Oh, and somehow, someway, Parr Ritter is responsible for this outrage!!!

I spent a lot of time in there, swilling Gin Bombs and looking for romance pre-1979 and playing banjo and cornet sober, and also solving the world's problems, in later years. The Better Than Nothing Dirt Band, organized by Tribune columnist Robert T. Smith, a trumpet player, practiced every Tuesday evening in the old Wagon, and twice -- thanks to Smith's initiative and the good sportsmanship of our guest celebrity -- we were led by Minnesota Orchestra conductor Neville Marriner. Smith did a column on the first occasion, of course, and Marriner repeated the gig weeks later for a People Magazine photo shoot; our picture is in an August 1981 issue.
Word had it (I haven't confirmed this) that the owner of a nearby bar complained to the city that the Wagon had music without an entertainment license. The city sent an inspector, who reported back that we weren't entertainment.
One night in 1990 or '91, not long before the old place was torn down, a Hollywood crew was filming a scene for Alan Rudolph's "Equinox" in the vacant restaurant next door, which shared a wall with the Wagon's back room. An assistant director came over and informed us that we'd have to stop playing because they could hear us next door. The late Dan Byrne, guitarist, Hennepin County prosecutor and former newspaperman, said we had been practicing in that room weekly for 15 years and we would not stop. He negotiated a routine in which a film crew member with a walkie-talkie gave us the "cut" sign when cameras were ready to roll and the all-clear during filming breaks, when we'd pick up the tune right where we'd left off. At 8 p.m. the crew and cast, including star Matthew Modine, joined us for their dinner break. The assistant director promised us a credit for not playing, but I watched the film carefully and didn't see it.
The old Wagon had truly scrofulous restrooms in the basement, and sometime in the 1980s the owners built clean new ones upstairs. We inaugurated them with the Can Opener, organized by Smith, with Mayor Don Fraser cutting the ribbon (or something).
The beautiful back bar -- transplanted to the new Wagon -- includes a magnificent stained-glass half-dome canopy. It has a fringe with one darker, brownish-purple piece. The story goes that sometime decades ago there was a fight, a bottle was thrown and it broke a piece out of the fringe. A stained-glass company was called in to repair it, and after much difficulty and special ordering they were able to find glass that matched the color. Then they washed the canopy.
Many in the Dirt Band group also met for lunch at a table reserved for us by longtime waitress Helen. During daylight hours we regarded ourselves as the local equivalent of the Algonquin Roundtable; Strib Books Editor Dave Wood brought such guests as Jon Hassler and Gareth (Oliver Towne) Heibert; Bob Evans brought State Sen. George Pillsbury; we were joined occasionally by Minnesota House Speaker Bob Vanasek. Around 1990 we cooked up and published a small book, "Minnesotans Say the Darnedest Things." Mayor Fraser and TCF pitchman Bob Lurtsema officiated at Smith's retirement from the Star Tribune.
It wasn't too long after the Can Opener that plans for the Haaf Ramp led to the demolition of the old Wagon. The late Steve Alnes, sax player, song parodist and retired editorial page editor of the Minneapolis Star, called me at work and told me to look out the window, and I saw the front-ednd loader chewing on it. I had my cornet in the car and left my Strib newsroom desk to join Dave Wood, Alnes, Smith, Byrne and others next to the rubble -- the building, maybe a century old, came down very quickly. We played "Nearer My God to Thee" as a KARE-TV team taped us for the evening news. A brick from the old Wagon is incorporated in the hearth for the wood stove in our family room at my home.
The Dirt Band got together periodically for music and somewhat regularly for lunch at the new Wagon, but of course it wasn't the same. Now Dan Byrne, Steve Alnes, Allan Holbert, Dale Canfield, Gene Adams, Dwayne Kinney and faculty adviser Red Wolfe have passed away, Smith and some others are in deteriorating health, and the Wagon is a book-length set of memories. Thanks for reading all this.

As a reader looking in from the outside, I absorbed the stories of the "Wagon" with much pleasure.

But Parker, don't stop now...the Strib, media print ...all that's dying daily here needs to be so respectfully; joyously remembered.

However, the only one who got short press here was Helen...so tell us more short vignettes if you will. Entertain us and 'booklength' it in the process. Thanks again Mr Parker.

