Craddock Connection

Mom didn’t have much of an education and her only real job experience was just manual labor so when dad got too sick to work much she took a job tending bar. It didn’t really require experience, provided steady work and paid better than anything else she could find. However, it didn’t take her too long to figure out the guy running the bar was the one making most of the money so sometime around 1960 she rented a building in Ft. Cobb and opened up her own business. I don’t remember what she called that place. Not too long after that she decided paying rent wasn’t that good of an idea either and started looking around for a building to buy.

By this time she had learned all the ins and outs of the business. I have no idea what the laws are now but at that time bars in the city limits closed at 12:00 midnight. Those outside city limits could stay open until 2:00 A.M.  She knew that lots of her customers weren’t ready to go home at midnight … especially on the weekends. With that in mind she narrowed her search to buildings outside the city limits of the towns in the area and that didn’t leave much to choose from. She finally found an empty house right on a curve in the highway 1 mile west of Binger and decided that would be the place.

We moved to Binger in the summer of 1962 and they started working on the place. It was just a small house on a 5 acre lot and I don’t remember what she paid for the place but it wasn’t much. Regardless of the price my dad was convinced it was no different than throwing that money away and they bickered (to put it nicely) about it from mom’s first mention. One day while getting the place ready mom brought up the subject of what they would call it and dad jumped on the opportunity. It’s been too long for me to remember the conversation word for word but his response was something to the effect of “well it’s so little you couldn’t get nothing in here but a room full of midgets … you ought to just call it The Midget Bar!” He was obviously being sarcastic but in a tit-for-tat move of master strategery (thanks W) she did just that. In keeping with the whole ‘midget’ theme, the sign she hung outside with the name on it was so small you could barely read it from the road. They were quite a pair!

Larry Craddock