During the 1950’s and 60’s,
my parents, Harry and Helen Wiener, owned the Round Bar, which was
located on the northeast corner of Frelinghuysen Avenue and Miller
Street, south of the downtown area and not far from the large New
Jersey DMV facility, which, to my recollection, did not exist then.
Miller Street School, however, did stand right across the street.
I suppose that in many places today, a public school would not be
located directly across the street from a bar, but this was the
case at that time.
At some point, and I am not certain when, my father changed the
name of the bar to the Wagon Wheel, which featured live country
and western music, a genre that my father loved but that my mother
didn’t care for at all. She referred to it as “your
father’s cowboy music” and not without some resentment,
if not contempt. The Wagon Wheel may have been the only establishment
that featured live country music in the Newark area during that
era, but I cannot say this for certain. As a child, I remember finding
the extensive mailing list that my father used for advertising his
special jamborees, and it included customers from all over New Jersey,
which was mostly rural during that time, even though most people
today don’t believe me when I say this. Many of his customers
came from small “country” towns throughout New Jersey
with names that were completely unknown to me. Being the geography
nut that I have always been, I used to spend hours researching these
unfamiliar places on one of the state highway maps that were freely
distributed by gas stations everywhere.
My father’s customers not only came from all over the state
to see and hear the Wagon Wheel’s live country and western
music but from all over the country too. Located near what may have
been Newark’s only interchange of the recently built New Jersey
Turnpike, the Wagon Wheel also attracted truckers from all over
the country who mostly learned about my father’s place by
word of mouth. All four walls of the bar were covered with huge,
stained, wooden plaques that listed the neatly hand painted names
and hometowns of every visiting trucker, hailing from nearly every
state in the country.
While I believe that most of the musicians were local to the area,
Roy Clark did appear at the Wagon Wheel before he became an international
television sensation. Even though country music was not his genre,
Frankie Valli also performed at the Wagon Wheel before he and his
group, the Four Seasons, achieved worldwide fame. Coincidentally,
after my father retired from bar ownership, he tended bar at the
lounge of the Four Seasons Bowling Alley, whose name the famous
group decided to adopt for itself, located on Route 22 in nearby
Union, where I spent most of my childhood. Although Connie Francis
lived just over the tracks from the Wagon Wheel in the Ironbound
Section of Newark before her family moved to Belleville, I can’t
say that she performed at my father’s place. I wish that I
could. Who’s sorry now? I am!
When the neighborhood changed and became less safe for my father’s
customers, the Wagon Wheel was forced to close. Many years later
when I attended the Rutgers Graduate School of Management, which
was not very far away, I passed the site of the Wagon Wheel at the
northeast corner of Frelinghuysen and Miller. All that I found in
its place was the burned out shell of a building. Only the memories
endure.
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