Well it was the bar in Raleigh. When I got here in '67
it was the first place I went and had a beer,
so it's like a legend. It's been around forever.
It's always been a very eclectic place where
you'll walk in and there'll be a plumber sitting there drinking a PBR
on Friday afternoon and at the next table the governor's sitting there
or the mayor, dressed up, eating an early dinner to go to the symphony,
and everybody gets along. It's always been like that.
But I worked there my senior year in the kitchen,
the year I was student body president, for Bernie Hanula, and Mickey, who owned the place.
It was always funny because Bernie thought it was just really cool. People would come in
and he would go drag me out of the kitchen and say, "Can you believe I got the student body president making pizzas back here?"
He just did that all the time.
But I loved Bernie and Mickey and it was just a great place.
I never thought about owning a bar
and a restaurant but the guy who bought it after him,
from him, Pete Jarrell,
Pete had never been in the hospitality business
and it was a struggle for him and it started going downhill
and a new person bought the building and tripled his rent,
and it wasn't doing very well anyway. It was in bad shape.
He called me up and said, you know I've got people who want to buy it
but they want to change the whole thing and just bastardize the name
because it's a brand. People know the Players' Retreat. I mean it's been there for sixty-one years.
He said, "I would rather close it than let that happen, but I know you love this place so much that you would make sure it stayed the PR,
so I want you to buy it." I said, "I'm not interested in buying it."
So he said, "No, you want to buy it." I said, "No. I ain't got any money and no interest." He said, "You don't know what the deal is yet." I said, "I don't care what the deal is."
Finally he tells me the deal
and I, quote, said, "Why the ____ are you doing this to me? I mean come on."
And he said, "Because I know you'll keep it," so he pretty much gave it to me.
I bought it with my heart, not my head.
I got in there and every piece of equipment in there was
old as it could be, falling apart, had been held together with baling wire.
The air conditioner in the kitchen didn't work and I didn't know it because I bought it in November when I didn't need it.
The first three years, four years, I was spending sixty, eighty hours there.
It greatly interfered with my law practice. I still was able to do it, I was just killing myself work wise.
And we've turned it around. I mean it had six employees when I got there; we have fifty-six employees now.
It's doing really, really well. I've got a great Johnson & Wales graduate chef who studied two years in France
and had two restaurants of his own. He's probably one of the best chefs in North Carolina.
He's an old friend of mine and he's in there cooking, and it's just doing great.
We're still a big part of the university.
We do-. Elliott Avent, when the baseball team was flying off to go play in the regionals
at Florida their last dinner was at the PR that night and then they went out and got on the plane and flew down to play,
so I get all the coaches in there. The chancellor's in there all the time
and his wife, of course not as much since they moved him over there in the boonies at the new place.
He can't walk across the street at 11:00 and get a PBR anymore like he used to do.
But it's just an important part of North Carolina history and NC State history
so I'm just glad we were able to save it.