It Paid to Advertise

The distinctive front windows of the Bearded Bros.,
black lights and Dayglo-painted panels (1969).

As the doorway into show business opened for me, 50 years ago, I entered gladly. At the time I had a sales job I was itching to quit. What I wanted was to be a cartoonist/writer and eventually a filmmaker. So serving sandwiches and beer in a Fan District dive then seemed like a step in that direction. At least more so than continuing to sell janitorial supplies.

Thus, when a friend, Fred Awad, offered me work at the restaurant he was operating my coat-and-tie job was history. Actually, my coming aboard as a bartender/manager was part of a larger plan we had cooked up to convert what was then a typical blue collar neighborhood beer joint/eatery into the Fan Distict's most happening night club.

The restaurant belonged to Fred's parents, who wanted to retire. Toward that goal, they had turned it over to their sons, Fred and Howard. The brothers changed the name of the place from Marconi's to the Bearded Brothers. It was located on the southeast corner of Allison St. and West Broad St.

Growing beards was easy, but as it happened the Awad boys couldn’t agree on how to run the business, so the younger brother, Howard, left to pursue the quest of opening a place of his own.

In a series of conversations Fred and I had talked ourselves into believing the fun-loving baby boomers in the Fan District needed a place to enjoy cold beer, hot food, live music and a psychedelic light show. That, together with the edgy spectacle of go-go girls on stage -- dancing topless. At this time, in 1969, such "dancing" was going on in Roanoke. But it had yet to make its way to Richmond.

And, speaking of booming babies, at this time my wife, Valerie, was six months pregnant. Fred’s wife, Mary Ann, was seven months along. So while Fred and I were brimming over with youthful confidence that the new scheme for the restaurant would pay off, in truth, it was under pressure to do so right away.

It took us a couple of weeks to paint the walls of the interior flat black and build the stage for the dancers and light show apparatus. We also painted the front window panes that faced Broad Street in Dayglo colors illuminated by black lights. While I did most of the window painting, a handful of volunteers also painted a few of the panes. 

Fred booked a couple of local rock ‘n’ roll bands. They performed maybe three or four nights a week, and that went over well as the '60s wound to its conclusion. As we had planned, the live music immediately brought in a fresh nighttime crowd. A four-man group calling itself Natural Wildlife became a regular attraction.Then it came time to hire the go-go dancers. So a help-wanted sign went up in the restaurant.

A few young women came in asking about the dancing job. Eventually, we settled on two. One of them had some go-go girl experience, the other didn’t. But only the dancer new to the exhibitionism trade could be there for the first night, which we advertised in the local newspaper. The ad art was my work; it featured a pen-and-ink rendered silhouette of a female dancer and a new Bearded Bros. logo I had designed.

By 8 p.m. the place was packed, wall-to-wall. We were selling beer like never before. The only problem was that our featured dancer with her new sequinned costume, which included tasseled pasties to cover her nipples (Alcohol Beverage Control Board regulation), was scary late. She hadn’t called, either.

With the crowd clamoring for the promoted dancing aspect of the show to get underway, a woman with a sculpted hairdo, wearing shades (at night), waved to get my attention. As the joint was noisy, I motioned to her to come around to the end of the bar I was behind. In a what was maybe a Queens accent, she asked something like, “Do you need another dancer?”

Trying to hide my pure glee, I called Fred over. She told us she had noticed the Bearded Bros. ad in a discarded newspaper on the counter of the Greyhound bus station’s coffee shop. She claimed she had been dancing in a club in Baltimore. She was chewing gum. Fred promptly offered her $50 to alternate sets with the other dancer.  

That night’s experience gave me new faith in the power of advertising. The Greyhound Girl even had her costume with her in her suitcase. Fred paid her in advance and suggested that since the other woman was running late, she could go on right away.

It all went over like gangbusters. Up on stage, with the lights and music, she danced like the pro she actually was. Natural Wildlife was cooking and the beer taps stayed open.

After the dancer’s first set was over, she put on a robe and found Fred and me behind the bar. She laughed, “There ain’t no other girl, is there?”

Either Fred or I probably said, “Hey, we don’t know where she is.”

“I’ll need another fifty bucks to go back up there,” is about what she said ... firmly.

The money was put in her hand without hesitation. She agreed to do two more 20-minute sets. Yes, a hundred bucks was a lot of money for about an hour's worth of work, then, but there was no use in quibbling.

After that night we never saw her again. Other women were hired, pronto. The show went on. 

It became my duty to paint the dancers with Dayglo paint. I painted vines curling around their arms and legs, stars and stripes on their torsos, etc. Yet, after a few weeks of that, it seemed the most vocal of the customers didn't care much about the artsy aspects of topless dancing, such as they were. They preferred bare skin. So, the Laugh-In-style body decorating stopped.

Although painting the dancers was a pleasant enough task, hanging out after work was the best perk of the Bearded Bros. job (which wasn't always paying me as much as I needed to make each week). Frequently friends, some of them musicians, stayed around late, jamming, smoking pot and playing pinball games. The most notable of the musicians who passed through was Bruce Springsteen, whose band occasionally played in Richmond then. He was a skinny, quiet guy who didn’t stand out as much then as he would later.

When my daughter was born in January the Bearded Bros. scene was lively. Then, as the weather warmed up, the crowds began to thin out. Other clubs opened up offering live music, some of which were closer to VCU. Gradually, the restaurant began to drift back toward being what it had been before it had been painted black.

The restaurant's daytime crowd of regulars from the neighborhood didn't always mix well with the hippies coming in at night for the music. Then the topless angle turned out to be mostly a fad that sort of clashed with both crowds. So it was discontinued.

In the spring I had to look for a real job again. After short runs at a couple of forgettable jobs, I landed a sales position at WRNL AM/FM. Richmond Newspapers still owned the two radio stations then. Once again, I learned it paid to advertise. And, on that job I did my first professional writing, when I began penning commercials and dreaming up promotions for my advertising clients.

Eventually, Fred's mother took the restaurant back over. About a year later Howard Awad opened up Hababa's on the 900 block of W. Grace St., where he had a lot of fun making large money (1971-84) serving cold beer and playing canned music on his popular bar’s monster sized stereo.

In the years to come topless dancing morphed into a creepy form of entertainment aimed at an entirely different audience. A narrow audience. Truth be told, since the time of the Bearded Brothers I've never had any interest in the places that feature that form of entertainment.

Although I saved copies of the aforementioned newspaper ad, the logo I did for Natural Wildlife their cards and handbills, etc., I haven't seen any of that stuff in a long time. The only remaining souvenirs from my initial stumble into show biz are a few black and white photographs, like the shot above of the Bearded Bros. distinctly 1969 front windows,.

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