As they walked toward the forked tree that formed the door, they noticed the porch was lined with stuffed buffalo heads. Inside were more stuffed animals, most of them perched in five trees that stood in the middle and on the corners of the dance floor. My dad sat down and tipped a cold one. The place made quite an impression on him because he never stopped repeating the story. He told this one enough times that, although he's gone now, it's firmly fixed in our family's folklore.
THIRTY-FIVE YEARS LATER, I'm sitting in that same club on that same road, only now the road is called Santa Fe Avenue and Route 66 has been replaced by Interstate 40. The club, too, has a new name. Although the sign near the road says "Museum Club," locals call it the Zoo Club after its years as a dead-animal museum. It's a Saturday night in July in 1985, and Flagstaff is having the kind of weather that inspires chamber of commerce billboards saying, "Where spring goes for the summer."
The bar hadn't changed much from my father's time. Most of the taxidermy mounts are still there, along with the pine siding and the trees lining the dance floor. One thing that has changed is the smell. The place now has the magical aroma that separates the real honky-tonks from the pretenders: a bouquet of spilled beer, cigarette smoke and old wood. A mix of urban cowpokes, rednecks and Navajos fills the place. I am there meeting a former girlfriend I haven't seen in years. Sauntering in dressed in a silk blouse, strategically ripped 501s and green-suede boots, she looks better than a body ought to. Years ago, she'd left me. A couple years later, we got back together and I returned the favor. After a couple of beers, the conversation turns to what went wrong. A couple more beers and a couple of progressively slower slow dances later, and we were friends again. By midnight a full-scale reconciliation was on.
OF ALL THE GIN JOINTS in all the world, few have the character of the Museum Club. As Arizona's most storied honky-tonk, redneck palace and Route 66 roadhouse, it's a spot that can leave an impression that will last a lifetime.
What's so special about this saloon? Just about everything.
There's the location. This most memorable of roadhouses sits alongside America's great lost highway, Route 66. Although it's now called Santa Fe Avenue, so strong a hold does this road have on the imagination that the name Route 66 will be officially resurrected in Flagstaff in March 1993.
And, if atmosphere were measured like applause, the Zoo Club would send the needle off the scale. Outside, the place still looks much like it has since it opened in 1918-a giant log cabin that's a cross between the set for Bonanza and a whipsaw cook house from the Great White North. Inside, with its 40-foot-high ceiling, dark wood and deer antlers everywhere, the Zoo Club is the kind of place people in Ohio imagine when they think of the Wild West.
There's also a rich musical history contained within its ponderosa-pine frame. The Zoo Club's heyday took place in the Sixties when it was owned by Don Scott, a professional musician who once played steel guitar for Bob Wills' Texas Playboys. Because Scott was friends with many of the biggest names in country music, Flagstaff soon had a country-music club the equal of any outside Nashville. Everyone from Wanda Jackson to Waylon and Willie played the Zoo Club-Willie went so far as to fall in love with the owner's daughter.
The place is even said to be haunted. Most tales peg the ghost as a blond female. In recent years, she's scared at least one employee half to death.
Recent history has been lively as well. Since 1978 the club has been owned by Martin Zanzucchi, a member of a large Flagstaff family known equally for its Flagstaff dairy and page-one drug bust. Taking all these factors into account, Car and Driver magazine chose the Museum Club as one of the ten best roadhouses in the United States. It appeared in the magazine's January 1992 issue as an example of a "barn-sized Okie stomp where long necks are de rigueur and politically correct behavior means not throwing up on the waitresses' feet."
Now there's an apt description of the Museum Club if there ever was one.
THE MUSEUM CLUB story begins in 1915 when Dean Eldredge, who owned a taxi service in Flagstaff, decided to buy land east of town on Route 66 to house the fruits of his hobby: taxidermy.
