"Bud Clark is Serious" - Remembering Portland’s Most Famous Publican
Bud Clark in 2017.
The most famous barman in a pretty famous beer city died last week, and the two aren’t entirely separable. Bud Clark owned the Goose Hollow Inn, his second Portland tavern, which he acquired in 1967 and ran until his death. (In later years with help from his daughter.) The obituaries mentioned his bar, but as a public figure he was more famous as the colorful and surprisingly effective mayor of Portland from 1985-1992. In fact, bar owner wasn’t even the second item on his list of high-visibility accomplishments. That would be the publicity stunt he ran as a neighborhood organizer in the late 1970s. Dressed like a vagrant, Clark opened his trenchcoat to a well-known downtown statue. Posters of the work, titled “Expose yourself to art,” were wildly popular—by the time he ran for mayor, people had bought a quarter million of them.
But that third item—bar owner for his last sixty years—is who Clark was. “This Goose Hollow Inn is my legacy,” he told OPB in characterizing his own impact. He lived a full and rich life, bicycling Portland’s streets and canoeing its rivers, organizing neighbors, raising children and looking over grandchildren, but the throughline was that modest tavern a quarter mile from the high school he attended on the western fringe of downtown.
I had the wonderful opportunity to interview Clark for The Widmer Way in 2017, and the history of Portland, his own life, and his bars were blended so completely they became a single story. It started, almost unbelievably, early in the Kennedy administration. When he got into pub ownership in 1961, he had to find a place to buy. Bars were still regarded as public dangers and Portland limited the number of licenses. “In those days, you couldn’t get a new liquor license,” he told me. “You had to get one that had been given up.” The bar he called Spatenhaus was on the site the current Keller Fountain in a city none of us would recognize now. It was near the old I-5 freeway and on the southern end of a much smaller, rougher town. It was considered a blighted area of town into which office workers from the financial district who would swing by for a drink after work. Nearby Portland State was only fifteen years old and evolving into a four-year college in 1961 (and called Portland State College at the time).
The famous “Expose Yourself to Art” photo.
In the first age of urban planning, the city’s brand-new Portland Development Commission chose the blocks for urban renewal, and Clark lost his lease on Spatenhaus in 1967. In a turn of good fortune, he was able to buy the bar he’d wanted back in 1961, then called Ann’s Tavern. His move to politics was partly motivated by the changes that happened in south downtown, and he began activities that would lead to a political career, including joining his neighborhood association and helping found a neighborhood newspaper.
In terms of the bar business, he had an offbeat approach there as well. The Blitz-Weinhard brewery was in wort-smelling distance (almost), so it’s no surprise he sold a lot of it. But Bud had ideas about making Goose Hollow more interesting than the typical corner Portland bar. “Eastern beers were higher-cost, so I put in Budweiser and Michelob.” (For old-time Portlanders, “back east” referred to anything on the other side of the Rockies.) “We sold 180-200 kegs a month out of here. A-B told us we sold the most beer per square foot of any tavern they knew of.”
That relationship wouldn’t last. By the 1970s was becoming a grassroots player in Portland politics. He had a political mind (bog standard for a publican), and A-B raised his ire. “I threw Budweiser out over the California bottle bill vote in 1980. They were advertising against the bill and I thought that was wrong.” Fortunately, another high-end product was coming on the market—“microbrews.” Redhook was the first draft product in the Northwest, and Bud put it on tap. “We were the first to have Redhook on tap,” he told me—and by then the Horse Brass’ Don Younger had passed, so I couldn’t fact check him. Either way, the Goose Hollow was one of the pioneers.
Barman Mayor
The political became more personal by the 1980s as Clark edged closer to throwing his hat in the ring, and the Goose Hollow Inn was at the center of his plans. “This tavern is what got me elected,” he told me, and that’s how I remember it. Bars may have been well-trafficked in the 1980s, but they were still disreputable. In 2022, owning a bar would be a major political plus, but it wasn’t in the ‘80s. Clark, earthy and straightforward, ran as a proud barman when he unexpectedly jumped in the 1984 mayoral campaign against incumbent Frank Ivancie. Politicos treated it as good fun because Bud was such a character. The idea that someone from such a low station as saloon-owner would run for office was good for a laugh, but no one took his candidacy seriously.