Will there ever be a WEB WAGON? I don't think so.

I suppose someone could organize a Wagon Facebook group, but it probably wouldn't be the same.

The roster of employees is fading somewhat in my memory, but I remember fast-talking, kindly Edna, who often served our roundtable; Darlene, who reminded me of a country-western singer; George the bartender; a very friendly but all-business waitress (what was her name?) who chased me down on the sidewalk once after I accidentally left without paying; Jimmy John Keeler and his twin brother, Johnny Jim, who tended bar under Bob and Olive Sorensen, the owners before Dan Mramor and Jerry Benda bought it in 1978.

A former Strib colleague and roommate, still working at the paper, urges me to share this: My bad old days coincided with the heyday of Boyko's Cadillac Bar, about 1973-75. I hope the statute of limitations protects the memory of the late Joe Boyko and all his patrons. Joe was a Star and Tribune printer who brought coolers of beer in the trunk of his 1967 Cadillac. After the Wagon closed at 1 a.m., we would gather around Joe's car in the Strib parking lot (former site of the Minneapolis Artificial Limb Co., incidentally, which stood there when I started on the copy desk in 1969). Most of us had worked until midnight and had had little decompression time after work, so we welcomed the opportunity to socialize over a beer, for which we reimbursed Joe. For those two or three summers, on nice nights, you'd find a couple dozen people from deputy managing editors to copy aides talking sports and politics, playing Botticelli, singing and trying to make time with the opposite sex until about 3 a.m. It was where I got acquainted with my wife, a U of M journalism student and Tribune copy aide at the time. We've been married almost 33 years now.

Doc Parker neglected to explain how a dozen or more people could stand in a well-lit parking lot openly consuming bottles of beer until near dawn. The policemen who cruised past on 4th Street had a vested interest in not busting up the parties: They were on their way to the newspaper's loading dock a block away to pick up a hot-off-the-presses Morning Tribune. If the cops had been foolish enough to mess with the open-air Cadillac Bar, their supply of freebie newspapers would have been cut off.

Thanks to all for sharing your recollections! Today's "cookie cutter" establishments that seem to pop up just about everywhere (think TGI Friday's, Applebee's, Chili's, etc.) lack (IMHO) the character and ambiance of locally-owned "mom and pop" establishments like the Little Wagon. Or the price.

It's not just the "cookie cutter" eating and drinking establishments that are taking over. The Strib itself has become just another "cookie cutter" newspaper with no distinct voice - seeking, much too hard, to be all things to all people and ending up being nothing to anyone.

The current owners having nothing short of moronic levels of debt on the books will eventually pull the plug, refusing to sell it to anyone else, lest success at the hands of new management/ownership make them look like the failures they, so clearly, are.

I, myself, have such fond memories of the good old days when the Strib was worth something (all the way back to my first job - delivering the Tribune door-to-door every morning in the small town where I was growing up).

I also have very fond memories of a bar with a similar spirit: Adrian's Tavern (4812 Chicago Ave South), which became my very reasonably priced standby for eating out when I suddenly became a single parent with two growing, hungry, sons many years ago. Good food, good beer, reasonable prices, wonderful service and atmosphere.

The Wagon was like a clubhouse for the newsroom gangs of the Star and the Tribune, and later the Strib.

It's where you could go commiserate with your fellow reporters about how some nasty editor took your head off - and then, a few minutes later, tell that editor what you thought of them in nicer words. But only if they bought you a beer.

And great teaching of the craft occurred in those sessions. Until - sometimes - somebody's wife came down and fished them out of the place.

I also found Paul McEnroe one nite in the alley behind the Wagon pondering his life, and got him safely home. Did I do the right thing?

Nick, I think that happened in the Park Avenue lot, where another gang gathered for a while -- after the Whirlpool let out?

You were a good Botticelli player, but nobody could touch Lundegaard. Remember Missionary Crow? Aristo-fanes? Don Rondo?

Wonderful stories. I wasn't part of any of it, but, after reading them, I wish I had been.

Molly Ivins was a Little Wagon regular when she was the Tribune's police reporter in the late 1960s.

