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Faculty Club manager Dennis Scott
The bar is as small as one in a train car, and immediately to the right as you step into the architectural hypen that joins the 1728 Homestead House and the ca. 1730 Homestead House to form the Faculty Club - which, by the way, will soon be renamed the University Club, to assure uncertain staff that it's not the exclusive environs of professors. The bar, with its 1985 renovations - from the smooth maroon counter to the maroon-trimmed curtains in the windows flanking the mirror-backed tiers of bottles - gently plies UMass spirit. No team photos or pennants or scoreboards clutter the paneled walls; no popcorn or water-rings on the counter. Just bottles in tiers, a tap at one end of the short bar and a punch bowl at the other, adjoining the lobby of the Homestead House - crowded, in this five o'clock hour on a late spring afternoon, with microbiology department faculty and students having a year-end get-together. Above the bar hang neat rows of small, down-turned wineglasses, and in front of it are eight barstools, all empty.
"Not much of a bar crowd," concedes manager Dennis Scott, who looks as appropriate behind the bar as he does greeting lunch guests, though he says he once wanted to be "either Hemingway or a dentist; anything but in the hospitality business." Still, the microbiologists are occasionally dipping into the punch bowl set out for them; the geosciences "safety meeting," which has convened every Friday afternoon for the last twelve years, is gathering in another room; and the political science department is slated to take the microbiologists' place at 6:30.
A microbiology student with burly biceps filling the sleeves of his dark blue polo shirt approaches the bar. He looks a bit young to be drinking. He orders his second Perrier. "I don't drink," says James Kirnon, a senior who plays on the football team. "I don't believe in it. I try to stay healthy." He talks positively about the new football coach and confusingly about cells.
"Hi Dennis," says another man, who looks like a geosciences-grad-student kinda guy. "Got any Sam Smith's Oatmeal? No? I'll have a draft." Ken Narkiewicz says he's met the rest of the geosciences faculty and grad students here every Friday for the three years he's been working on his Ph.D. "This is definitely a social time for us to get together and not talk shop."
Other geologists soon appear, ordering their beers and taking them out to the umbrella-shaded tables on the front terrace, where they've decided to congregate. Though grad student Stephanie Surine is "a dedicated fan" of Otter Creek's Newcastle beer, and lots of drafts are sold, the Oatmeal Stout and Anchor Steam are the group's decided favorites. Grad student Mike Vollinger says they consider Professor Mike Rhodes, a.k.a. "Pommie," their "mentor" in the art of drinking beer and a real "beer conoisseur."
This mentor, who has traveled to the Galapagos Islands, hiked Mount Saint Helens, and experienced the rumbling of a volcano while camping on its side"He'll be well prepared for hell when he gets there," Scott ribs his longtime customerobviously also enjoys the simple things of life."This is a Friday ritual," he says. "Our department's been coming here for a long time. Years ago, we used to have a beer in the department. It's more sensible to come here."
By now, though no one has pulled a stool up to the bar, lots of folks are stopping by to order a drink to carry into their particular reception or to say hi to Dennis. Economics professor Lisa Saunders voices a plea for baked brie to be returned to the menu"Yours is the best," she says convincingly. "And what about some lemonade?"
Ashoke Ganguli, director of auxiliary services, comes by along with other Faculty Club board members who've just finished meeting in a room upstairs. He knows the club's finances inside and out and is quick to applaud Dennis's work: since he took over as manager, the club's gross income has increased from $54,000 to $180,000 (only about one-tenth of which comes from sales of alcohol). "Dennis has done a fantastic job." Ganguli emphasizes, though he says the club is still a losing proposition, as it has been for years.
In some ways, maybe. Not in others.
It's almost noon on a warm yet fresh day the same week, and there are more sunlit windowsills and vintage teapots than diners to be seen in the several rooms of the Faculty Club. A few regulars of the Common Table in the main room ladle clam chowder out of the big black pot beside the hearth and, chatting familiarly, take their places under a hand-lettered sign reading, "Often in Error, Never in Doubt." (Many of them are retirees gathered "to run the university in absentia," teases Scott, who made the sign for them based on one of their adages.) Waitstaff in khakis and white shirts, bearing plates of mushroom-glazed filet mignon or tuna-salad sandwiches, move unhurriedly among the linen-draped tables. Once in a while one of them rounds up Scott to fill a customer's order for a beer or wine from the bar.