As his campaign got going, though, they started to take it more seriously—sort of. In their endorsement of Clark’s candidacy before the primary, Willamette Week told readers that voting for Bud would force Ivancie to debate him and defend his policies. It didn’t seemed to occur to them he might win. He did, though, with 54% of the vote, ending Ivancie’s career and shocking the political establishment.
They should have paid closer attention to how Bud was running. His was an unconventional campaign, but thanks to his tavern, he had deep and broad support in the community. Listening to Bud, it was fascinating to hear how he tapped into his decades-old tavern network to win. He didn’t follow the typical route of raising money and waging a media war; instead, he identified people who hadn’t worked in politics and weren’t reliable voters, and turned them into an army. He clearly relished the confluence of his two loves, politics and the Goose Hollow, as he described his campaign.
“I was sitting in this booth [the one in the photo at the top of the post] and I sat down with Margaret Strong, after I said I was going to run, and for about two hours she told me how to run a campaign. All the volunteers came out of the tavern. They went door-to-door for me.”
He described how this worked. “I’d go up to Lombard Street and Foster and Sandy to the taverns and talk to the people. That’s the working class neighborhoods, and they’d always go to the taverns on Saturdays.”
“We made this button that says, ‘Bud Clark is serious.’ It doesn’t say I’m runnin’ for mayor or anything. The idea is, people read that and they ask, ‘What does that mean?’ and you tell ‘em you’re runnin’ for mayor. That was the marketing idea. So anyway, we have these pickle jars you get a lot of here and in taverns all over the city we set up these jars and took donations for the Bud Clark for Mayor campaign. This elderly couple would go around and collect the money and put in more buttons and so forth.”
“A lotta things happen in taverns, you know!” Clark said, laughing.
The Importance of Neighborhood Bars
Legacies are built in many different ways. Bud’s years as mayor visibly reshaped the city. The Goose Hollow Inn may have had a more subtle impact on the city, but it has become its own kind of instituion. For years even before he became mayor, the pub became the meeting place of the city’s political class. Then, in the early years of craft brewing, bars like the Goose Hollow were indispensable outposts for breweries desperately seeking to find customers. Four decades later, the Blitz-Weinhard brewery has shut down, craft breweries are part of a multi-billion dollar industry, and the Goose Hollow is still slinging pints.
You can also trace the warp and weft of a city’s culture through bars. The Goose Hollow is tucked away in a sleepy pocket of the city, near the tony Multnomah Athletic Club on one side, but some gritty downtown streets on the other. When Bud bought the pub, the city was already an incubator for urban planning, and it would mature in later decades into a light-rail system that skirts the neighborhood. The light rail revitalized the corridor through which it snaked, and would lead developers to renovate nearby Civic Stadium, which became the home of the Portland Timbers. The barroom deals that city politicians used to hash out over cigarettes and pitchers of beer has become the pre-function destination for young, scarf-wearing soccer fans today.
On an early visit to the pub, Patrick and I raised an eyebrow when we saw this claim on the menu: “the best reuben on the planet!” In an American pub or diner, if you don’t see a claim for a world-famous something, you figure you’re dealing with amateurs. It doesn’t usually mean much. We ended the meal shaking our heads in admiration, though. If it’s not the best rueben in the world, it’s surely the best in Portland. How many people know that? A lot. And they’ve known it a long time. The Goose Hollow is one of those places every Portlander has to visit, at least once. It’s deeply embroidered into the DNA of the city. It is an unfolding nexus of Portland history, a pub and a landmark at once.
As legacies go, the Goose Hollow Inn, a modest, out-of-the-way neighborhood bar, is quite an impressive one. We lost one of the truly great Portlanders last week—a great mayor and civic leader. But we can also take heart knowing his pub is still there offering a place to go and toast his memory. Cheers, Bud—we’ll miss you.