A favorite Wagon moment occurred quite a few years ago, before Coors had become a national brand.
A Tribune copy editor escorting some out-of-town visitors, brought them to lunch at the Wagon. One of the visitors asked a waitress "Do you have Coors here?"
"Well, yeah," she said. "But they don't bother anybody."

DeeAnn Christensen: Good point! Someone call Peg Meier and wake her up! Catherine Watson, are you in town? Sue Peterson, step up to the plate!

Pam Kelly, you triggered one more memory from me somehow. Maybe the connection is longevity: I worked at the T(St)rib 37.5 years. Maybe it's that "we were the only people still going there" to the new Wagon. The last time I saw Allan Holbert was at lunch in the front room there. In a stroke of good luck, Phil Schrader happened by and joined us. To digress (oh, no...), Phil is a PR man who played harmonica (the Philharmonic) with the Dirt Band. It was at a Schrader family party that the band was named. Phil asked his father, "How did you like the music?" His dad replied. "Well, it was better than nothing."

But the focus here is the late Allan Holbert, who died a couple years ago. He was the Tribune's music critic when I started at the paper, a respected writer with journalism and music degrees from the University of Nebraska and Columbia University. He was keen on traditional jazz and did a major Tribune story in 1966 when the Hall Brothers New Orleans Jazz Band opened their Emporium of Jazz in Mendota. (The Hall Brothers band and the Emporium were included in the Minnesota Historical Society's MN150 exhibit in 2008, recognizing 150 entities that helped shape Minnesota in its first 150 years.) In the early 1970s Holbert married Jill Irvine, Sally Ordway's daughter, and I remember seeing them at the Wagon, and their matching Mercedeses parked outside. Alas, it didn't last. A few years later, after the Dirt Band got going, Holbert was a semi-regular, and during the Strib strike in 1980 he pulled some of us together and formed the Reggie Hacksenflax (half newspaper hacks, half PR flacks) Society Dance Band, which practiced at the Wagon on Wednesdays. We played many gigs in the 1980s, including five at the Emporium and, in 1988, as the official band for the 50th anniversary of the Pig's Eye Sewage Treatment Plant.

Getting involved with Holbert and fellow journalists Jim Fuller, Dick Caldwell, Bob Watson, Ron Schara and Dave Wood was the equivalent of an advanced dcegree in music appreciation for me. Rest in peace, Allan.

Nick Coleman’s statement about Joe’s Cadillac Bar are unfounded. Like Dick Parker said, there were other groups. Joe ran a very tight ship. When someone got out of hand he would cut them off for a week. If he caught someone buying them a beer, they would be cut off for a week. I was at the Strib from 1971-2004. The demise of the Cadillac Bar came one winter day when Joe wrote a letter to the Strib attorney, John Dennison, asking permission to use space in the Freeman building for his venture. Up until then they were able to ignore what was going on. Now that Joe officially called it to their attention, the Typographical Union, which Joe was a member of, was asked to put a stop to it, before any legal action was taken. This “of-the-record” meeting took place at the Little Wagon. As were many other “Off-the-record” meetings.
As president of the local Typographical Union and a composing room member, I can say that many union contracts were settled over a drink, or two, at the Little Wagon before going back to the bargaining table for the “Official” negotiations. Many “In-house” issues were talked over at the Wagon and carried over to the Cadillac Bar. Most of the time they were settled without the lawyers.
I don’t know if the reduced force of the Strib is responsible for the closing of the Wagon or if the drinking at the wagon is responsible for the demise of the Strib. Could be if the management spent more time at the Wagon, they would have learned how to run a newspaper successfully.
A little more about the Cadillac Bar. When Joe Boyko went into the hospital I ran the bar for two weeks because he didn’t want anyone to get used to going somewhere else. That’s when I realized how a printer could afford two Cadillacs. Selling up to ten cases of beer a night at .50 cents a bottle, he made lots of money while providing a service.
My wife, Nancy, (not a Strib employee) would join us, at Joe’s, many times. We would joke about getting an apartment above the Little Wagon when our kids were grown. Then we could go from work to the Little Wagon, to Boyko’s and back home without driving. About two years after I quit drinking (for obvious reasons) we drove by and both started laughing because the Little Wagon was a one story building without any apartments.