Were it the middle of the semester, everything about this scene would be cheerfully multiplied: more diners, more khaki-clad waiters manuevering laden plates through the doorways, more boisterous discourse from the gang at the Common Table.
Except for orders for drinks from the bar: There wouldn't be a whole lot more of those at the busiest of times, according to Scott, who has unaccustomed time to talk todayalthough, even while sitting, he's inspecting cutlery, glancing up whenever the door opens, and periodically hustling off to welcome patrons.
Least of all during lunch, after which people must hasten back to offices and classrooms, spirits have little to do with the club's character, which Scott believes is its real draw. "I serve almost no alcohol at lunch," he says. The bar sees a little more action from 4 to 6 p.m., when many departments have receptions and some, like geosciences, have Friday afternoon "safety meetings" ("Happy hour" is illegal in Massachusetts.) The bulk of the club's alcohol sales occur at those hours.
Scott notices a few early arrivals of the Distance Learning group, who've made reservations for fifteen for lunch. "Excuse me a second," he says, already out of his chair. "I gotta take care of these people." His voice can be heard greeting people by nameperhaps among the fifty or so new ones he learned this year (he set a goal of 150)and instructing a waiter to set wineglasses on the table, as this group will be having wine with lunch. "And put out cloth napkins," he adds discreetly. The guy aims to please.
"When I arrived here in 1986," says Scott, having seen to his guests, "more people were apt to drink. There wasn't such concern. Now the business guests of faculty and administration drink more than our university people do. They're used to having a drink at lunch."
His blue eyes brighten mischeviously behind the silver rims of his eyeglasses. "Many of my faculty customers say, 'Oh, I can't; I've got to teach.' I say, 'Oh? Then maybe you should have some; it might improve your teaching!'" He aims to razz, too, especially the regulars.
"My personal opinion is, the concern is overblown," offers Scott. "There's been drinking since there've been humans. I'm sure the Neanderthals were fermenting. Somebody dropped some fruit somewhere and found the result was good for what ails one."
Granted, he doesn't have to contend with the problem of underage drinking under his roof, since his clientele is faculty, staff, and graduate students. "Obviously, I don't have undergrads here, except at some department receptions. And then I card them if they order at the bar."
As to the problem of underage drinking, Scott is among those who see it as a lack of early education. "The reason we get drinking problems with kids on campus is they're not taught at a young age to respect alcohol. It should begin when kids are still at home. European kids respect alcohol more." (Scott lived in Germany for several years in the mid-1960s after being stationed in the Army there.) And though he himself doesn't drink much, this born publican believes that the Faculty Club " wouldn't be the same without the bar."
Some lunch patrons share his opinion, and others don'tthough even those who agree on the bar's importance don't seem to actually drink. "I'm not sure we'd miss it," says associate director of development Michael Seppala, who can be found at the club three times a week. "I can't speak for everyone, but I rarely have lunch with anyone ordering a drink."
"I don't think we'd miss the bar," agrees Mark Baszak, who's sharing a large mason jar of iced tea with comparative literature professor Catherine Portugese. "Speak for yourself!" rejoins Portugese archly.
History professor Dean Ware, outgoing president of the Faculty Club, and biology professor emeritus John Roberts, a member of the club's board of directors, take Portugese's view. They've lunched at the Common Table several times a week for twenty years and remember the days before the bar was built and the club obtained a liquor license in 1972.
Before then, says Roberts, "you brought in your own bottle and kept it in your locker in the room that's now called the Chancellor's Roomquite a clumsy arrangment." Ware remembers a cabinet in which members kept their own bottles labeled with their names he kept Scotchand to which they each had a key.
"It wouldn't be the same without the bar," they agree, despite the fact that they seldom drink, and Roberts adds, "I come mostly for the clam chowder. It's excellent."
Says Ware, "Basically, this is a lunch club, that's what it's for, and there's nothing else like it on campus. A lot of academic life goes on here."
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