Stuff Around My Home -- Beverage Room Chair

In the corner of my bedroom, there is an old chair. The paint on its arms is worn and scarred, although the rest of the chair is in good condition. Like most bedroom chairs, it is not actually used for sitting on, as such. It serves instead as a place to pile my jeans, pyjama bottoms and the odd pair of shorts.

Where did I get this disreputable-looking chair?

It comes from the "Licensed Beverage Room" of The Queen's Hotel, an old country hotel in small town Saskatchewan outside of Regina.

[photo by Lawrence Hutchinson, 
taken in 1981, found here on Flickr ] 

The hotel was new in 1885, the year of the Riel Rebellion involving Native and Métis peoples, when Saskatchewan was not yet a province but simply a district in the North-West Territories. General Middleton, commander of the Canadian Militia sent from Eastern Canada to put down the Rebellion, billeted at the Queen's Hotel and made the town the marshalling point for his troops.

The Beverage Room was a later addition to the establishment, built in the 1930s. Under Saskatchewan liquor laws, a bar could not be a free-standing establishment. It had to be part of a hotel offering both a restaurant and sleeping quarters, so that total inebriates could eat, sleep and sober up, if need be, without driving anywhere.

During World War II, my maternal grandparents bought the Queen's Hotel and went into the hospitality business. My mother worked here in her youth. My parents' small wedding reception was at The Hotel. Although they subsequently moved to Manitoba (my father's home province), there was still a lot of traveling back and forth to The Hotel over the years. I spent a lot of time at The Hotel when I was a kid, right up into my early 20s.

[Beverage Room, Queen's Hotel, photo taken by 

Debra She Who Seeks, probably around 1980-ish?]

The Queen's Hotel is gone now, an empty lot all that remains. The hotel burned down in a 2003 fire that occurred about 15 years after my grandparents ceased owning the business.

When the family connection to The Hotel ended, my Mom took a couple of barroom chairs out of the Beverage Room as a keepsake. I don't know what happened to the other chair, but in due course I ended up with this one.

The Beverage Room was always the main moneymaker of the whole hotel operation. A lotta booze 'n beer were slung in that bar over the decades. How many drunken backsides have sat in that chair? Too many to count, I bet.

But now the chair leads a quiet, sober and sedate existence as my bedroom pants-piling spot. I wonder if it misses the old days?