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   Beer For Breakfast By John McGuire Contributing Writer Note From Mr Breakfast: I came across this article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and it immediately gave me a warm feeling. It's a departure from most of our articles. Rather than presenting recipes or breakfast food/restaurant ideas, it shows another side of breakfast, across the street from Denny's or IHOP, where men opt for coctails instead of coffee. This article (originally published 02/22/2004) is reprinted with permission from the author. It's dawn, burp: "I'll have another beer, and some chips." If you look up, you'll see a sign over the cash register: "No credit cards, no tabs, this is a cash establishment." Welcome to the world of sunrise saloons. When you walk in these places, at a time when most people are getting up to go to work or school, you may start humming the old Max Morath "One for the Road" lyrics: "Saloon, saloon, saloon, it runs through my brain like a tune. I don't like cafe and I hate cabaret, but mention saloon and my cares fade away..." Well, cares may not fade away in these saloons, but they do seem to help those at the bar prepare for daytime sleeping. Besides, there aren't many of these early morning taverns around anymore. "There used to be a ton of these places," said Larry Kerperien, owner of Larry J's Bar at Weber Road and Interstate 55, at the St. Louis city/county line. His place had been a sunrise saloon until the nearby Stupp Bros. Bridge and Iron Co., with 180 workers, shutdown in 1998. "My bar used to be an around-the-clock place, but with the nightshifts not there anymore, there's no reason to open up at dawn. There's a few left, but not many." Kerperien was reminiscing at the bar at Al's Cafe, DeKalb and Victor streets. It's near the Yellow Freight truck yards and C. Hager & Sons Hinge Manufacturing Co., not far from the Mississippi River. Al's is truly a vintage sunrise watering hole and restaurant, in a building that's more than 100 years old. "This is the earliest one in the city," said Kerperian. It opens at 5:30 a.m., and they call it the "breakfast club." Beer and booze go on sale at 6 a.m. A bar that purrs  "Is today Tuesday?" asked Dan Chambers, a bottling superintendent at the nearby Anheuser-Busch brewery, sitting at the end of the bar at the Cat's Meow. "You get bleeped up when you work nights," he said.He was one of a half dozen mostly late-night working souls gathered in this historic building at 11th and Sidney streets in Soulard; the date, 1885, on the upper facade. It's across the street from the Barlog-Kuszaj-Zero American Legion Post 422, and it's owned by Patricia Ortmann, wife of 9th Ward Alderman Kenneth Ortmann. "I'm trying to figure out what in the hell's going on with Martha Stewart," said Christy M. O'Neill, seated nearby, watching an early morning television show on the tube above the southeast corner of the bar. O'Neill works for the Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. O'Neill is pretty typical of the folks who frequent these a.m. establishments - they tend to work "graveyard shifts," those nighttime schedules that often run from 10:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m. Most of them at the Cat's Meow are brewery workers; a few night-shift Third District police officers; an interesting character named Gino, who sits at a table drinking coffee; Trey Adams, a young man who lives in Soulard and is a nocturnal chemical processor at Sigma-Aldrich Corp.; Russ "No Name," who's worked at the Chrysler plant for 27 years, a member of Local 110 of the United Auto Workers; and a crew from Sachs Electric, led by Michael R. Muckler, the project foreman at the brewery. The Sachs crew is getting ready to work. Where everyone knows your name, or nickname Janet Waligorski loves to compare her life and her place with the former saloon sitcom, "Cheers." "You have your characters here, just like 'Cheers,'" Waligorski said. Each morning, she gets up at 5:30 a.m. to make sure her place is open for the early birds at 7. "I really do feel we have the cream of the crop," she said of her clientele. "These are all my children, right here." Straight Home Bar is a colorful spot amid the industrial gray of Granite City Steel, with approximately 2,500 employees right across 20th Street at the Route 203 intersection. The bar even had a mild brush with fame some years ago when it served as a scene-setting location for Bill Murray's 1995 movie, "Larger Than Life," featuring two elephants. A movie poster, autographed by Murray, hangs on a tavern wall. These days, you'll hear an occasional buzzing sound inside, as someone drives up to the takeout liquor window. Straight Home has been a bar and restaurant since 1948, and was once known as "Lone Acres." "You always tell your spouse, I'm going 'Straight Home,'" said Waligorski, who with her husband, Walter, has owned the place for 17 years. It's a typical morning hangout for night-time steel workers, quite a few from the blast furnace area, plus a night-shift Anheuser-Busch worker, who asked that he just be called "Sluggo" Doug. He frequents both this place and the Cat's Meow. "Don't forget your wife's Pepsi," Waligorski shouted as "Sluggo" headed for the door. Strangely enough, he drinks Miller High Life Beer. He's miffed about something at work. Waligorski enjoys telling the story about the alcoholic who came in her bar back when the place opened at 6 a.m. "He ordered a Budweiser and told me he hadn't had a drink in four months. I told him to call the around-the-clock Alcoholics Anonymous number; he did, and walked out without having a drink," she recalled. On this winter morning, sitting on vinyl, high-backed chair at the corner of the bar was Tom Sanders, sipping mugs of Bud Light. The beer was cold but not as frigid as the air outside the place. The clock read 7:30 a.m., the hour that most people start their day. Sanders, of Granite City, was just winding his night down, and it was a special morning for him; his 48th birthday. He had just finished a 12-hour overnight shift as a forklift operator at the Dial Corp. warehouse. "Working nights is like living in Bizzaro World," said Sanders, referring to Superman comics, and the bad guy who's the exact opposite of the Man of Steel. "You're working when others are sleeping, and you're sleeping when they're working. You can't get your schedule right." A Sidebar Left Out Of The Originally Published Article This newspaper (St. Louis Post-Dispatch) was across the street from one of the busiest sunrise saloons in St. Louis. An old roof-leaking, fascinating place called the Press Box Cafeteria & Annex. Because of the leaking roof, customers would haul in canoes and put them on tables; one even brought in a live cougar. It was that kind of place, until many years ago it was urban-renewalized into a fond memory, demolished to make room for an office mall. In the before dawn hours, the Press Box was often as bustling as a New Year's Eve party, as "lobster shift'' workers, most of them pressmen and late-shift printers, partying after their work night ended. Not surprisingly, the place was filled with characters. Such as longtime St. Louis Sheriff's Department employee, Marshall Mickey McTague, who would sit near the bar and do rambling Harry Caray play-by-play gigs, with the lineup, pitchers and batters, the names of those sitting around the bar. He did this by speaking into a tilted empty beer glass, his voice resonating like Caray: Hal-lo, everybody!
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