John Carlisle

Detroit Free Press

The soul of Marvin Gaye is flowing from the jukebox, while whiskey is being poured over ice, and the salty smell of fried chicken wings fills the small room, and everyone’s having a great time.

The ambiance is inviting. But you can't just walk into this club.

First, you have to ring the doorbell. A member has to decide whether to let you through the locked door. You have to walk down a narrow flight of stairs to another door. And even once you get inside the basement bar, you’d better show some old-fashioned manners.

“Everyone is welcome,” said Judy Daniels, the club’s 67-year-old cook and bar manager. “Just as long as they handle themselves properly.”

Welcome to the Lower Level of the Jolly Old Timers club, an open secret of a bar hiding in plain sight for six decades in an old Victorian house at the edge of the Wayne State campus. It doesn’t advertise. There’s no sign on its building to say that it’s here, other than a small, neon “Open” sign in the front room window. And, until recently, you couldn’t get in unless a member invited you.

That kind of protectiveness, its members say, is what has helped this place — an incorporated nonprofit club — survive so long.

“It’s definitely a well-kept secret,” said Gail Spencer, the club’s 59-year-old vice president. “For years, you had to know someone to get in. People looked at it and wondered, ‘What is that house? It has that open sign in the window. Is it a hotel or what?’ ”

The JOT is one of the last black social clubs remaining in Detroit from before the Civil Rights era, a place of chivalry and genteel manners where Motown is the soundtrack, where the employees are unpaid volunteers, the walls of the stairwell display black-and-white photos of their esteemed founders, and where someone will still always walk women to their cars at night.

“You will never see a woman standing in here,” said Fred Simpson, 75, the club’s treasurer and three-time past president. “Somebody will always give them their chair.”

But their secrecy is also what has kept their ranks from being replenished. Not long ago, they were down to a handful of members, and they began worrying that the JOT and its history could soon be gone. So now, cautiously and slowly, they’ve been extending an invitation to anyone who would like to learn of their legacy and sip a strong drink in a historic underground bar.

Their hope is that some of those visitors will want to join the club and help preserve it. Their fear is that opening the doors more will somehow alter what’s lasted so long. It’s a tricky balance.

“I want to move us forward in most areas, but I want the basic spirit of what we had to stay here always. Always,” Daniels said. “That’s why we don’t take in members very often, because they have to have what we have — they have to love it. And we don’t want to lose that.”

A tough start

When they first found this building almost 50 years ago, they had to send a white guy to buy it for them.

Back then, racial covenants prevented black people from buying property in much of the city, including the block near the university where they’d found an ideal location for a club.

"Back then, in the ‘50s, black folks couldn’t get those kind of things in their own name," said 62-year-old Gwendolyn Marshall, a member for 15 years. "They usually had to have some backing.”

Before that, they were just a group of friends who would gather in Paradise Valley — Detroit’s black business and entertainment district just outside downtown — in an era when they weren’t allowed in most of the city’s bars and restaurants.

“They were bellhops and porters and blue-collar workers, and they would all hang out down in The Valley, that was our downtown area at the time,” Simpson said.

“Hastings Street had the barber shops, the bars, the churches, the cleaners, some of everything,” he said. “Guys would take their clothes in, they’d meet at certain places or hang out at a bar while they waited, and finally they said, ‘Let’s get a place we can call our own.’ ”

They had to. When plans called for a new freeway to connect the city to the suburbs, city and state officials decided the best place for it happened to be where the city’s black community lived and worked at the time, and they carved the new Chrysler Freeway right down its main road, Hastings Street. That was the end for about 300 black-owned businesses.

For a while, the group met in the lobby of the Gotham Hotel on John R, but they came to believe their group deserved something better. Fifty-one of them formed a club not just to socialize, but also to perform community work. They called themselves the Jolly Old Timers and had bylaws, a board of directors, and elected officers. Monthly meetings were governed by "Robert's Rules of Order."

