...choicer than the Red Key Tavern.

"Souls of poets dead and gone..."

I write a lot here about the beauty of the cafés of Buenos Aires and how they are the "living rooms" of this enormous city and how they, somehow, each one, seem to contain the lives and souls of thousands of people from their neighborhoods.  Nothing new about that here in this space.

But I came to this capital of great public places, via Chicago, from the city of my birth, Indianapolis, Indiana, USofA.

That place was not friendly to those of my ilk.  Like my fellow "Indianapolitano", Kurt Vonnegut, I liked to quip that I had left that town to join the USAF at the age of 18 ...and that it had taken me that long to realize "that we were actually free to go."

But there were a handful of places in that city that, not only nourished me in my vague seeking of the civilization that our city fathers generally denied us, but that also encouraged me to find more.

Places where you were welcome to enjoy the great human pleasures, yourself ...even if under the strict definition of the proprietor.  I had to go to Paris before I encountered anything similar.

That strict proprietor, has died.  Russ Settle, of a tavern the size of a Buenos Aires café has left this world at the age of 92.

Before you start to think that I am describing just some "anybody" that ever wiped a bar-top in anybody's old home-town, lemme tell you that the man, Russ Settle, has already been honored and feted in national magazines and novels.

No one who ever "bellyed-up" to his bar ever thought this man as ordinary.   He was rare, for the world and especially, for my old hometown.

You hung your coat in the proper place.  You did not move tables and chairs around to suit your mid-western party group.  There was a decorum in his Red Key Tavern that was unlike the other places available nearby.  Still, even we pikers seemed to recognize that there was something right and special about the place and the way that Russ insisted that we conduct ourselves within its friendly confines.  There was really nothing else to compare in our little Northside.  None of us really understood it.

Maybe he brought it back from the "war in France."  I used to think about it that way.  When he told me, one night, of his experiences as part of bomber crew over fascist Germany, and his being shot-down and taken prisoner, he spelled it out to me in such personal terms that I felt that he had never told the story to anyone else in his life.

It was only later that I learned from others that he had recounted those experiences to maybe hundreds of others he felt might be able to absorb the human-ness required to maybe understand.  I felt honored ...and the others that had heard the stories, as well, seemed to feel the same way when they recounted his same stories to me.

After the war, he came back to the city that always threatened to strangle the life out of me... and took over a bar.  The kind of bar that doesn't much exist anymore.  Sure, it has won awards from afficionados of great dives from national magazines ...and has even won a place in a series of novels.  While I think that Russ felt honored by those kudos, it apparently did not change his attitude toward how the place should be run and the ambiance it should have.

I write a lot here about how the "souls" of long-time bares and cafés here in Buenos Aires are destroyed by remodeling and changes of ownership ...and a re-direction of their purpose beyond the people that those places have devoted themselves.

Sometimes, I wonder where a kid from the Fairgrounds of Indianapolis ever got that kind of sensibility.

If you were to press me, I'd have to say that I got it from Russ Settle's Red Key Tavern.  From my experience, you could drop the Red Key into Paris or Buenos Aires ...and no one would notice.  You can't say that about just any other place in Indianapolis.  Soul is soul ...and the Red Key has always had it.

When I walked into my first brasserie in Paris, I knew exactly how to conduct myself.  Russ had already taught me.

Russ Settle made me feel, not only at home with the world, but made me feel that I could go anywhere.


With all the love in my heart,
Mike from 44th and Norwaldo