It was an amazing bar. All dim and smoky and forbidden. The perfect blend of low lighting, dark wood, polished brass, leather and glass. I know all this because at one end, the area behind the bar itself took an abrupt 90-degree turn and shot through a pair of saloon doors into the gameroom, where it became a snack counter.

What a great story. It reminds me of my own experiences with a country club bar as a small kid.

I don’t recall how young I actually was. I want to say up to kindergarten age, but I’m guessing probably even older than that. My Babička Adeline worked as the snack counter cook for the country club in Hennessey, Oklahoma.

The Hennessey Country Club was the perfect by-product of the Oklahoma oil boom of the 70’s and 80’s, the good-times precursor to the Penn Square Bank collapse in 1982. Why else did a town of roughly 2500 people in the middle of the Great Plains need a country club? Because times were good and it could have one, thank you very much.

I spent a lot of time at that country club during the summers, exploring the pro shop, walking the trails of the golf course on slow days, playing with the ball washers1 and most of all, playing in the ballroom.

The ballroom was everything you’d expect out of a mid-70’s building placed squarely in the middle of rural Oklahoma. There was fantastic wood paneling, high ceilings with exposed beams, crushed velvet couches and the nearly unnoticeable opening to the room that was my obsession - the bar.

The bar was very small. Really, in hindsight it was nothing more than a wet bar with room for about 4-5 people, but it was the greatest room I had ever been in. The walls were covered in that quintessential 70’s swank wall covering: mirror tile with embedded gold flake. The bar itself was black naugahyde and mahogany Formica with a brass step rail. The bar stools were lime green crushed velvet and there were matching chairs placed around the felt-topped poker table nearby.

The bar was never used during the day, so most of my days were spent back there bellied up to the bar reading, drawing or playing with whatever toys I had brought with me. The bottles and bar equipment were never set out when the bar wasn’t in use, but part of spending so much time in that room meant that I explored it thoroughly. Of course with it being the 70’s, there were no child locks or other security measures on any of the cabinets, so I was able to check out everything that there was to see.

I played with the Crown Royal bags. I looked at the cocktail strainers and tried to figure out their purpose. I soaked in all the labeling on the bottles, wondering what the contents in each bottle were like2. I do remember thinking that anything called Canadian Club had to be pretty cool and I wondered what I could do to get into that club.

One of my favorite things to do back in that bar was to just relax with a bottle of grape or strawberry Crush that I had grabbed from the snack bar coolers. I’d bring it back to the bar and, instead of popping off the cap, would poke a hole in it with the bar’s ice pick and drink through the tiny hole in the cap. I’d sit at the bar and listen to the piped-in music while watching the golf carts cruise by on their way in from the latest round of nine holes3.

I loved that bar and I loved that ballroom. My 20-year high school reunion was held at the country club a couple of weekends ago. I was very excited to go in and see the old ballroom and bar even though I knew that both would have certainly had to have been remodeled some over the years.

When I got there I made my instinctive right turn only to find that neither were there. The ballroom had been gutted and turned into additional golf cart storage. Where once there sat naugahyde and crushed velvet there only stood cinder block and exposed concrete. Worse still, the space only held three or four golf carts. But, that’s the way things always go with spaces remembered from childhood. They’re always actually much smaller than how you originally perceived them.

I guess I wrote all this to say that I too became interested in bartending and cocktails because of my early experiences at a country club. And even though I never tried my hand at the craft professionally, save for one night at my favorite college bar’s Christmas party where the regulars got behind the bar and served the staff4, I always have held the idea of country club bartending as one of those over-romanticized occupations that I see myself engaged in every time I whip up a well-made cocktail.