Sixteen
clippings

Vi is born. She grows up in Seattle and teaches Sunday School at the Buckley Presbyterian Church.

Newly divorced and working at a Seattle meat plant, she decides to become a piano player — and can’t play. She teaches herself and takes the Skyroom at Boeing Field.

Bars in Juneau, St. Paul and St. Petersburg; record crowds at the Epicure in White Center; Diamond Jim’s; the Las Vegas lounges; the Rum House in Fort Lauderdale; Carnival cruise ships. Somewhere in there, a microphone.

Darby spots “a dumpy little bar” for sale in Buckley. They buy it, name it the 737 Main Pub, and form a two-woman entertainment team.

The Tacoma News Tribune runs the major profile: sold-out weekends, no drinking, no smoking, Don Rickles-style crowd work, and a midnight sing-along with the whole room standing.

She works the room every Friday and Saturday, and plays free shows for the DARE program, a veterans’ hospital, retirement homes and a children’s home. “I’m here as a servant, not as an ego maniac.”

Klipsun magazine profiles Vi at 68: 200 people a night, a sold-out crowd every weekend, and her own description of the bar as “a social service.”

Robert’s health fails and Vi takes three months in Florida. She briefly considers retiring; her own employees talk her out of it. She comes back.

Vi and Darby sell Vi’s Place and move to Bradenton, Florida — then keep turning up unannounced in local bars.