BoomerGirl Diary

By her count, Theresa Fenner has flung about 160,000 beers down the bar at Western Lanes. Schlitz. PBR. Miller. She sent so many cans skidding toward thirsty bowlers that the yellow countertop is scuffed white. In all that time, Fenner brags, she hit only two customers - one of them a Wake County, N.C., judge. "It's my sobriety test," says Fenner, 60, demonstrating her sidearm sling. "All you gotta do is remember to close your fingers." As Raleigh, N.C., wrings its hands over Hillsborough Street, which is adding roundabouts and hookah bars to its faded main drag, here is one spot that stays blissfully unchanged. No waterless urinals here. No speed dating. No Wii. In her 25th year behind the counter, Fenner has outlasted the Rathskeller, Bourbon Street, ACC Tavern, Swensen's and Crazy Zack's without altering so much as a pepper shaker. A few other elderly eateries survive, notably Mitch's Tavern. But who there can say she spent a quarter-century perfecting a saloon trick? "I'd put her in icon status," says David J. Craver, president of the National Bartender's Association in Atlanta. "The fact that she's been in one place for 25 years, that's an anomaly. Less than 1 percent." Fenner appears as colorful as her beer-slide. She wears rings on every finger, three earrings in each ear and three gold loops around her neck. Her speech suggests Philadelphia, sprinkled with the "sugars" and "darlings" she has gathered in Raleigh. Sit for a half hour and she will bring up the five Chevelles she has owned, none of them newer than 1972. Why muscle cars? "Because they're pretty," she whispers over the counter. Fenner came to Raleigh as a single mother of three girls, her husband having disappeared after their divorce in Pennsylvania. She had a sister, Nazarena, who ran Granny's Kitchen on Old Wake Forest Road. But Nazarena died soon after Fenner arrived, and she found herself working two restaurant jobs for 85 hours a week, making chit-chat with beery bowlers, serving coconut pie, winging Schlitz down the counter. The beer-slide started as a distraction, a way for Fenner to stay interested working six nights a week in a bowling alley. It gets lonely in there at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday. "Now," Fenner says, "if I don't do it, people think I'm mad." It's an antiquated gimmick that suggests the Old West, or at least a distant decade. In the 1980s video game Tapper, the virtual bartender wears a striped coat and soda-jerk hat, and he looks as if he spends his night crooning alto for a barbershop quartet. Once, Fenner recalls, a patron complained about slack service. She flipped a beer at him, which he managed to catch, but not before stumbling over a stool and hitting the floor. The second casualty was former Judge Fred Morelock roughly 10 years ago. Fenner recalls the judge warning her that she'd end up in court one day. "I would say she missed me by an inch," says Morelock, who has since returned to private practice and still bowls at Western Lanes with his sons. "I was walking up the steps and the beer came flying. Every time I see her, I kid her about it. She's wonderful." Fenner laughs recalling a chesty patron who laid her anatomy on the counter and demanded a beer in-between. Fenner threw a bull's-eye, and suddenly everyone else in the diner wanted to try. The only thing that keeps Fenner working - she married a furniture salesman 15 years ago - is osteoarthritis. Every 12 weeks, she gets a round of 16 injections to build up her calcium, and it isn't cheap. Western Lanes' bar has already closed, but the restaurant still serves beer, and the countertop makes a suitable bar. But some day, she hopes Western Lanes will be finished with her yellow counter and let her take it home as a prize. Her patrons already ask for a piece, a small chip off the end for memory's sake, a relic like the bones of a martyred saint.

Tease photo by JasonJT.