Where men are men and hillsides are scared

When I was in high school, there were at least four taverns in the general environs of Floyds Knobs, all clustered tepidly along Paoli Pike as the highway swung left at the crest of the Knobs and set out westbound toward Mt. St. Francis.

To have spent one’s childhood years in a parsimonious, Baptist-inflected place like Georgetown is to grasp how important it became to win friends and influence classmates living in predominantly Catholic towns like Floyds Knobs.

A seemingly inexhaustible supply of big brothers and family friends to help the under-aged consumer buy beer was but one benefit of these hard-earned contacts.

Irvin’s, the most primitive and archaic of all the Floyds Knobs taverns, was located a few miles north of “downtown” in the shadow of St. Mary’s. It has been gone a very long time.

Herman’s Tavern also disappeared many years ago, although his widow Grace kept the bar open, sans signage, for short afternoon hours well into the 1980’s.

The Schupperts Corner beer joint that served me Falls City at age 17 didn’t survive the gentrification of the structure into “Mooresville Station,” circa 1980.

Happily, the venerable Mike’s Tavern remains alive, and will be open so long as there are Freibergers freely floating around the county.

The other bar still operating on Paoli Pike, Sammy O’s, not only has stayed in business, but it has undergone a complete metamorphosis. It is a transformation so incredible that if “surreal” were not a word, I’d have to invent it. The “new” Sammy O’s strikes me as a metaphor of sorts for the transformation of Floyd County from pastoral farmland to carefully crafted exurb.

I was reminded of this fact last week when Kyle Lowry’s front-page Tribune news story highlighted potential problems for Sammy O’s, as certain issues arising from its refurbishment have yet to be addressed:

Trust me, you must see the Tribune photograph before reading the remainder of this article.

In my fading recollection, the old Sammy O’s was a 1950’s-era brick structure divided into a bar and family room, with the familiar patina of cigarette smoke and grease, and a palpable aura of familiarity.

Today’s Sammy O’s is a completely new building, one-half tavern (facing the street), and one-half banquet facility in the rear.

The owner’s decision to expand his business certainly was influenced by the shape of the new Floyds Knobs, still a scattershot community laid out along creeks, valleys and accompanying roadways, but now utterly dominated by high-dollar developments like the Woods of Lafayette, a sprawling, garish subdivision complex that predictably necessitated the obliteration of its namesake woods to make room for something that the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu might have planned had he been born in Galena and not Wallachia.

Having little reason to venture into the county apart from occasional trips to Georgetown to visit my mom, I’d taken little notice of the evolution of Floyds Knobs until the summer of 2004, when my cousin’s wedding reception was scheduled for a place I’d never heard of, which was because it was the first such party to be held in the recently constructed hall … which of course turned out to be the catering arm of the “new” Sammy O’s.

All this faded into irrelevance as we drove into Floyds Knobs and saw the missing hillside behind the place where Sammy O’s used to stand.

I didn’t remember a rock quarry there.

Across Paoli Pike was a jagged, scarred and denuded slope where a wooded ridgeline used to be, and where landscaping apparently was about to begin as part of a Woods of Lafayette entrance, but at the time it was a barren tableau of mud inhabited by puttering bulldozers.

A strip mine? In Floyds Knobs? Perhaps the quarry and the mine were a package deal.

Torrential rain had made it impossible to finish the parking lot of the new Sammy O’s, which was slated to fill the space formerly occupied by the dynamited hillside, so fresh-faced teenagers were ready and waiting to park cars in the mud so wedding guests wouldn’t have to do it and get their shoes dirty.

Inside, the wedding reception proceeded without incident. With nary a good beer to drink, I became bored and wondered from the banquet hall section of Sammy O’s into the new barroom.

At first, it seemed as though I’d been beamed down into a sterile, gingerbread airport lounge – such was the airy, almost pastel-driven contrast to the gritty barroom décor of olden time.

Was that a spittoon hidden behind a potted plastic plant?

The tavern’s regulars were there just like they always were, but even they were vice-gripping their frozen longnecks like frightened children pawing the safety bars on an amusement park roller coaster, slack-jawed and gaping at clean walls entirely undecorated except for a Budweiser NASCAR banner, which is required by Indiana statute.

Strange days had found us … and it was an unsettling picture.

The reception ended, we tipped our valet, and it was over. I haven’t been back to Sammy O’s since, and probably won’t go – nothing against ‘em (in fact, I admire the owners for plunging ahead and investing in the future), but in the end, there’s no beer there for me.

And that strange missing hillside gives me the willies.

Here's to the hope that the Sammy O's regulars did well at the re-education camp. Change can be a very scary thing.