In fact, he built it twice.
“He just taped a hammer to his wrist, and swung away,” Sheppard says of Ed Hazelton.
There was just one problem.
“No one had ever been able to buy drinks in Paradise because it was written on all the property deeds,” says Betty Meyer, who was born just down Paradise’s main drag, now known as Montana Highway 200, in 1924. “No sales - what did it say? Not alcohol - no, it was 'No sales of spirits allowed.’ Said so on every deed in town.”
The railroad wouldn’t let anyone in Paradise run a house of prostitution, either, and Meyer says she could prove it if she could just get into her safe.
She owns the house, now vacant, where she was born, and has the original deed in the safe in her current home across the alley from the one that belonged to her parents, Magdelina and Howard Steele. It specifically bans using the property for either a house of prostitution, or a bar.
“But my grandkids play with the dial on the safe, and I can never get it open,” Meyer says with a laugh.
It still must be true, because after building a bar in town that never served a drop of alcohol, the Millers had Hazleton construct another one.
“I think it’s about six feet outside the city limits,” says Kathy Gorham, Betty Meyer’s daughter and owner of Kathy’s Whistlestop Cafe in Paradise.
Called Miller’s Bar but known by everyone as the Green Shingle because, well, its shingles were green, the bar was built sometime between 1936 and 1938, near as anyone can remember.
Over the years it changed owners and it changed names - finally settling on the Pair-A-Dice Bar - but never locations.
When it was destroyed by fire on the morning of Oct. 31, the small town lost one-third of its business district.
“It burned on our poker day!” says Ann Baker, who made the short jaunt from nearby Plains with her husband most every Friday for years to play cards with friends in the Pair-A-Dice’s back room, which had once been the dance hall.
“At first I laughed, because there was no heat in that back room and it was always so cold in there,” Baker says. “We joked that we should still have the game during the fire, because we could finally stay warm.”
But then the reality settled in. The Pair-A-Dice in Paradise was gone.
“Then I got really sad,” Baker says. “We’re going to miss our hole in the wall.”
Not everyone feels that way. There’s at least one person who, long ago as a child, reportedly used to pray that the place would burn down because they felt an adult in the family spent more time there than at home.
“Prayers do get answered,” the person supposedly said after the fire. “Sometimes it just takes a long, long time.”
But for most, Oct. 31 was a sad day in Paradise.
The Pair-A-Dice was one of three businesses - two of them bars - in town.
“That Friday was really busy,” says Breyanna King, a bartender at the American Legion, next door to the Whistlestop and about 100 yards down the road from the Pair-A-Dice. Lots of townsfolk gathered at the American Legion on Oct. 31 to talk about the loss of the other watering hole even as it burned.
Otherwise, she says, most people patronized both bars in this town, which had a population of 184 according to the 2000 census, and the Legion hasn’t exactly inherited a new clientele.
“I don’t know where I’m going to get my beefsteak now,” says 80-year-old Miles E. Williams, who ate dinner at the Pair-A-Dice three to four times a week.
“They did have good dinners,” says Betty Meyer. Her daughter’s Whistlestop Cafe, the town’s other business, is only open for breakfast and lunch, so the Pair-A-Dice was the only place in town where you could get an evening meal.
For Meyer, now 84, the Pair-A-Dice was a place of great memories. She used to go there all the time while in high school in the late 1930s and early ’40s.
“It was different back then,” she says. “When I was in high school, drinking wasn’t a part of it. We’d all go to the bar just to dance, and we’d have dances there after the football games.”
Ress Miller and her son Lyman were both terrific pianists, Meyer says, and they’d bring in other musicians and folks would dance up a storm.
“Lyman was also the bartender,” Meyer says, “and he was a very classy person. He always wore a white shirt, and he was fast, friendly and professional.”
Paradise was where crews changed on the Northern Pacific trains, so the bar was a popular place for railroaders.
And troop trains came through during World War II en route to or from the Pacific Coast, and because the trains stopped in Paradise longer to make the crew changes, soldiers had a chance to dash over to the bar to have a beer, or get some to go.
Joe Sheppard happens to be the assistant fire chief in Plains, and was one of about 20 firefighters who responded to the fire in the bar his grandfather had built.
Ed Hazelton had a large machine and woodworking shop on the other side of the Clark Fork River, and turned that building into an occasional dance hall during Prohibition, before the Green Shingle went up.
“He’d move all his tools to the side, and bring in bands to play music,” Sheppard says. “He didn’t serve alcohol because it was Prohibition, but most people brought their own. They’d get so many people in there dancing they had to go down to the lower level and put beams in to hold the floor up.”
When Sheppard arrived at the Pair-A-Dice on Oct. 31, flames were shooting 20 feet in the air out of the old dance hall to the rear of the bar.
Firefighters tried to confine the fire, but Sheppard says there were just too many routes for the flames to travel after 70 years of remodels and add-ons.
“There were so many different ceilings and roof lines,” he says. “We fought it for five hours.”
Eventually it spread to the bar, and not long after that, the roof collapsed. A large beer cooler kept two firemen inside at the time from being injured by the falling debris.
The cause is under investigation. There appears to be some question about who owned the Pair-A-Dice - you’ll get one name from some people, a different one from others, and still more who believe a previous owner was carrying a contract for a new buyer.
Most everyone, however, is under the assumption that the Pair-A-Dice will not be rebuilt, at least not in Paradise.
If so, it joins countless other places - Paradise had three grocery stores during its railroad heyday, a large hotel, theater, coal dock, railroad tie plant, roundhouse, pool hall and round-the-clock restaurant called the Beanery - that have disappeared over the years.
But the people who loved the Pair-A-Dice - and the occasional ones who didn’t - are still here. They’re not hard to find.
Now there are only two businesses left in Paradise for them to frequent.
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