Using ponderosa pine from the nearby forests, Eldredge began to erect his museum. He had the quirky idea to build it around five live trees. Digging down below ground level, Eldredge encased the trees in concrete so that, even after they died, they would remain sturdy. Using block and tackle to hoist the roof beams into place, Eldredge built a huge log cabin around those five trees. Today, shiny with furniture polish, those same gnarled pines, complete with branches, mark the four corners and the center of the Museum Club's dance floor.
Once those trees were full of stuffed animalswhat taxidermists call "mounts." Arranged in them were bobcats, cougars, black bears, foxes, mules and whitetail deer and an array of birds that included a golden eagle. On what is now the dance floor were more deer. The front of the building was festooned with buffalo heads and the front half of a longhorn steer. A wooden eagle was perched above the porch. And up on the crest of the roof, a carved buck gazed timidly out.
Of the more than 80 original mounts with which Eldredge filled his museum, sadly only two are left. The rest were taken by the many people who have owned the club since then. Still, 160 racks of antlers, most mounted by Eldredge, line the walls to this day. One of the more charming parts of Eldredge's dead-animal museum was his stuff-while-you-wait service. During a renovation, Martin Zanzucchi found a pamphlet detailing Eldredge's prices. Apparently, if you could drag it into the Museum Club, Eldredge would stuff it. According to a 1920s-era pamphlet-now framed and hung near the club's back bar-Eldredge would stuff a "gopher, weasel or chipmunk" for $3.50. Buffaloes were $50 for a medium-size specimen and $75 for a large one. Tanning a goat hide would run you between $3.50 and $6 and a canary or an oriole could be mounted for $2.50 (wings closed) or $3 (wings open). Reptiles, though, were the biggest bargain. Eldredge would stuff a Gila monster for $5 and a horned toad for 50 cents.
THE MUSEUM CLUB was transformed from a taxidermy shop to a roadhouse under Doc Williams, who purchased it in 1936. A local saddlemaker, Williams applied for and received one of Coconino County's earliest post-Prohibition liquor licenses.
As a roadhouse, the building began to build the character we know today. Williams gave it the name "Museum Club" and booked the first live music ever heard there.
Newspaper advertisements from those years show Flagstaff growing closer to the bar's once out-of-town location. In 1937, when the American Legion held a convention at the Museum Club, it was three miles east of town on Route 66." By 1946, it was "in Flagstaff."
After the war, the Zoo Club saw a string of successive owners, a list that Zanzucchi calls "a who's who of the Flagstaff business community." They include car dealer Jimmy McGowan and shopping-center owner Jack Grant. During this period of unsettled ownership in the Fifties, the Museum Club earned the nickname "Muscle Club" because it was so tough. Bikers and local rednecks of all sorts were known to belt booze and brawl there. Much of that changed when Don Scott bought the club in 1963.
Scott's focus was music. A professional musician who played with Tommy Dorsey and Bob Wills, Scott decided to settle down and buy his favorite venue. A frequent visitor during those years was Willie Nelson. The young singer-songwriter Nelson's star was rising in those days. It's puzzling then that a set of original contracts between Scott and Nelson shows that the singer lowered his price from $600 to $500 a night between his 1968 and 1969 shows. Given Willie's current troubles with the IRS, you could write this off as a lack of business sense. But that's not the answer.
"I'd heard that Willie was going to play Tucson," says Donna Scott, daughter of former owner Don, talking by telephone from her home in El Paso, Texas. Willie was the most wonderful, prolific songwriter I'd ever known and so I asked Dad if he'd close the club so we could run down to Tucson and catch his show. Weeks later, when I thought Dad had forgotten, he said, `Donna, you remember you asked me about going to see Willie? Well, we don't have to go to Tucson, I booked him here next week.'
"The night Willie arrived, they pulled the bus around the back and he came in. Dad was at the back bar and Willie went back there and began talking about the terms of the contract. I was all gussied up in a new dress and, boy, was I excited. I waited until they were done discussing business and, when I saw it was appropriate, I walked up and said, `Hi Willie, I'm the boss's daughter, and you're mine tonight.'
"He had no objections!"
part 1 of 2
THE HOUSE BY THE SIDE OF THE MOTHER ROAD... v2-26-92
