Chunky flakes fall like a billion tiny parachutes outside the windows of the Frenchtown Club while Jimmy Buffett’s “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes” plays.
Tom Erving tends bar as if he’s done it for years.
Tom and his wife, Mykell, bought the place last June. Before that they owned a mortgage company in Missoula.
“They brought Montana bars back to Montana,” Dick Babbitt says, holding his chihuahua Paco and sipping on a Widmer Hefeweizen with a dozen lime wedges in it.
Babbitt has been coming to the Frenchtown Club for six years. Paco, an immigrant from Mexico with a green card, has been coming to the Frenchtown Club for four.
“The atmosphere changed,” Babbitt says. “From glum to happy.”
There is nothing out of the ordinary about the place, except maybe how clean it is.
Budweiser and Coors are prominently displayed in neon, orderly liquor bottles reflect bar lights and Christmas decorations, and the pool tables sit dark and unused, awaiting the evening crowd.
Erving chats up his customers, enquiring into their lives as if he’s a brother or close relative.
He looks relaxed in a gray Quicksilver T-shirt and a faded, blue Keystone Light baseball cap.
He leans into the conversation and laughs.
“See how happy Tom is,” Babbitt says. “You come in in a bad mood, and they’ll get you out of it.”
For three years, Mykell Erving answered phones and stared at a computer screen.
But she missed people.
“I was waitressing since high school,” she says.
Mykell Erving is from Baker.
“They got a different work ethic than here,” Babbitt says of where Mykell was raised.
“She asked me, 'What can I do to change the place?’ ” Babbitt says of a conversation he had with her early on. “I?said, 'Smile.’ ”
She still wears that smile, or maybe she always has.
And when Donna Perkins sees Mykell Erving smiling, she smiles, too.
“I’ve been coming here a long time,” Perkins says, as if a long time can be measured. “I clean here when they need some help, odds and ends, heating things, lights and stuff.”
Truth is that Perkins has been invaluable to these bar owners who got out of the mortgage industry when the getting still was good.
“Donna helps us out a lot,” Tom Erving says, pointing over his shoulder to where she sits at one of the slot machines. “She knows all the little quirks, and you’ve gotta be respectful of that.”
Especially when you’re changing more than just jobs.
“We wanted to be more involved with the community,” Tom Erving says in between getting a vodka tonic for one customer and refilling Babbitt’s beer. “We were looking for something not so up and down.”
Up and down might be a modest way to describe the mortgage industry, but this was six months ago, and things were just starting to go south.
Banking on Mykell Erving’s experience in waitressing and running bars (she managed Ropers in Lolo for four years) the couple didn’t just put money into the Frenchtown Club. They invested themselves.
Some people call it sweat equity.
“Yeah, we’re more involved in the day to day,” Tom Erving says as he puts a crumpled cheat sheet for drinks on the bar.
Alabama Slammer, Alpine, Black Russian, Bloody Brain, Cape Cod, all the tricky ones are there.
“If you don’t know how to make a drink, just ask people,” Tom Erving says.
But he says those fruity drinks that the girls like still get the best of him on a busy Friday night.
It’s cold outside, typical for this latitude this time of year. But it’s warm in the Frenchtown Club and Jimmy Buffett plays in the background.
“It’s these changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes nothing remains quite the same,” Buffett sings in his too-much-rum tropical crooner voice. “With all of our running and all of our cunning, if we couldn’t laugh we would all go insane.”
There is a lot of laughter in the Frenchtown Club these days.
From DJs on Friday nights to karaoke on Saturdays, live bands, pool and cribbage tournaments, a charter bus to Griz games for patrons, Vegas trip giveaways for karaoke singers and a big Mardi Gras dress-up party planned for New Year’s Eve, indeed, nothing has remained quite the same.
But it’s more than just filling up a business with customers.
For Thanksgiving, Tom and Mykell Erving had four turkeys and five hams cooked up by one of their patrons to feed those customers who didn’t have any where else to go.
When Mykell Erving met a women whose husband passed away recently, she started taking her to events around the area.
“She wasn’t from here, she had nobody, so we kind of adopted her,” Mykell Erving says, the tips of her smile nearly touching her eyes.
“You couldn’t find two better people to buy it,” Dean Buffington, another patron says, clutching a light beer and a cigarette in one hand. “They have a vested interest.”
Tom Erving wipes the bar down with a rag from a red bucket that says H2O-bleach on it.
There isn’t a smudge on the bar, and you can almost, almost, see his smile reflected in the shine on the surface.
“It’s a lot of hours,” he says of his new career. “But it doesn’t feel like a job.”
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