The Bar: Growing Up In the Backroom In the 60s In Rural Michigan
Excerpt from The Bar by Cathy Winick
Then, in the summer of 1961, Mom and Dad bought the bar and everything changed. We moved from the city we loved to the country, fifty miles north. It may as well have been clear across the country. It was a podunk place, not even a town really, population 682, with no sidewalks, no departments stores, no movie theaters. There was a hundred year-old church, a tiny grocery- a general store type place that sold live bait, and two bars. The bars were conveniently located less than a block apart so people could walk between the two. And they did.
The four of us crowded into a summer cabin behind the bar to live. There was a single bedroom, that Mom and Dad got. The sides of their full-size bed nearly touched each wall of the room. We all shared a tiny bathroom and the house was warmed by a space heater in what we called the frontroom. Mom described our new home as “an outhouse with a picture window.” That window looked out over the river.
My teenage brothers slept on bunk beds off the tiny kitchen. At almost five, I slept across from them in my old crib with the sides down. When our little brother was born a few months later, in December 1961, he slept in a wooden playpen in the front room. This camp-type living helped prepare my older brothers for the communal confines of military barracks in a few years.