Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
The new owners of the Bohemian Club Tavern, believed to be the oldest continuously operating business in Sweet Home, celebrated a “grand re-opening” on Saturday.
Clint and Heather Pollock took over the tavern from Frances Blair on March 25. Clint Pollock runs the day-to-day business, while his wife works behind the scenes and holds down a job as a nurse.
They held off on any fanfare after taking over because they were working with the Oregon Lottery to get video poker back into the establishment.
Pollock, a 1996 graduate of Sweet Home High School, spent 11 years logging, eight for his father and three for Wolfco, he said. Buying the Bohemian made sense from his perspective.
“It’s every logger’s dream isn’t it, to own a bar?” he asked.
The late Tom Blair ran the Bohemian for years, and the family continued to run it until this year when the Pollocks took over. The establishment is known for its long-standing tradition of buying a beer for everyone on the house when the fire department siren sounds,
“The first couple of months were tight without the video poker,” Pollock said, but business has picked up since the reintroduction of the machines to the tavern.
Pollock has been told the business opened in 1925, predating opening of The New Era by four years.
The Bohemian continues to provide a free round when the siren sounds, he said. That’s a tradition that has gone back through at least three or four owners.
“This is just a good old-fashioned beer-drinking tavern,” Pollock said. It’s “ultra-mellow” and “low-key,” with no troubles and no “screaming karaoke.”
It’s just a place to “come have a beer,” he said. Three new flat-screen high-def screens keep customers updated on football and NASCAR while enjoying a game of pool.
“It’s just mellow,” Pollock said. “It’s a working man’s bar.”
Dean Boer, called “Deano” around the Bohemian, has been a regular for decades; and he’s seen many owners and bartenders over the years.
“He’s a fixture,” Pollock said. “He comes with the place.”
“I’ve been coming here for something like 40 years,” Boer said. There’s “a lot of good people,” and that’s what keeps him hanging around, he said.
He started frequenting the Bohemian after work, he said. He is retired from a seed plant in Harrisburg. Before that he worked at the Santiam Lumber Company for 19 years.
“He’s been doing great,” Boer said of Pollock. “He’s a good man.”
The Pollocks recently repainted an outdoor patio area, where they barbecued for Saturday’s festivities.
On one wall, they painted the informal name for the tavern, “The Bohunk,” with their names and the date.
No one in the tavern Saturday knew where the term came from, but it’s been called that forever, Boer said.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as a person of central European descent, while urbandictionary.com defines it as slang for eastern Europeans or short for bohemian, with some saying it’s a derogative term.
On a wall behind the bar hangs a framed description of a Bohemian:
“The term Bohemian, of French origin, was first used in the English language in the 1800s to describe the untraditional lifestyles of poor and outcast artists, writers, musicians and actors in major European cities. Bohemians were associated with unorthodox or anti-government political or social viewpoints, which were often expressed through non-marital sexual relations, frugality or voluntary poverty.
The term emerged when these such artists and creators began to concentrate in the lower-rent, lower-class gypsy neighborhoods, reflecting the belief that the Gypsies had come from Bohemia, a region in western Czech Republic. These Bohemians were often viewed as outsiders, a people apart from conventional society and untroubled by its disapproval. To be Bohemian carried the image of possessing mysterious wisdom as well as the less frequently intended image of carelessness about personal hygiene or marital status.
The modern term has become associated with various artistic or academic communities and is used to describe such people, communities or situations. The ‘American College Dictionary’ defines Bohemian as a ‘person with artistic or intellectual tendencies, who lives and acts with no regard for conventional rules of behavior.’
By extension, Bohemia means any place where one could live and work cheaply and behave unconventionally, a community of free souls beyond the pale of respectable society.
So maybe you’re a rough-handed blue-collar rebel seeking refuge from the pompous, or maybe your soul longs to cry out against an unjust society or an overbearing government, or maybe you’re just an ol’ hippie at heart, searching for the truth, a little love and a good time.
If so, then welcome to The Club.”