Posted on 05/12/2025 11:16:10 PM PDT by thecodont
For more than half a century, there was just one place on the UC Berkeley campus where you’d run into 20-year-old Aaron Rodgers rocking a bowl cut, see a stand-up set from comedy legend Robin Williams or hear Grateful Dead icon Jerry Garcia perform live. The Bear’s Lair — Berkeley’s only on-campus pub — was both the only bar with beer dripping from the ceiling after a Jason Kidd-led Cal team shocked Duke in the NCAA Tournament and the only location that made any sense to drop off the torn-down goal post following the 2002 Big Game (I remember, because I was there).
For generations of Old Blues, it was, and forever will be, a core memory — whether it was where you went to “Beat the Clock,” first saw Oski drink out of a tube inserted into his eyeball or incredibly found your Nobel Prize-winning professor hosting office hours over pints.
“It was really a great part of my career,” says John Martin, who owned and operated Bear’s Lair from 2001 to 2011 and still owns Berkeley institutions Triple Rock and Jupiter. “There was a lot of history there. I remember they marched the goal post down to Bear’s Lair and presented it to us. So we hung it up, and over time, it was signed by players that were part of the team.”
There’s a case to be made that Bear’s Lair, named one of the 25 best sports bars in AMERICA by Sports Illustrated in 2005, is the most storied bar in Berkeley’s history.
And yet, all that history hasn’t been enough to make the university care much about its future.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Thanks for sharing this story. Normies never see our erasure coming, right up to the last instant. “I don’t get it, big Dan” as the life is clubbed out of us. ( O Brother, where Art Thou reference).
Hardly surprising they’d forget about a legendary bar on campus; it didn’t take them all that long to turn the Free Speech Movement upside down.
For decades, prior to the Bear’s Lair, there was the off-campus Kingfish where tens of thousands of pitchers must have been downed.
I have an oddly related story. At [college town in a midwest state] they have a successful shop that sells donuts. IMO their glazed is as good as any I've ever had, and it is there to this day. I am unsure of (if any) the legal/business connection there was to the original, but shops with the same name sprang up all around the nearby city. The investment must have been substantial; along with all of the remodeling and building, they even had an armored truck for promo deliveries.
I frequented our local shop in their chain, but there were problems. They didn't bake on-site; there was a central location that delivered. Far too often I would stop in to find they had little left, sometimes as early as 9:00 am. On one occasion I was told, "last day of school. We had a line out the door and were sold out of almost everything by 8:00."
Their inability to plan became routinely obvious. At one point I spoke to the manager. She sported a nose ring and hair that was blue on on side and pink on the other. The rest of the staff was similar in appearance, and service there was not bad, but never better than adequate. I asked if they tracked their daily donut sales so they could better anticipate how much to order from the baking center. She seemed to have no idea what I was talking about even after I politely explained it.
Shortly thereafter they began overstocking the location, presumably to stop having so many unsatisfied customers. But this backfired in the other direction. They had taught the community that they couldn't be counted on to provide donuts. Demand decreased at the same time supply went up and it took time for the public to realize they had become dependable. This meant too much unsold product each day. Their response? After 11:00 am everything was BOGO ... half price. They began teaching the public that if they waited until 11:00 they would be rewarded. Profitability was likely going away fast and they had backed themselves into a corner.
Blessing or curse, I cannot say, but covid arrived and they went from selling at (possibly) break even or less, to being open intermittently. The public was now learning that if you stop there it was no longer that you may have to settle for something different, you now went away with nothing for your trouble. The final straw was when the health department closed the local shop for an insect infestation. I am unsure if it was more widespread but they all went away. In all probability it was the covid that did them in. And truthfully, I cannot say if the other locations were different. But if they were not, I can't help but wonder if they would have survived if they were properly run.
Bottom line is that employees with "woke" ideology are significantly less likely to value and incorporate the qualities, both individually and organizationally, that make a business successful. And often those key qualities are not just ignored or dismissed, they are anathema to them.
Beat Cal !
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