Bouncing a Boston Pastime, Say Square Tavern Keepers

The Boston Licensing Board's ruling that bartenders may not eject customers will not affect taverns around the Square.

Two reasons are given for this: the Licensing Board has no jurisdiction in Cambridge, and the clientele needs no bouncing. Proprietors of the homes of foam in the Harvard area are unanimous in their opinion of bouncing: unnecessary.

"Skid Row and South Boston have a different problem from ours," says Thomas O'Brien, manager of the Club One Hundred. "The time to stop trouble is before it starts--at the door."

This is generally the sentiment at the bars that circle the Yard. The "don't let 'em get drunk" school prevails over the discipline of the bouncer and the bar stick in these parts.

The Cronin Opinion

"There are only gentlemen coming in our place," claims Jim Cronin, Jr.

Strange things have been known to happen to gentlemen on football weekends, however. What happens if one of the gentlemen gets drunk?

"Then the gentlemen with him is kind enough to take him home," says Cronin, but adds hastily that "we never serve them that much, of course."

"If a man is drunk--and what few drunks we have are usually that way when they come in here--there's no need to lay a finger on him," says Jack Spear, manager of the Wursthaus. "Tact. That's the way to handle him. Place him on a pedestal with a few words, and make him think that you're his servant. Pretty soon he'll be outside."

"And in 99 cases out of 100," he continues, "the drunk will never remember about it the next day. He'll usually come back and ask, 'What happened to me last night?'"

No Strong-Arm Men

No bouncers are in evidence in the places where Harvard drinks and thinks. It would be wasting a man, say the managers.

The customer-protecting ruling followed a Thanksgiving Day bar-room fracas in which a South Boston longshoreman claimed he was beaten over the head with a baseball bat. The longshoreman, Joseph Fratolillo, spent 11 days unconscious in City Hospital with a fractured skull.

In the event of trouble in a Boston bar, under the Licensing Board's new ruling, the bartender should call the police. Punching customers or bouncing them out into the street will be punished by disciplinary action--and not of the University Hall variety. Loss of license may follow such violations.

"We don't approve of a proprietors roughing up customers or bouncing them into the street or parking them in doorways," declared Licensing Commissioner Walter Miens, but added that "of course the principles of self defense are not to be ignored."