Raising the bar

SPRINGFIELD — Guy walks into a bar …

Wait. Let’s try that again.

Ninety-two-year-old guy walks into a bar …

Hold on. One more try.

Ninety-two-year-old great-great-great-grandfather walks into a bar — and buys it.

But it’s not a joke. He really did.

And now, like a lot of folks, Earle T. Foley rises from bed each morning, takes a shower, gets dressed and heads to work five days a week. After all, he has big plans for the Time Out Tavern at the corner of 52nd and Main streets. A remodel. A new kitchen. And more emphasis on it being a place to get good food and not just a local watering hole.

“In six months, you’re not going to recognize this place,” Foley says, sitting in his chair in the bar’s garagelike back office, the sound of the old bar’s old icemaker humming in the background.

At a time when most people born in 1919 are, well, dead and gone, Foley has a 10-year plan for his new business venture as a way to make his money grow and leave a larger nest egg — maybe even set up some trust funds — for his grown childen, some of whom are already grandparents themselves.

“Look at it this way,” says Foley, who has lived in Junction City since moving there six years ago from Florida, to be close to one of his six daughters and her family. “Why should I have a goal of only one year? That’s nothing. Two years is nothing. Ten years? That’s pretty acceptable. If I can get that, I’ll go for another 10. If I behave myself, I’ll probably make it,” he says with a grin.

Having a nonagenarian buy their place of employment has not been an issue for those who work at the bar, manager Stephanie Horn says.

“We’re really glad he’s our boss now,” says Horn, after stepping away from behind the bar and ducking into the kitchen to put in a food order on a busy Saturday night. “It’s good to have someone who cares around here. Once you meet him, you realize age has nothing to do with Earle Foley. I was awed that he was in his 90s.”

None of the bar’s staff asked him his age when he bought the place in September, says Foley, who turned 92 on Oct. 11. “And they probably couldn’t guess,” he says. “Some have said as low as 65.”

“Who’s to stop him?”

Besides his six daughters, three of whom live in Oregon, two in California and one in South Carolina, Foley has 19 grandchildren, 24 great-grandchildren, four great-great-grandchildren and one great-great-great-grandchild.

He bought a house in Junction City upon moving from Davenport, Fla., after his second wife, Carmen, died at age 62 in 2004 — to be closer to his second-youngest daughter, Elaine Penix, and her family.

“He’s been talking about buying a business ever since he moved here,” Penix says. Her father is always working numbers in his brain, always looking for his next challenge, she says.

But when he actually found something, and that something was a bar?

Yes, that was a surprise, she says. And maybe not the choice she would have made, but each to his own.

“I really think everybody has the right to choose their own path,” Penix says. “And if this is what he wants to do, who’s to stop him?”

Foley busied himself for awhile by being a volunteer with Court Appointed Special Advocates of Lane County, helping represent local children in the county’s child welfare system. He bought and sold a few homes in Florida and here, he says. But he wanted to keep his savings at a certain level, and when the nation’s housing market went south, he quickly sold those homes and began looking for another opportunity.

He saw an ad in the newspaper for an investment firm, made a call, and started shopping some properties.

He made an unsuccessful offer on a Veneta bar and steakhouse. He looked at some other options in Junction City and Albany — then heard about the Time Out Tavern.

“I bought the bar because my money was sitting in a bank and rotting,” says Foley, who spent most of his working life in managerial and personnel roles with companies in the Midwest and Southern California, such as General Motors and Litton Industries, a large defense contractor.

Foley says he paid $175,000 cash for the Time Out Tavern, buying it from Kum Loon LLC. He doesn’t own the building, which dates to the 1940s, but would like to buy it. He’s also considering turning his business into an LLC (limited liability company), in which owners have limited personal liability for debts and benefit from pass-through taxation.

Foley, who plays pinochle and poker with a couple of groups, says some of his card buddies were perplexed by his bar purchase.

“They said to me, ‘At your age, what’re you doin’? You’ve got money, what’re you doin?’ ” Foley says. “I said, ‘I’m goin’ nuts with nothing to do.’ I needed something more. I just had to have something else. I had to put my money to work. I don’t need any more money. But I need to protect what I have.”

Laugh at Foley’s investment if you want, but he says it’s a “smart idea.”

He expects to be making a profit within three or four years — when he’s still only in his mid-90s. “Instead of giving the money away, this was the answer,” he says. “I’ll get my money back in a maximum of four years.”

“Love him to death”

Foley says he enjoys a couple of beers or maybe a “nice vodka martini” now and then, but that’s not what prompted him to buy a tavern. And you won’t catch him behind the bar. He doesn’t pour the drinks. He handles the bar’s books and manages the payroll for a staff of six.

“I haven’t been trained in it,” he says of the bookkeeping, “but I have enough brains to know if I don’t do it, I’m not going to know what’s going on.”

On a mid-November Saturday night, between 30 or 40 folks are milling about the place with four pool tables and multiple video poker machines, amid silvery blue 16-ounce cans of Busch Light and cocktail glasses lined along the bar.

Foley is dressed in a yellow sweater, bright green slacks and white sneakers. The biggest Oregon football game of the regular season, UO vs. Stanford, is on. He’s usually not at the bar in the evenings or on weekends, unless there’s a UO game on — then he likes to come and be among the people.

“I love it,” Foley says. “It’s great. If I wasn’t here watching, I’d be watching at home.” He says he’s been a UO football fan for years, long before he ever moved here. Something about the Ducks being the underdog for so long.

And it’s clear Foley’s customers like him just fine, too. Why shouldn’t they? He buys them drinks sometimes.

“You need to let the customers know you appreciate they’re here,” he says. “It’s part of business. It’s a selfish thing on my part that I want them to keep coming back and spend their money and play the (Oregon) Lottery.”

Cheryl Garrett and LeeAnn Lemons are watching the game at the bar. The friends say they’ve been coming here for years — since they were teenagers, actually, when they baby-sat the children of band members who played the bar back in the 1970s when it was known as the Frank ’n’ Hank Tavern, filled half with loggers and half with Free Souls bikers.

“I just love him to death,” says Garrett, a 1979 Springfield High School graduate, of Foley. “He put in new tables and he put chairs out front and he painted. He’s really done wonders.”

Mark Baker is The Register-Guard’s features editor. Reach him at 541-338-2374 or [email protected].