Owner of Maxine’s Tap Room dies
Posted on Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Marjorie Maxine Miller was an icon, a classic, a second Mom to thousands, a legacy and a legend. She was also a bouncer, a bar owner and what one longtime friend and business associate called "nicely cantankerous." "Gruff, ""opinionated"and "hardnosed,"say her friends and family, adding "sweet," "kind, ""independent"and "one-ofa-kind"just as often.
Marjorie Maxine Miller, who started Maxine's Tap Room in 1950, died Friday. Her funeral is Thursday and a memorial toast will be held at the Tap Room, 107 N. Block Ave., after the graveside service. "I was actually going to buy a keg and just let people get a toast, but whenever I thought about it, I thought Maxine would just get ticked off at me for not charging people,"said her greatniece, Andrea Foren. She and other family members who helped Maxine at the bar over the year have been taking care of it since Maxine had a stroke about three years ago. The family intends to keep the bar open.
Maxine's funeral service will be held at 10 a.m. Thursday at Moore's Chapel in Fayetteville. Her obituary can be found in Tuesday's edition of the Northwest Arkansas Times.
People who didn't know Maxine or only knew that she owned a bar might be surprised to learn she made a positive difference on a tremendous number of young people as they passed through Fayetteville for their formal education at the University of Arkansas. "A lot of folks got their training wheels at Maxine's"said entertainer Jed Clampit, who will sing one of her favorites," Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,"at her funeral. He said she was a great influence and a guardian for many of her customers. "You get your education up on the hill, but she educated folks to things they don't teach in the books up there,"he said. Clampit said Miller showed students that you can have a good time and still be a responsible individual. "You can have all the money and all the degrees in the world, but if you don't know how to conduct yourself, you ain't going to get through it,"he said, paraphrasing his friend Maxine's philosophy.
Maxine accepted nothing less, he said. "You didn't mouth off to her. You just did not mess with Maxine. You just said, 'Yes, ma'am. '"he said. "She was one of the classics. You just couldn't deny Maxine,"Clampit said.
Foren said people knew what to expect when they came to the bar. "She kept people on their toes,"she said. "You were welcome as long as you behaved yourself. I don't know how many of them referred to her as Mom. She'd get flooded with cards and calls on Mother's Day,"Foren said.
For most of her 82 years, Maxine Miller sat on the bar stool directly in front of the cash register at her Tap Room, a glass of Dr. Pepper and dominoes on the worn bar in front of her, a burning cigarette nearby.
The bar, like its owner, has a style of its own, one that goes back to 1950 when 24-year-old Maxine borrowed money from her parents to buy it. She paid them back within a year.
That's one of the reasons Foren first thinks of her greataunt as a hard-nosed businesswoman. "To start a business in 1950, being a woman, just gives me all the respect in the world for her. I'm sure there were very few women to start one then and have it last for 56 years,"she said.
Angela Ryan of McBride Distributing Company Inc. loved and respected Maxine Miller for years even before Ryan joined the family business of distributing beer. "There's not a lot of women who can handle some of the things that may go on in a drinking establishment. She had a lot of backbone. She just handled people - not always with kid gloves. Rarely with kid gloves. Either like it or go on somewhere else,"said Ryan, who cited Miller's tenacity and straight-forward style for the keeping the business strong.
Clampit recalled hearing about a patron who got a touch of that behave-or-leave attitude. He had more to drink then he could handle and threw up, Clampit said. "Maxine grabbed him up by the scruff of the neck, took him to the door and threw him literally out. She told him, ' You don't come back in here if you can't control yourself, '"Clampit said.
In the 1960s, when the old wooden building came down, Maxine put up a long, narrow brick structure with exactly one 8.5-inch by 40-inch window at the front. It was the minimum size allowed by the building code at the time, and that, said Foren, was a business decision probably aimed at limiting break-ins. Likewise, keeping a club behind the bar, having only a pay phone available and trying to get football players as employees so the team would follow were all decisions intended to keep the business going.
The more-than 50-foot long bar that stretches nearly the length of the building dominates the room, which also features an old coin-operated cigarette machine, a juke box that still plays 45s, and a deer head adorned with Mardi Gras beads, sunglasses and a tie.
