By 7 o'clock, the Monday-night scene was in full swing: A college student with a mohawk pushed through the door for the $5 pizza-and-pitcher special. A woman with white curls laughed with other locals at the bar, and in the back, a skinny guy in a cheap dress threw darts.
It's been like this for decades at the Green Door Tavern -- busy, with an eclectic, tipsy crowd. But the smoky room in Park Hall is one of the last of the old St. Mary's County bars, a holdout in a place where the changing culture and crackdowns on drunken driving have put a serious dent in its hard-drinking reputation.
Sitting on Rt. 5, The Green Door is a favorite watering hole to many of the locals and students at nearby St. Mary's College.
(Preston Keres - The Washington Post)
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Twenty years ago, St. Mary's had more liquor licenses per capita than anywhere else in Maryland, according to a grand jury investigation, and the highest percentage of driving deaths caused by alcohol.
The traditions ran deep: It was a place where, during Prohibition, bootleggers rolled barrels of whiskey off the wharves; where in the 1940s, the Patuxent River Naval Air Station opened and test pilots crowded into the Roost; where in the 1950s and '60s, slot machines in bars gobbled and spat quarters; and where, in the '80s, bartenders still sold cocktails-to-go in paper cups.
But things are changing, as the county's economy transforms and warnings about health and drunken driving take hold. Farmers and watermen are becoming outnumbered by newcomers to the county -- a large number of them well-paid scientists and executives working for defense contractors drawn by the Navy base. People now are more likely to head to the gym or a chain restaurant with their family after work, rather than hang out at the neighborhood hole in the wall.
"It's like every place now," said T.V. Long, who has lived in St. Mary's all his life.
Duke's bar closed years ago in Leonardtown, replaced by a French restaurant with lace curtains. The Wharf burned down, and now luxury condominiums are rising on the waterfront land. The Victory Bar and the Two-Spot, and most of the topless bars that sprang up near the Navy base, are long gone. Even the taverns with ballfields out back have been shutting down. Two of the biggest are up for sale.
Here and there you can still see the signs of the old hard-drinking St. Mary's -- in dark bars, some without signs, most without windows, places with linoleum tiles that smell like old beer, red vinyl stools with stuffing poking out, cigarette scabs on Formica, peanut shells on the floor, friends who grew up together, dogs sleeping under pool tables.
Yet it's nothing like it was back in the day.
The Old Gum Tavern was built in rural western St. Mary's back in the 1930s after a big hurricane hit, said Long, who spent much of his youth there. Torn-up piers floated down the Potomac and were nailed together into a rough wooden structure with a hole in the floor to throw the whiskey bottles down.
Long's parents dressed up to dance the Charleston at the Old Gum. Farmers, watermen and laborers in the area found their way to the neighborhood bars most afternoons. "It was nothing for these guys to drink half a fifth of liquor and smoke two or three packs of Pall Malls," Long said. "Some people drink coffee. These guys had a [shot]."
The fights were legendary, and a few ended with gunshots. "Some people would say, 'Don't go into the Old Gum -- they'll rip your head off,' " Long said.
But it could be a friendly place, too, with a ball team, ice cream for the kids and nickel horse-race games. As a teenager in the '60s, Long and his friends would push open the double swinging doors, put money in the jukebox, get a $2 bucket of scalded oysters, flirt with girls. The Old Gum was one of nine bars in a seven- or eight-mile radius, Long said, at a time when there were only a handful of general stores and nothing much else in the area, so sometimes they'd pick up a go-cup and head up the road.
"Might be a little drag race here and there," he said. "Wasn't no traffic."