Rachel Brougham: Stafford’s Hospitality: Thank you
There’s a glass beer mug on a shelf in our dining room built-in that sits in front of all the others. It reads, “One Hop Momma” and has M-15 toward the bottom, noting where it hung in the Noggin Room in downtown Petoskey.
My husband, Colin, and son, Thom, had their own mugs as well. You got a mug by drinking your way through the bar’s beer list; Colin drank most of the beers on the list for me and thus choose the inscription.
Thom, then 3, had his own mug that read “T-Dawg” and while he certainly didn’t get it from drinking beer, he was a regular fixture at the bar on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. He’d sit on a bar stool between us with a coloring book or puzzle, munching on a basket of popcorn and sipping a root beer or Orange Crush. A couple of bartenders pitched him and surprised him one day with his own mug.
Thom has a small scar on his arm and another on his knee, the result of him tumbling down those spiral concrete stairs to the Noggin Room one afternoon. He was so excited to see his favorite bartender and show him his new Thomas the Train toy that he did somersaults down the stairs and when he finally stopped at the bottom, he just got up and ran over to show off his toy like nothing had happened.
One of my favorite photographs is of Thom and Santa sitting at the Noggin Room bar one Saturday afternoon in early December while Santa took a break from greeting kids upstairs.
When Colin and I first moved to Emmet County in January 2005, our first meal out was at Stafford’s Pier Restaurant in Harbor Springs. During my time as a reporter and editor at the Petoskey News-Review, I attended numerous breakfasts and lunches at Stafford’s Bay View Inn, whether as a guest of the Rotary Club or for events hosted by McLaren Northern Michigan. The Noggin Room became the place News-Review staff would meet up for food and drinks after a long, busy day.
I knew there’d always be a barstool waiting for me at the Noggin Room, along with friendly faces no matter what time of day. Colin, Thom and I became regular fixtures there, just like so many of you. It was just the place you went when you were hungry, thirsty, wanted to hang out with friends or just needed to get out of the house on a dreary day. We spent birthdays there, took out-of-towners there and I even have a photo of Colin and I taken by a bartender there on our tenth wedding anniversary.
A few days before we moving to Minneapolis in 2015, we made one more stop to the Noggin Room to say goodbyes and grab our beer mugs. Thom’s mug was missing, someone had accidentally knocked it off the wall the night before and it broke. Colin’s shattered during the move. Mine is the only one that remains.
When I read the news recently that after six decades, Stafford’s Hospitality announced it was selling its collection of hotels and restaurants, all these memories surfaced. Online, people with stories like mine said they worried what will happen to their beloved Stafford’s restaurants and hotels when the new owners take over.
I understand being unsure and apprehensive about the future. Change is hard, but we can’t stop life from moving forward whether you want it to or not. Eventually good times become good memories.
For 60 years, Stafford Smith and his team have played a role in helping many of us create our favorite memories. For me, so many of mine took place in that dark bar beneath the Perry Hotel in Petoskey. I know Colin felt the same, and I know my son Thom, now 14, does as well because we still talk about those days. As long as it exists, I’ll always pull up a seat at the Noggin Room bar each time I visit, and once again I’ll feel like I’m home.
So thank you to Smith and the entire team at Stafford’s, both past and present. Thank you for the memories you gave my family, and so many others for the last 60 years. Cheers.
— Rachel Brougham is the former assistant editor of the Petoskey News-Review. You can email her at racheldbrougham@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Rachel Brougham: Stafford’s Hospitality: Thank you
