Bowersox's road to reality TV began in a tiny Toledo tavern
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"American Idol" contestant Crystal Bowersox has the backing of people in the Toledo, Ohio, bars where she used to play.
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TOLEDO, Ohio -- What makes an American Idol most?
A great story? A great talent?
To understand the phenomenon that is, or will be, Crystal Bowersox, to trace the roots of this 24-year-old Midwestern singer -- from microscopic rural patches of northwest Ohio to Chicago train platforms where she busked for tips, from the dingiest old-man dives to the glare of "American Idol," where she now stands a real shot at winning, or at least walking away a freshly minted star -- to assemble the pieces that come together in a bluesy growl that transcends pop novelty altogether, to understand why an everyday, small-town bar musician with few prospects has most of this depressed area rallying around her: Begin at Papa's Tavern.
Papa's is on the East Side, on the side that looks like the Toledo that people who are not from Toledo imagine Toledo looks like -- that is, until the economy collapsed, and the rest of Toledo began to look like the East Side of Toledo. Papa's rests in the center of a blue-collar neighborhood, within a row of squat houses, a 70-year-old bar so tucked away that people who have lived here all their lives have never heard of it.
Ms. Bowersox started here.
It is a place so unchanged that a chunk of cardboard pulled from a beer case and signed by dozens of returning Vietnam vets still hangs on a pillar, a makeshift POW-MIA tribute from the 1970s.
A place so unchanged that at the back of the urinals in the men's room you can still find a "Hanoi Jane" sticker, with Jane Fonda's stoic expression at the center of a bull's-eye. A place so unchanged the lovely caramel-candy color of its tin ceiling is actually decades of accumulated nicotine, so thick the bar once brought in folks to scrub it off, but the hue was so ingrained everyone gave up after a few hours. A place so unchanged that on a Tuesday afternoon every stool at the bar is occupied and nearly everyone is smoking, the state ban on cigarettes in bars and taverns more of a quaint suggestion than a law.
First Published May 3, 2010 12:00 am
