heritagepub

April 12, 2023

Oregon Tavern Age: Heritage Pub

It was noon on a gray and rainy Friday.

But I didn’t allow my mood to match the weather. I was feeling great after dropping off copies of The Old Crow Book Club at the Clackamas Book Exchange, a block off SE 82^nd Ave, and its river of concrete, commercialization and homelessness.

Linda the proprietor of the shop was excited to help me sell the book for a few bucks each. She would retain all profits to assist in keeping this very, very second-hand used bookstore alive.

I told Linda that the Clackamas Book Exchange will be the only bookstore to carry the book (unless another one reaches out to me, which they won’t). Linda loved the distinction and she praised the striking cover of the book, which resembles a bottle of Old Crow, the rotgut whiskey.

“I always drank Lord Calvert myself,” said Linda.

“Why?” I said.

“So I could say the ‘Lord was always with me.’”

We laughed pretty hard at that.

The Heritage Club has gone through many iterations but, according to the bartender, the same family has owned the property since 1922! Jesus, Silent Cal Coolidge was President!

The joint’s décor reflected three or four different decorating schemes, including a former strip joint and biker bar. I liked the lack of cohesion. Who wants order with interior design in OTA country?

But was the Heritage Club authentic OTA country? Not really. I’ve just got to let go it’s going to last the course of my lifetime.

Absolutely nothing interesting was going on with the patrons, except that one OTA couple was on their second or third double screwdriver.

The Heritage Club was all fried food, gambling, phones, tablets. No storytelling at all. I longed to hear an osprey story or a sodden tale of way too much Jägermeister and shitting one’s self in a bathtub.

The only thing memorable of the surroundings was a poster of an attractive woman with a plea that she contact her aunt.

I sat at a back table and watched Tiger Woods limp around Augusta National. I wrote some notes for a future piece of writing. I daydreamed of being in the Sea Star in Gold Beach. I hoped The Old Crow Book Club would find a special way out into the world. I believed it contained unique magic. But one really never knows where a book goes.

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The Old Crow

Book Club

$11.99 + $3 Shipping

In December of 2020, author Matt Love moved to Portland to care for his elderly father.

Returning to the Rose City jolted Love after 23 years residing on the Oregon Coast. In the Sellwood neighborhood where he lived, Love met a homeless man named Mark. They formed a friendship over literature and the unforeseen magical discoveries in street libraries. They created The Old Crow Book Club, and yes, sometimes that involved drinking Old Crow on a sidewalk.

The club also included several other Sellwood homeless men and women cut from John Steinbeck's Cannery Row cloth.

In due course, Love learned the members' stories of homelessness and how they survived. He wondered what happened to his beloved state of Oregon and attempted to help Mark get off the streets only to run up against the seemingly futile policies to address the crisis.

Along the way, he had the best conversations about books in his life and wrote The Old Crow Book Club, where he recounts his interactions with the homeless people in his neighborhood and offers some suggestions how to alleviate what he considers the greatest man-made American humanitarian disaster of his adult life.

The Old Crow Book Club is available for purchase here and select independent bookstores in Oregon.

Choice Cuts

of Oregon Fiction

$22.99 + $3 Shipping

Choice Cuts of Oregon Fiction by Matt Love contains 20 stories, all set in Oregon. The cast of characters includes a depressed Santa Claus, Steve Prefontaine, Jack Ramsay's fast break offense, socialist squirrels, a clearcut, a dead deer, a junior high football team, a high school tennis player, a dissipated teacher, a man who evolves into a beaver, a homeless vet, a jilted preacher, a double date to a prom, rural degenerates, a wily caterer, and much more.

The publication of the collection culminates a quarter century of the author's writing about Oregon and rambling around the state.

Choice Cuts is available for purchase here, through Amazon, or select independent bookstores in Oregon.

The Savage

of State Street

Nestucca Spit Press is proud to present The Savage of State Street: The Thieving and Literary Lives of Smoky Epley. He is the greatest unheralded writer in Oregon history and also one of its more mediocre, colorful and persistent thieves.

$19.99 + $3 Shipping

In 1973, Oregon State University Press published Men in Exile: An Anthology of Creative Writing by Inmates of the Oregon State Penitentiary. Twenty-two of Smoky Epley's pieces appeared in the book.

Smoky spent most of his adult life in state and federal prisons for robbery. In 2008, during one of his brief stints of freedom, Smoky became friends with Matt Love, an Oregon author and publisher. They met after Love discovered Men in Exile and wrote a newspaper column about the landmark book. Smoky read the column and reached out.

He returned to prison in 2009 after forging a check. Upon his release in 2011, Love encouraged Smoky to write a memoir. He completed half of Auto before dying in February of 2013.