“The reason the club got started is, back then, black folks could not just go anywhere,” said Marshall. “Black folks were kind of limited in the establishments you could go to. That had a lot to do with them coming together as a group.”

They found a three-story house on West Forest, between Second and Third, that seemed ideal. A white club member presented himself as the buyer, knowing it was the only way to get the place.

“He was the one that was our face, and got this place,” Daniels said. “And then, we were here,” she said, laughing.

At one point, they had nearly 250 members; enough to rent out a whole Boblo boat for regular parties, enough to stay open seven days a week and offer both lunch and dinner. The club has three levels — the bar in the basement, another one on the main floor and an upper-level lounge for members only. And it was packed every day.

The JOT drew business people, council members, even Mayor Coleman Young, who once was told there were “No Parking” signs on the side of Forest where he’d parked his car. “I’m the damn mayor,” he replied, leaving the car where it was. Fred Ross, whose daughter Diana led The Supremes, served as president several times.

The club functioned not just as a place to gather, but also as a vehicle for charity work. They gave out scholarships to local students, contributed to the Boy Scouts, hosted tutoring sessions for students in the summertime, and brought meals and presents to poor families at the holidays. To this day, charity work is a central duty of all members, who pay a $600 annual fee to belong.

“The idea of wanting to maintain what had been here so long is one of the reasons I joined,” said Ron Simkins, a 57-year-old Wayne State research assistant and the club’s current president. “It’s the legacy, the ideal of this club itself and what it stood for. You’re standing on the shoulders of a whole lot of people. You don’t want to let them down.”

An eye on the future

Over time, as older members passed away, the club began to fade. There were fewer charity events, fewer members, fewer nights they were open. Recently, they dropped down to a dozen or so members, and opened only three nights a week.

But some of the younger members are working to revive the club and what it represented. They’re re-establishing their charity efforts, beginning with a Flint water bottle drive they just finished. They've opened their doors to the public during the annual Dally in the Alley street fair and on St. Patrick's Day. And they’ve added a few new members recently. But change still makes some members nervous.

“I do worry, and so that’s why we’re not having a large influx, we’re doing it small,” Spencer said. “We just let in five new people. We vet them, we make sure they believe in the things we believe in, the morals, the values and all that sort of thing.”

Among them was Julie Owens, who was tending bar on a recent First Fridays night, when guests and visitors came to mingle with the president and meet the handful of new members just sworn into the club.

“I can come down here and have my drink, I can relax, I don’t have to dress up,” said Owens, 46, the case manager for a federal judge. “They have the good soul music and the hot chicken, it’s very casual and comfortable. And when you come down here, everybody knows you.”

She’s helping to modernize it with new lighting, a Facebook page, and glossy menus. “I think we’re making slow progress,” she said.

Detroit's oldest cabin lies hidden in a neighborhood

Around her, a couple dozen members were packed into the softly lit bar with the low-hung ceiling, between the soul music jukebox at the end and the television to the side. Pork chops and chicken made their way out from the kitchen to the crowded tables.

Most of the men were in suits, many of the women wore dresses. But a few young hipsters had jeans on, and a long-haired, grizzled apartment manager from down the street wore an old hoodie as he ate his dinner by himself at the bar.

“We are not just a black social club,” Daniels said. “We did not start off all one color, so we don’t discriminate against anybody. We’re becoming multicultural. But when you come in here, you act a certain way. We’re warm and fuzzy, and this is our home. When you come in here, you’re in our home.”

There was a knock at the back door, and a woman was let in. She looked around the crowded bar, but there was nowhere to sit. Smokey Robinson sang softly over the speakers. The fryers in the kitchen were bubbling.

The apartment manager, who isn’t a member but who has come to the club frequently enough to know how things work around here, grabbed his beer and his fries, stood up from his bar stool and turned around. Then he politely offered the woman his seat.

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.

Jolly Old Timers is located at 641 West Forest Ave. in Detroit. The Lower Level is open on Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings, though hours vary. For more information, call 313-831-5342 or see facebook.com/jollyoldtimers.