Somehow, I’m a little doubtful about my mother’s claim that the “hippie movement” of the sixties had arrived pretty much complete and on time up here in North Idaho. Certainly, the more pop aspects of the era were inescapable anywhere; The Beatles’ classic Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band obviously blared from lo-fi phonographs in basement rooms thick with incense smoke where human be-ins were planned and many tie-dyed shirts and macramé plant holders were made. However, I’d imagine that many folks in a town of Coeur d’Alene’s size forty years ago would have been reluctant to really embrace the more intense free love, pro-drug and anti-establishment values that came with the onset of the counterculture.
Nevertheless, my mother remembers witnessing firsthand an event which sounds like it could be described as North Idaho’s own miniature Woodstock. Bored one hot afternoon in the late sixties, my slightly naïve grandparents packed the family into the station wagon and headed up to Farragut State Park to check out a concert they’d seen a little ad for in the newspaper or somewhere. Laying out the picnic blanket and settling in, they were stunned to realize they were, as my mother puts it, “the only sober, normally-dressed people” in a crowd of thousands of half-naked hippies openly drinking beer, passing joints, and dropping acid to the throb of psychedelic hard rock. “The girls were running around completely topless,” she recalls. “Your grandfather’s eyeballs were practically bulging out of his head!”
Such hedonism was likely rare in these parts and most young folks in Coeur d’Alene pursued more innocent flights of fancy, such as the dances in the gym at North Idaho Junior College. Admission was a dollar, and every weekend would bring a different band, each with increasingly silly, sixties-ish names: “The Wilson-McKinley”, “Honolulu Fruit Gum Orchestra”, and my favorite, “Peach & the Pits”. Cruising Sherman Avenue was also a major craze at the time. A series of burger joints where all the cute, popular girls worked served as gathering points along “the loop”, starting with Paul Bunyan on the west end, and with Dairy De-Lite, Topper, and Arctic Circle rounding out the middle. The parking lot of The Boat Drive-In on the east side of town was the place to get a chili dog and rev up the Mustang before spinning out impressively and heading the other direction again.
The drinking age at the time was 19, so the kiddies didn’t have to wait too long before they could start frequenting night clubs and bars like the infamous Rathskeller’s Inn on East Sherman. The Goss family ran this notoriously uproarious beer and pizza joint, and for many years, it was the default hang-out spot in town for both college kids and the underage teens who managed to sneak in through the side window. Known affectionately by patrons as “Rats”, the bar featured live rock-n-roll bands, go-go dancers, pinball and pool tables. Longtime resident Virginia Balser shared with me a slightly twisted but entertaining memory about Rathskeller’s. “It was known to not have sufficient rest rooms for the patrons,” she explains, “and every weekend there were a number of gentlemen arrested for ungentlemanly behavior in the bushes outside.” Sound
s like a situation that really reeked.
The Diamond Cup hydroplane races that once packed the shores of Lake Coeur d’Alene with thousands of rowdy fans had begun to peter out by the late sixties, due to malaise caused by the massive drunken riots and civil disobedience that would inevitably accompany the events. My mother tells a great story about one of the last times the races were held, when she and her best girlfriend got dressed up in evening gowns and made fake beauty pageant sashes to wear which read something like “Miss Hydroplane Princess 1966”. Of course, there was no such title or pageant and the whole thing was merely a clever ruse enabling the girls to spend an evening being wined and dined for free by all the visiting hydroplane honchos at the Athletic Round Table, the elite lounge located within the elegant Desert Hotel.
Also on the classier side of the nightlife scene at the time was the North Shore Restaurant & Lounge, located in the footprint of what is now the Coeur d’Alene Resort, as well as neighboring Templin’s Waterfront Lodge. According to legend, Templin’s was the popular place for local business and politics bigwigs to have drinks because it was so dimly lit that they could avoid being seen by wives and busybodies while sneaking out on the town with their mistresses.
Further down Sherman was the Brunswick Café where, as witnessed by Coeur d’Alene’s Gary Ingram, the city council would meet for lunch on meeting day to decide what would be discussed at the meeting that evening. “This practice was the genesis of the Idaho Open Meeting Law”, says Ingram. Balser remembers having coffee breaks at the Brunswick with the Chief of Police and others. One day one of the regulars noticed that the menu included “Baked Owl with Dressing.” A prankster at a nearby business had managed to sneak away the menus over time and alter them, adding the unsavory “daily special”. According to Balser, “several people were outraged and finally the cook announced there was no ‘damned owl’ being served. The rest of us had great delight in this antic.” The Brunswick’s trademark “Awful Awful” burger is still served at the location, which is now The Iron Horse, but unfortunately I hear the burger is now just plain awful.
By the late sixties, Coeur d’Alene’s northward expansion had created a small strip of dining establishments on Appleway, near the town’s first indoor shopping mall, which was anchored by Buttrey Food & Drug and Montgomery Ward and was a huge deal at the time, despite only having about ten stores. The place had a distinct odor I can still almost conjure in my head which was specific to shopping malls of the era, a pungent mix of cafeteria fumes, new plastic shoes, hot popcorn, and artificial air. Nearby were both Elsie’s Dakota Café and Marie’s Coffee Stop Café, satisfying hungry mall shoppers who lined up at the lunch counters to have some soup and a sandwich and gaze longingly into rotating displays of pies and cakes. Both diners were run by big, loveable ladies who always sat in the back and treated all their customers like family.
Further west on Appleway, the Log Cabin Restaurant was considered fairly elegant at the time, boasting an extensive salad bar, perhaps the first of its kind in the area. Along with perennially popular favorites like Chicken Fried Steak and Spaghetti & Meatballs, menu options included more dated fare such as Liver & Onions and a Monte Cristo Sandwich (my favorite item you never see on menus anymore).
Cedar’s Floating Restaurant had recently opened its doors quite literally on the lake near the newly completed US-95 Bridge, and although it was well-known for it’s incredible steak and baked potato special and “soft lights” cocktail lounge, it wasn’t for the seasickness prone. I have some old photos of my parents and friends ringing in the New Year in 1968 out at the ultra-kitschy Happy Hour, which was just west of town on Seltice Way where The Grail sits now. The place looks smoky and cave-like, the depressing wood paneling and burgundy velvet wallpaper contrasting sharply with the florid hues of their outfits and dazzling party hats. Here was the local mecca for buffet-style dining, with a Wednesday all-you-can-eat Chicken Dinner and a splurge-worthy $2.85 Seafood Smorgasbord with 8 different seafood items including Alaskan king crab, lobster tail, and grilled fillet of Mau Mau Fish. Wait a second, wasn’t that the name of one of the bands playing down at the junior college?