Liberty Bar

The Liberty Bar began in a bookstore. In the spring of 1960, the year I graduated from high school, I had an epiphany at my uncle Clyde’s drugstore in Pampa, Texas. I was sitting on a chrome stool at the end of the marble soda fountain counter drinking a cherry limeade and idly rotating the wire paperback book rack. I stopped at a cover with a hand drawn yellow title, THE BEATS over a black and white photograph of a bearded bespectacled man in a white shirt with his sleeves rolled back, leaning forward, apparently explaining something, under a painting that appeared to be scribbles and scratchmarks.