ANCHORAGE

Darwins Theory

Barbara Jean Alberg

I've been in Alaska since 1975. I've been working at Darwin's Theory for eighteen years. It's a fun kind of old-fashioned bar. No tricks. What you see is what you get. You can tell people that they have to leave if they're in a bad mood; which is right because it's a small bar, so a bad mood or if somebody's angry is going to impact everybody else's mood. So you can tell them to come back when they're in a better mood and, generally, everybody listens to the bartender here, so we don't have a big problem. We don't have fights, or anything like that. And you can usually make the guys who are in bad moods go away, so we don't have fights very often.

Easter Sunday, my first year here, there were three people here and it was so boring. Everybody was out doing lunches and church and all that. I just couldn't have that, so the next year I had an Easter egg coloring contest. People came in and decorated eggs. There were about eight or nine people who participated the first year. This last year, thirty people participated and everybody wore Easter bonnets and I made a big feedturkey and a lot of food and champagne. And now it's blossomed into a full-blown event.


Darwin Biwer

I bought Darwin's Theory in Anchorage with two partners back in 1981. It was Ruthie's Forty-Niner before that. Ruthie was seventy-six years old and she'd been in the bar business for thirty years, so she was ready to get out of the bar business. But she couldn't find anybody. I mean, all kinds of people were always wantin' her to sell it to 'em all the time, but she was a shrewd old tomato and she wasn't ready to sell it to just anybody. So finally Birdhouse Dick, Dick Delak, Dick was one of my partners when I opened up and Bill Seltenrich from Fairbanks, he was a buddy of Dickie's...So I was lookin' for a bar to buy and Dickie and Willie, Bill Seltenrich, I call him Willie, they had a lunch-bunch thing every Friday over here at the Rice Bowl, so a bunch of guys would get together every Friday Noon and have lunch and drinks and just bullshit with them about whatever, be it football or where's the place to take your car or who's doin' what to whom, just gossip. So I was lookin' in Juneau and I went down to Kenai and Fairbanks. I came this close to buyin' the Howling Dog up in Fairbanks. So I was just kinda tellin' the guys what I was doin' and, finally, on 4th of July in '81, they were havin' a function up at the Birdhousethe old Birdhouseand Dickie motioned me over and said, "How about...Think about buyin' Ruthie's Forty-Niner?" I just barely knew where it was. I had a girlfriend years ago that worked across the street and I'd pull up to pick her up and I saw the bar over there, but I'd never been in it. I'd been livin' out in Gerdwood and out in Alyaska for twenty-five years. I lived out there before I even bought the bar. So anyway, Dickie said, "How about goin' into Ruthie's Forty-Niner?" Well, Jesus, just to have Dickie as a partner, because he's been in the business a long time and knows a lot of shit. So we said, Okay. Then Willie was part of the deal, which I didn't know at first. So the three of us each put in twenty-five thousand dollars, bought the liquor license from Ruthie. The only reason we were able to that is Dickie and Willie own some little storage units down on Ship Creek and the people that ran that for Dickie and Willie, Bobby and Sandy Morrow, knew Ruthiewere good friends of hers from a long time agoso they talked Ruthie into lettin' Dickie and Willie and I buy the bar from her. Kind of respectable business people, good referrals, references that they knew Dickie and all of this. And Dickie'd had the bar down at the Birdhouse for twenty years or almost that. So anyway, she finally sold it to us. She sold it to us on September 1, 1981, and we had a big going-away party for Ruthie at the end of August. We came in here and just started cleaning the place up. Basically, we changed the bathrooms. The little one here was the mens' bathroom and the big one over there was the womens' bathroom. But there was no urinal, it was just a toiletjust a commodeover there, so we took this one here and made that the womens' room and took the big one and put the urinal in there, so there's a commode and a urinal in the mens' room now and made those opposite. Then the bar, we took the sink from one side and moved it to the other side and plumbed it on the other side of the U-shaped bar so that we could have a waitress station. And we cut a hole for the garbage to go through, so you could take the garbage out the side. Ruthie always had all the doors closed up here. She got raped one night, many years ago. Way back when, quite a few years earlier, but in this bar. She opened this bar here in 1970, moved it from...Ruthie's Forty-Niner was over here where the Westmark parking lot is. It was over there. When they built that hotel, she had to move it into this building. So somewhere between 1970 and 1981, in the mid-Seventies, she got raped back here by some Native guy, so she kept everything locked up and closed down and it was pretty...And all the windows were boarded up with plywood, so it was a real dark hole in the wall where the bankers across the street would hide.