Local Spirits: Three of Southern Colorado’s Best Neighborhood Taverns
by Holly Snow
Eiler’s, 326 E. Mesa, Pueblo
Just like Grandma intended, “It’s always been just a shot-and-a-beer bar,” says Joe Kocman, owner of Eiler’s, once the center of a Slovenian neighborhood.
In those days—the early twentieth century-- the scenes of the past may
have been something like this: The big front windows display the street, busy
with children playing. The smell of polish sausage and potica (pronounced
puh-TEET-suh
)
wafting through the open door, the sound of tamburitza dancing in the ears
of those who pass by. Over the music, the cheers of Pueblo’s minor league
team, the Walter’s Brewers, are heard as they fill the booths after
their practice across the street. Many times they came to Eiler’s
to drink beer with Joe’s father, their organizer, Rudolph “Moon”
Kocman. This small bar has not just been a
safe place to unwind, but has always been a home to the neighborhood people.
Had I grown up in a neighborhood like Bessemer, I would have been pleased to have a tavern like Eiler’s on my street. Converted to a tavern from an old grocery store in 1933, it is equipped with a vintage Pepsi cooler in the corner and the original booths, bar, and bar stools bolted to the floor. Owned now by Kocman and his wife Pam, it is the only bar in Pueblo to have been in the same family since Prohibition, he brags.
Four or five people sit at the bar loudly joking with the bartender. Pam tells me, “There are up to three or four generations of the same family that come to this neighborhood bar.” There are the new drinkers at age 21 and their grandfathers, up into their 80s, who drop by for a drink. The bar attracts even more visitors on the nights they bring in the live music of the button box accordions and the “tammies.” (The tamburica, or tamburitza , nicknamed “tammy,” is a Croatian stringed instrument that resembles a mandolin.) The walls of Eiler’s display photos of past convivial evenings next to recent pictures of people at some of the bar’s social events, intermixed with an old Walter’s Brewers uniform, and baseball and boxing pictures from the 1940s and 1950s collected from people in the neighborhood.
As I
get ready to leave, Joe picks up his jacket and shows me the design on its
back: A cartoon caricature of Grandma Pepper.
“She used to sit in a rocking chair in the front corner of the store,” Joe says. “She started the bar and ran it by herself until she was well into her 80s.”
If he has to change anything from the way Grandma used to do it, I am sure he’s going to make it worthwhile. She’s always watching over the bar, and to Joe she’s his trademark.
