Remembering Max Allen, bartender extraordinaire.
We’re drinking my friend to the end of a brief episode
So make it one for my baby
And one more for the road
— “One for My Baby” (Johnny Mercer/Harold Arlen)
Maxwell E. Allen Jr. was a certified legend.
His name used to come up often during beer-side conversations at the Public House, but now he’s been gone for 22 years, spirited away by heart disease in March of 2000 at the ridiculously young age of 60.
These days only the older bar regulars might recall meeting him. The problem is that too many of these patrons are no longer with us, either.
I found myself thinking about Max after mentioning his name amid a consideration of folkways, foodways and beerways. If a high resolution image can be found, I’d love to honor his memory with a framed photo somewhere in Pints & Union.
Knowing that on widely scattered occasions, I can be a stubborn cuss when compelled to plant my heels in the primordial muck of our Falls of the Ohio flood plain and defend the proposition that we can’t know where we’re going without some idea of where we’ve been, it strikes me as vital that Max’s life and work be remembered.
Consequently, it is my ongoing pleasure to continue writing and talking about Max — just so everyone else doesn’t forget, because trust me, I never will.
Max was a full-time, professional bartender, best known for his quarter-century stint at the legendary Hasenour’s Restaurant at Barret & Oak in Louisville, which was followed by a coda of sorts at the Seelbach Hotel downtown, where his father had tended bar many years before.
I seem to recall an interlude between gigs at Hasenour’s, during which Max started a small engine repair business or something similar. He seemed to be good at it, but unfulfilled. Max was a “people person,” and as jovial and friendly a man as you’d ever hope to meet. He seldom was seen in public without a broad smile on his face, and maintained a vast repertoire of ice-breaking jokes and tales.
Max introduced himself to me one evening in the early 1980s. He came into Scoreboard Liquors, proceeded to the bourbon section and stood intently for the longest time, studying the labels, not that we had a large selection in the first place.
When Max finally asked me a question about one of them, I readily conceded...Read more