A hula girl in a grass skirt dances atop the cash register, empty milk jugs call for tips and the lights advertise her wares: Budweiser, Falstaff and Schlitz. The "ding-ding,"an old-fashioned bowling game, stands in the corner by the door as it has for almost all of the bar's 56 years of business.
Maxine's Tap Room was sometimes a place to study and always a good place to go for a sit-down conversation or to get away from the crowds on Dickson Street.
The smell of beer and smoke hung over it all.
It was in this setting that Maxine Miller came to know her patrons and they came to know her.
John Lewis, former president of the Bank of Fayetteville, said he saw Miller infrequently as a bank customer and only went to her bar probably three times, but he understood how she connected with people. "I think it was her character,"Lewis said. "She was a really outspoken, honest, straight-forward person.... She just told it the way she saw it."
Lewis said frequent patrons of Maxine's went there because Miller fostered an atmosphere not unlike that of the comedy series "Cheers."
Customers knew she enjoyed her business and her customers, he said. "She was caring and she recognized and responded to you,"Lewis said. "She was just a real human, not anything put on about her."
Bob McBride of McBride Distributing Company Inc., a longtime friend and business associate, said Miller treated her regulars "like her own little covey of quail."She'd tell people when it was time to go and when it was time to quit drinking, he said. She wouldn't let anyone leave until they were sober. She'd hold birthday parties for them. "She made her customers her family,"he said, in a phrase echoed by others who knew her. "She'd take them under her wing and protect them and take care of them. She was very kind and nice to people. On the other side of the coin, she could be a complete biddy,"McBride said. "It was a nice cantankerous, and everybody loved her."
Former Razorback basketball star Joe Kleine took the woman who would become his wife to Maxine's for their first date. "She was always inquisitive about what was going on in my life,"he recalled, describing Maxine as sweet but opinionated. "She was gruff, but that's why I liked her. She'd say, ' You stunk tonight.' It was a dose of reality and boy it was nice."
For her part, Maxine would light up whenever Kleine came in, Foren said. "She was absolutely a sweet, sweet woman, but she meant business,"said Foren, who learned at her 21 st birthday party that she'd be starting work the next week.
If she said "turn down the juke box,"college kids would answer," Yes, ma'am,"her great-niece recalled. "Everybody knew if Maxine said something, she meant business. She had a firm way about her, but she touched so many lives. She didn't change. People knew what to expect when they came here."Foren said. "She built one-on-one relationships with her customers. Bouncer, CEO, she was everything. If you went there, you knew her. She really cared about all the students." "I'll meet you at Maxine's became the buzzword for people,"said James L. "Skip"Rutherford, dean of the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service.
Generations came to Maxine's Tap Room, he said, recalling when Maxine told his son," Your dad used to sit right here and do what you're doing." "I think a lot of families heard that,"he said.
Rutherford described Maxine as an icon and a symbol of life and fun in Fayetteville
A T-shirt sold at the bar tells the tale. It reads," It was your parents' bar, now it's yours."
When Maxine's health kept her from the bar; it didn't keep her friends away. A good many, like Clampit, would visit her weekly at home when they couldn't visit her weekly at the bar anymore.
Brandon Long managed the place for about three years. He had been her friend first and became her friend and manager.
He and other friends say that she was a huge Razorback fan, never drank alcohol, loved to gamble and loved playing the horses - where she knew everyone with a tip - and going to the casinos.
Long said she could happily pull slot machine handles for days on end and was lucky at it. "If that bar was open, she was there,"Long said. "It was her life. All the patrons that came in were her family. Those were her kids. She was everybody's friend."
He said she was very independent, always paid her own way and did it the way she wanted to do it.
According to Long, up to six years ago, when he last worked there, Maxine would get behind the bar and serve beer if the place got busy. "It was always more fun when she was there,"remembered Rutherford. "One of the legends. In 20 th century Fayetteville, she ranked right up there with Herman's Rib House, the Deluxe Inn, Old Main and Maxine. And I'm not sure, in all fairness, if Maxine shouldn't be at the top of that list."
Maxine opened the Tap Room every night and when the time came to close, it was Maxine who made the announcement in her own uniquely sweet but gruff style. Her closing bell announcement is also featured on a Tshirt at the bar.
This is what she said, night after night, year after year: "Can I have your attention, please? You have 10 minutes to drink up and get the hell out."
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