At 96, she's the world's longest serving bartender

ALPENA — Take a narrow highway west, away from the big city, past the tractor show being staged by a barn, until you see the little white shack set between the trees and the fields of the north Michigan countryside.

If it’s Friday night, this is the place to be around here.

“You drive by the outside and you don’t think it’s much,” said Lee Cousineau, 77, a longtime customer nursing a glass of beer on a warm August evening. “But you get in here, it’s everything.”

This is the 91-year-old Maplewood Tavern, an authentic, back-road honky-tonk where the farmers and field hands of the area have come for years to unwind with a drink after their work is done and the sun starts dropping. It’s a place so historical the bartender here is older than the bar itself.

Clarise Grzenkowicz is 96, still owns the Maplewood and still tends the bar here every day. She started working here in 1940 and never stopped. And Guinness says that’s a world’s record.

“We’ve had a lot of people come out just to meet me,” she said. “It’s unreal.”

The bar itself isn’t much different than it was when she started working here. The old wood dance floor is the original. The old-style country music played by the band is the same. The walls are crowded with the clutter of a century’s worth of souvenirs and keepsakes. And couples still dance the kind of old-fashioned, hand-holding dances their parents and grandparents danced when they were served by the same bartender still working here today.

“Strangers come in because they just kind of drove by and saw the place, and then they find out that she is in the Guinness Book of World Records,” said Erma Nehring, who is 70 yet still calls her bartender “mom” with mathematical justification. “Can you imagine being behind that bar for 76 years and she’s still serving drinks?”

If people are fond of the bartender, they’re deeply in love with her bar, a summertime tradition around here since before its customers were born.

“When you live here your whole life and it’s always been here, you take it for granted,” said Shirley Dietlin, 71, a regular who drives over from nearby Alpena. “You don’t understand that this place is special until people come in from somewhere and say ‘This doesn’t happen all over.’ ”

Family tradition

The Maplewood was built in 1924 by local resident Henry Cadarette during the depths of Prohibition, and named for the forest of maples in the midst of which it was planted.

No alcohol meant that it operated strictly as a dance hall, and the only beverage served here was pop. Patrons paid a quarter to get on the dance floor for three songs performed by a live band. Most were local, but some bands came from as far away as Detroit to play what was billed as the largest dance floor in northeast Michigan.

The ban on booze didn’t stop people from having a stiff drink out in the parking lot. “Things were being sold outside,” Clarise admits. Once Prohibition ended they got a beer and wine license, and it's been a tavern ever since.

Clarise married the son of the Maplewood’s founder, also named Henry, and the two took over when his dad died in 1940. She was only 21 and she was suddenly helping run a business along with her family’s farm. And when her husband died in 1964, she was left to run it on her own.

For years she lived with her family in the living quarters in back, raising her children, watching whole lifetimes play out before her in the bar.

“I’ve seen three generations at least,” she said. “Maybe four.”

When she looks back on 96 years and her life’s noteworthy moments, she doesn’t mention big events or life-changing milestones, but rather the little everyday pleasures, the company of friends and family, the simple elements of life.

“Oh, we had good years,” she said. “We used to go vacationing quite a bit. We actually went to Clawson, Michigan, near Detroit! My nephew lived there. And we bought a new car. We bought a ’75 Chrysler Cordoba and made a trip to California. It was very good. That was a very nice trip.”

She was twice married and twice widowed, and now lives with her stepson. Her son or daughter pick her up and take her to work every day, and her son drives her to Florida during the winter.

"I don’t drive anymore,” Clarise said. “Because I’d be a menace on the road.”

The hours here are unusual — from 3-6 p.m. on weekdays, longer on weekends when there’s live music.

Her son Henry became part owner not long ago, though it’s ownership in name only. “I don’t say nothing,” said the 67-year-old. “I just let her do whatever she wants to do, and I just repair things.”

He recently put new shingles on the roof, put fresh white siding on the walls outside and made a bandstand out of dozens of vintage guitars hung from the walls and strung from the ceiling, creating a cave of instruments and giving the old bar new life.

The first thing most people ask his mom is why she hasn’t retired. She tells them the day she retires is the day she dies.

“This is what she loves to do,” said Carole Cadarette, Clarise's 73-year-old daughter. “She’s not happy unless she’s here. And she’s here and she opens this place here every day except Sunday, and we let her do that because that’s what keeps her going.”

Clarise said it was a more practical matter — there just aren’t many other options for a 96-year-old.

“I still don’t want to retire,” she said. “What am I going to do at my age?”

Friday night music

The guitars were twanging and the singers were warbling as the band’s break was over and they started playing again.

They call themselves the Maplewood Jam Band, a three-piece or four-piece group that consists of whoever shows up on Friday night with their instruments.

But no matter who’s there, it’s always the same old-time country that’s been played here for years — classics by Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings and Hank Williams both senior and junior. It’s a raw honky-tonk sound that changes a little from night to night because the band is never the same. Sometimes a guitar note is stray, sometimes a singer’s pitch is off, but the band’s enthusiasm plows the song forward.

Often the singer is someone from the crowd who gets up with the band, and sometimes they blow the roof off, like the young woman from California who was visiting family in town that summer night; the girl nobody ever saw before she got on stage and tapped into her inner Patsy Cline, singing one song after another, her voice rising up the scale, carrying the crowd up with her, until they too began to sing.

Clarise watched it all from behind the bar as her head barely poked up above the rail. “It’s quite a something, I’ll tell you, for a little old country bar, you know what I mean?” said the diminutive celebrity bartender.

Her daughter said her mom and her bar have endured so long and drawn such protective affection because they embody the warm way people have always gathered out here in this rural countryside, enjoying pure, simple things like a good time with the neighbors on a Friday summer night.

“When I was a child we used to go to everybody’s houses and they’d get out the music and we’d play and they’d dance and the kids would watch,” Carole said. She stood outside the front door in the dimming summer twilight as flakes of ash trickled down from the sky, carried by the warm wind from the bonfires at the tractor show down the road.

“We don’t have house parties like we used to,” she said. “So this is the major house party in the neighborhood.”

John Carlisle writes about people and places in Michigan. His stories can be found at freep.com/carlisle. Contact him: jcarlisle@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @_johncarlisle.