Once-beloved community pub echoes with ghosts of curiosities
GLEN FLORA — My photographer friend Peter Brown and I were too late on Wednesday afternoon to rub the nose of Ed Scheller’s pet alligator. Nearly 50 years too late, actually. We were too late to sit at the old bar and have a beer at Scheller’s Place. That’s the country beer joint where Alligator — that’s what Scheller called him — lay in repose near the wood-burning stove in winter while beer-drinkers played dominoes, caught up on the news and told tales of life along the Lower Colorado that occasionally were true. Ed and his wife Florence — known as “Dick” — started the business in 1950.
Leon Hale’s many fans will recall that Scheller’s Place occupies all of chapter two in his book “Turn Right at the Second Bridge.” He mentioned it in a Facebook posting last weekend, mentioned Alligator and Ed Scheller and Dick’s sister, Frances “Pud”
Joines, the no-nonsense woman who helped run the place. After reading Leon’s Facebook reminiscence, I called him.
“Let’s drive down there,” I urged. He thought about it but finally decided an afternoon trek from Winedale to this Wharton County village 50 miles southwest of Houston was probably too much for a 94-year-old. Although Peter and I would have loved the company, it’s probably for the best. Alligator’s long gone and so is Scheller. So are Dick and Pud. And so is their community gathering place on Glen Flora’s main street (pretty much its only street). Ghosts and echoes inhabit the high-ceilinged brick building that Leon fondly remembers.
Fond memories
Like many small Texas towns barely hanging on a century or so after their founding, the little farming community midway between Wharton and Egypt was an ambitious place in its early years. A group of Pennsylvania Dutch investors laid out Glen Flora in 1900 and named it for a nearby plantation. The investors, looking to grow sugar cane, were drawn by the rich river soil, proximity to the navigable Colorado and the newly laid Cane Belt Railroad from Eagle Lake to Bay City. Sugar cane would eventually play out, but cotton and vegetable crops kept the little town prosperous for decades.
“It started going downhill in the ’50s,” Tom Joines told us Wednesday afternoon as we stood in the middle of Bridge Street. “Back when I was growing up, I’d say between three and four hundred people lived here. We had a carnival that came through here every year, had a school. All these downtown buildings were occupied.”
Joines — Pud Joines was his great-aunt — has lived in Glen Flora his whole life. He was a farmer until the late 1970s, when he left the rice field for the oil field. He has fond memories of Scheller’s Place and his greataunt. “Somebody got outta line, she could get salty pretty quick,” he said.
He also remembers how she could cook, as did Leon. “Mrs. Scheller (Dick) and Pud serve a meal meant for a man who has spent the day following a mule in a cotton patch,” he wrote.
Leon recalled going into Scheller’s thinking he’d have a hamburger but then sitting down to “steak cooked to forkcutting tenderness in rich gravy. Black-eyed peas with big sweet onions and hot tomato relish. Enough mashed potatoes to fill a dishpan. Hot corn bread and Jersey butter. All this is washed down with home-churned buttermilk that has a soporific effect on the consumer, causing him to walk short-stepped and humped over, like a stove-up bronc rider, out back of Scheller’s Place to stretch in the shade of a big oak and wonder what the poor folks are doing today.”
Curiosities on display
Scheller’s regulars got used to seeing strange and interesting artifacts Ed Scheller collected and displayed on shelves along the wall opposite the heavy old bar. One was a local woman’s appendix, pickled in alcohol.
“None of the regular customers considered this to be in poor taste,” Leon wrote. “After all, as one of the domino players pointed out to me, it’s a handsome appendix and was removed by the most skillful and expensive of surgeons.”
They also got used to an alligator 6 feet long from snout to tail in a somnolent state near the wood-burning stove. Ed Scheller raised the gator from a baby. By day, Alligator soaked himself in a long metal water tray under the live oaks out back. At night, he slept in a section of comfortable wooden pipe Scheller had built for him.
“In winter, on chilly evenings when other citizens of Glen Flora go out and wrap their hydrants against the possibility of a freeze, Ed would go out and wrap Alligator up,” Leon wrote. “Tuck him all snug and tight into his wooden pipe.”
One night when a really cold freeze hit the Gulf Coast, Ed forgot. The next morning, in Leon’s words, “Alligator was exceptionally stiff.”
A distraught Ed carried him home like a mother clutching a child to her breast and laid him like a board by the fire. Kept him there for days, then weeks.
“I kept hoping he’d thaw out,” Ed told Leon. “But he never did.”
On the market
Scheller’s Place went the way of the gator in 1980. Trish Winkles, who runs an antique store called the Glen Flora Emporium in a venerable mercantile building across the street, hated to see the Scheller’s Place building deteriorate — originally a pharmacy, it was built in 1912 — so she and her first husband bought it at a tax auction in 1985. They did some necessary repairs but couldn’t decide what to do with it. Nearly 30 years later, she and her second husband opened a restaurant on the first floor and rented out the spacious apartment upstairs. They called the restaurant Scheller’s Place.
Sharon Joines, Tom’s wife, recalls that Winkles’ cooking was a match for Pud’s. Her steaks, seafood, pastries and crusty, hot bread with butter attracted a loyal following for lunch and dinner. There was only one problem: Winkles and her husband, who held down a day job at the South Texas Nuclear Plant in nearby Bay City, were working nearly 24 hours a day. After three years in business, they closed for good on Christmas Day, 2012.
The sturdy, brick building, with its large, inviting apartment upstairs and its old bar downstairs, is on the market. Winkles says she’s had three couples look at it so far, but no one’s made an offer. The lookers have been city folks drawn to Glen Flora’s peace and quiet. They imagine living upstairs and running a restaurant downstairs.
“I would love to see it as a restaurant,” Winkles says, hoping that diners and day-trippers also would drop by her antique store and flea market across the street.
I didn’t mention it to Winkles, but I know a fellow who would love to have it. “If I were 30 years younger, I’d buy that building and try to turn it back into my favorite country saloon in Texas,” Leon mentioned the other day. “I did a lot of work in that place. I called it work anyway.”