Jul. 14, 2003 - 20:05 MDT

THE WONDERING JEW

The Greek's

In a cow town near the Colorado Rockies during a way back time when the Beer Barrel Polka played by the Glahe Musette group was sounding on most Juke Boxes I was going to high school.

In the next block east of school on Colfax, on the alley was a place we called The Greek's. A sort of a hole in the wall masquerading as a restaurant, it was wearing an adult face but was also catering to us high schoolers.

It was a fine place to escape the halls of Academe and breathe free air. One grand thing about it was that no one had to buy a burger to eat at one of the tables, just get a Pepsi or whatever and the seat at the table was yours. So the spectrum of teen customers was broad, the rich kids who went there ordered big and fancy while we plebeians nursed a coke and a home made sandwich -- and all the things in between were ordered and eaten there.

Strangely it was an egalitarian place, all of us on the same footing, jocks and dorks mixed amicably. The jocks usually would cut us dorks dead in the halls of semi-education - no fraternizing whatsoever there. But there, we were on a common social level -- strange but true. Any or all of us had the prerogative of worshipping the Goddess Nicotine in our various ways, roll your owns, tailor mades, an occasional pipe or fancy cigar. We lit up and raised no eyebrows. It was a place for sitting close and proposing nefarious plots and schemes and occasionally one of them would come to fruition - to the dismay of the perpetrators.

Some of the other schools in town had some kind of place which catered to teeners, but I liked ours best. I think we all felt at home there and the management types were great to us kids, treated us as human beings, by golly.

It was maybe a little rite of passage for us, being able to act like and be treated like adults. It was almost like being out in the workaday world, we thought.

It was long ago, our country was beginning to ease slowly out of the depression, but money was still tight even so. Many of those I went to school with went overseas in the war and a goodly proportion of them didn't come back.

But in my mind and memories there still exists, The Greek's . . . . . . . . .

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