a bar at the 3 way intersection of Park, Seventeenth and

Marion, possibly called the Marion Inn, and a bar on Colfax between

Pennsylvania and Pearl Streets where the plate glass front ill conceals

the patrons of its booths.  LuAnne Henderson’s

mother had a bar inside McVittie’s Restaurant, and she saw Neal there

for the first time when he came to pick up his current girlfriend, a

waitress several years older than he.

 

Thelma’s Crystal Room, inside McVittie’s Resturant, early 1940s. The girl on the left was an early girlfriend of Neal’s

 

 

 

 

Neal continued to work at tire recapping on and off and spent a lot of

time organizing parties. Sometimes renting trucks in which he threw a

mattress and ferried the gang back and forth to parties in the

mountains, or out to one of the amusement parks like Elitches, where

they could smoke pot inconspicuously or Lakeside, where they liked to

watch midget auto races.

 

            One of Neal’s girlfriends had access to an old victorian house up in

the mountains which was the scene of many wild parties still remembered

by his friends. All the kids liked beer and one of the girls in the

circle could get liquor from a much older boyfriend. There was a player

piano in the cabin as well as trunks of victorian clothing that the kids

would dress in and party all night to ragtime piano rolls.

 

            Friends from this time note that Neal didn’t drink much. He had a

sensitive stomach and didn’t like the effects of alcohol. But he liked

to smoke marijuana and benzedrine was available without a prescription.

 

            It was different times, his friends stress, a time of bars and

barfights and tough guys on the corner. One member of the Pedersons

group, several years younger than the others watched their antics with

awe, particularly impressed with Neal’s ability to seduce women. Later

this person became a teacher at East High, and has stated that this was

the smartest and wildest group to go through the school.

 

            There were some bad kids in town. Contemporary news stories show

teenagers being sentenced to hard time for violent and destructive

crimes, and a few were on the outside of this group, but joined mainly

by a common age. At least one was killed in prison, but in general these

kids were too smart to get caught up in anything serious, though some

petty crimes were committed. Mostly the gang liked to have a few beers

and cruise around. Green’s Drive In and Pick A Rib were favorite places

to get a burger, and though the crowd would sometimes get rowdy and be

tossed out of a place for a few days there was generally no harm done.

 

            A few cars ended up in ditches, a couple windows were broken and some

stuff stolen, a couple of war surplus smoke grenades set off downtown,

and somebody drove a bus up a couple flights of stairs, but during the

war years Denver was a crazy place, full of V Girls hooking up with

sailors, and gays meeting discreetly in the Brown Palace, and if these

were the wildest kids they weren?t the only wild ones.

 

            The group Neal hung with were smart, young and healthy and they didn?t

like to waste time. Anytime was the right time to party for somebody,

and the gang moved around from place to place taking advantage of

whatever space was available in somebody’s apartment or hotel room or if

somebody’s parents were gone for the weekend.

 

            Neal married LuAnne Henderson in Summer 1946, and set off for Nebraska

where they worked for a short time before heading off for New York,

where they arrived just before the end of the year.

 

They separated, but both were back in Denver by spring 1947, and the fun

continued. Carolyn Robinson, soon to be Neal's second wife, met him

through a friend on his return and was surprised when the gang simply

assumed they would use her hotel room for a party space. They were all

natives of Denver; didn’t any of them have a home?, she later wrote.

 

            Neal’s new friends Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg arrived in summer

and were impressed. They were used to the atmosphere of New York’s Times

Square and Harlem, and they found the same excitement in Denver.

 

            Several of their school friends were from Denver and showed them the

town in style, and Cassady, Ginsberg and Kerouac and others got together

for a few all nighters at Ginsberg’s basement apartment on Grant Street.

Kerouac describes the summer of 1947 in On The Road. It’s a crazy season

in the romantic west, cumulating with a wild night at the Central City

Opera and a party in an old miner’s cabin.

 

	Central City 1950

 

 

 

            At the end of the summer Cassady and Ginsberg went to Texas to see

William S Burroughs, and Kerouac went off to San Francisco, where he was

soon joined by Neal’s friend Al Hinkle. It’s hard to say when Cassady

was next in Denver. He ended up in San Francisco, pursuing Carolyn

Robinson. He was back in Denver in March of 1948 to get an annulment

from LuAnne Henderson, and then was back again just before Christmas

with Al Hinkle and his bride Helen to pick up LuAnne for the road trip

chronicled in On The Road and elsewhere. Kerouac moved to Westwood in

the summer of 1949, and spent time working in the city and visiting the

skid row area around Market and Larimer Streets, the poolhalls on

Curtis, the jazz clubs of Five Points and Neal’s old neighborhood of

Curtis Park, especially noting the ball park at 23 and Welton. He

wandered happily through the neighborhood digging it’s pure American

beauty, and later writing with his usual grace and attention to detail:

The old Negro man had a can of beer in his coat pocket, which he

proceeded to open; and the old white man enviously eyed the can and

groped in his pocket to see if he could buy a can, too. How I died! I

walked away from there. Unfortunately none

of his friends were in town and he left after a season, traveling to see

the Cassady’s, returning shortly with Neal. They ran around for a few

days, outraging the neighbors with Neal’s desire to make everybody’s

daughters, and drinking beer at a hillbilly roadhouse within walking

distance of Jack’s old Westwood home before heading to New York.

 

            During this time Kerouac had sold his first novel The Town and the

City, and he was in Denver again in late May 1950 to attend an autograph

party set up by Neal’s old mentor, Justin Briarly. This time his friends

were in town and he spent an entire week of afternoons in lovely Denver

bars where the waitresses wear slacks and cut around with bashful,

loving eyes, not hardened waitresses, but waitresses that fall in love

with the clientele ...and we spent the same week in nights at Five

Points listening to Jazz, drinking booze in crazy Negro saloons and

gabbing till five in the morning in my basement.

 

At this point Neal showed up unexpectedly and he and Kerouac

made plans to run off to Mexico with Frank Jeffries, a Denver guy who

could drink carafes of wine like water and jump over parked cars. After

the autograph party there was a party for Jack that carried over to the

Windsor Hotel, where Neal got uncharacteristically drunk.

 

Windsor Hotel Late 1800s

           

	You know the only reason I’m not a lush...Because I really don’t enjoy the...ah, the - if, you know, I mean I - to, you know - it doesn’t, ah, of course, I’ve got drunk quite a while... and I’ve been very drunk...see, I’ll bet I’ve been drunk six months straight, see, with Watson?   Neal Cassady, as transcribed by Jack Kerouac in Visions of Cody