HELENA - As temperatures dipped below minus 10 last Friday, the
crowd that frequents the downtown bars here at the start of most
weekends had noticeably thinned.
It wasn't hard to find a seat at the tap room of a local brewery
on Park Avenue, where elbow room is typically a luxury on a Friday
evening. Even the parking spaces on the street in this popular bar
area sat empty, looking like missing incisors in a gap-toothed
smile, as most people decided to stay home rather than brave the
weather.
The scene couldn't have been more different at the Windbag
Saloon and Grill, located in the downtown walking mall on
neighboring Last Chance Gulch.
The bar and restaurant was filled, as it usually is, with a
crowd of old and young, lobbyists and legislative aides, Democrats
and Republicans. They had come to eat dinner and drink away a
week's worth of politicking.
With its darkened rooms, lack of loud music and casual-dress
atmosphere, the Windbag has become nice place to have a quiet,
relaxing evening.
But it wasn't always that way.
"One year there were a bunch of Democrats," Lynn Fiegel, who has
worked at the Windbag for 16 years, recalled in an interview last
week. "Something had happened - a bill had passed or somebody has
just been elected in - but they were back there every 10 minutes
just pounding on the tables and screaming and yelling, and the rest
of the dining room was trying to have a nice dinner."
Fiegel and some other employees asked them to keep it down.
"That just added fuel to the fire," she said. "They were just
rowdier, yelling and screaming and laughing, and just drunk a
lot."
For more than two decades the Windbag has been a popular
destination both during and outside legislative sessions, and it's
not unusual to see a few well-known faces around the Capitol having
a drink there on a weeknight.
But what the Windbag is best known for is its unusual
history.
The restaurant once was a brothel. That establishment closed its
doors in 1973, one of the last brothels in the state to do so.
Pictures of the last madam, Dorothy Baker, hang on the wall in
the back of bar area and give the restaurant the name the locals
know it by, Big Dorothy's.
Owner Randy Beckner wasn't intimidated by the history when he
bought the bar in 1980.
If fact, he said, it added to the charm.
"This end of the gulch and this part of town, that was part of
the history," he said. "This was the red light district."
Baker ran the cleanest brothel in the state, or so local history
alleges. While the building still stands, little of the original
brothel remains. The rooms where prostitutes once dispensed their
services are now office spaces.
The building is also rumored to have been at one time a bowling
alley and a movie theater. It became a bar and restaurant in 1978,
with Beckner taking it over two years later.
The Windbag's clientele is a mix of locals, legislators,
lobbyists, Capitol reporters and tourists curious about the
building's colorful history.
The price of food is reasonable. A person can get a burger and
fries for under $10, and the drinks are the same price as most
other bars.
Beckner doesn't have any particular stories to tell about two
decades of running a bar during the Legislature. But he has noticed
a change in recent years in the types of crowds the sessions have
brought.
"More than anything, it's just not the raucous parties it used
to be," he said. "We literally used to count the days (until) the
Legislature was over."
Most the questions about the Windbag's history come during the
summer, when tourists visit the city, lured to the restaurant by
brochures and rumors they have heard.
Fiegel gets some ribbing from them as a woman working at the
bar, but she doesn't mind.
"The guys are like, 'Are you Big Dorothy?' 'Do you still have
rooms upstairs?,'" she said with a laugh. "So a little of
that."
The Windbag is located 19 S. Last Chance Gulch in the downtown
walking mall.
