World's longest-serving bartender pouring strong at 96

ALPENA, Mich. — Take a narrow highway west, away from the big city, past the tractor show being staged by a barn, until you see the little white shack set between the trees and the fields of the north Michigan countryside.

If it’s Friday night, this is the place to be around here.

“You drive by the outside and you don’t think it’s much,” said Lee Cousineau, 77, a longtime customer nursing a glass of beer on a warm August evening. “But you get in here, it’s everything.”

This is the 91-year-old Maplewood Tavern, an authentic, back-road honky-tonk where the farmers and field hands of the area have come for years to unwind with a drink after their work is done and the sun starts dropping.

If you think the bar offers a shot of history, wait until you hear about the bartender.

Clarise Grzenkowicz is 96, owns the Maplewood and serves drinks every day. She started working here in 1940 and never stopped. Guinness says that’s a world’s record.

“We’ve had a lot of people come out just to meet me,” she said. “It’s unreal.”

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The bar itself isn’t much different than it was when she started serving up cold ones. The wooden dance floor is original. The old-style country music played by the band is the same. And couples cling to the kinds of hand-holding dance steps their parents and grandparents embraced.

“Strangers come in because they just kind of drove by and saw the place, and then they find out that she is in the Guinness Book of World Records,” said Erma Nehring, who is 70 yet still calls her bartender “mom” with mathematical justification. “Can you imagine being behind that bar for 76 years and she’s still serving drinks?”

If people are fond of the bartender, they’re deeply in love with her bar, a summertime tradition around here since before its customers were born.

“When you live here your whole life and it’s always been here, you take it for granted,” said Shirley Dietlin, 71, a regular who drives over from nearby Alpena. “You don’t understand that this place is special until people come in from somewhere and say ‘This doesn’t happen all over.’ ”

Family tradition

The Maplewood was built in 1924 by local resident Henry Cadarette during the depths of Prohibition, and named for the forest of maples in the midst of which it was planted.

No alcohol meant that it operated strictly as a dance hall, and the only beverage served here was pop. Patrons paid a quarter to get on the dance floor for three songs performed by a live band. Most were local, but some bands came from as far away as Detroit to play what was billed as the largest dance floor in northeast Michigan.

The ban on booze didn’t stop people from having a stiff drink out in the parking lot. “Things were being sold outside,” Clarise admits. Once Prohibition ended the bar got a beer and wine license, and it's been a tavern ever since.

Clarise married the son of the Maplewood’s founder, also named Henry, and the two took over when his dad died in 1940. She was only 21 and she was suddenly helping run a business along with her family’s farm. And when her husband died in 1964, she was left to run it on her own.

For years she lived with her family in the quarters in back, raising her children, watching whole lifetimes play out before her in the bar.

“I’ve seen three generations at least,” she said. “Maybe four.”

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When she looks back on 96 years and her life’s noteworthy moments, she doesn’t mention big events or life-changing milestones, but rather the little everyday pleasures, the company of friends and family, the simple elements of life.

“Oh, we had good years,” she said. “We used to go vacationing quite a bit. We actually went to Clawson, Michigan, near Detroit! My nephew lived there. And we bought a new car. We bought a ’75 Chrysler Cordoba and made a trip to California. It was very good. That was a very nice trip.”

She was twice married and twice widowed, and now lives with her stepson. Her son or daughter pick her up and take her to work every day, and her son drives her to Florida during the winter.

"I don’t drive anymore,” Clarise said. “Because I’d be a menace on the road.”

The hours here are unusual — from 3 to 6 p.m. on weekdays, longer on weekends when there’s live music.

Her son Henry became part owner not long ago, though it’s ownership in name only. “I don’t say nothing,” said the 67-year-old. “I just let her do whatever she wants to do, and I just repair things.”

He recently put new shingles on the roof, put fresh white siding outside and made a bandstand out of dozens of vintage guitars hung from the walls and strung from the ceiling, creating a cave of instruments and giving the old bar new life.

The first thing most people ask his mom is why she hasn’t retired. She tells them the day she retires is the day she dies.

“This is what she loves to do,” said Carole Cadarette, Clarise's 73-year-old daughter. “She’s not happy unless she’s here. And she’s here and she opens this place here every day except Sunday, and we let her do that because that’s what keeps her going.”

Clarise said it was a more practical matter — there just aren’t many other options for a 96-year-old.

“I still don’t want to retire,” she said. “What am I going to do at my age?”