#Great falls sip n dip series
After 35 years, she retired from her job at the local clinic, but continued on as the Sip ‘n Dip’s resident entertainer.įrom the time it was built in the 1960s, the bar was a favorite of locals and anyone who just happened to be passing through Great Falls, a small city of about 60,000 people, known for being home to a series of once-freely rushing waterfalls that now power hydroelectric dams. In her 30s, recently divorced and with three children to support, she worked as a medical transcriptionist by day and at the piano bar by night. Raised in a small Montana town by the Canadian border where she began playing piano as a child, she moved 100 miles south to Great Falls, settling about 60 years ago, she recalls. For just a few hours, two nights a week, Piano Pat climbs the O’Haire Motor Inn stairs to her illuminated post as a crowd of eager newcomers and longtime fans fills the room from wall to wall. Pat Spoonheim, 86, better known as Piano Pat, has been serenading crowds at Sip ‘n Dip for the past 56 years with pop and country favorites for regulars and a growing swell of tourists alike. Every few minutes, they weave out of sight to gasp for air at the pool’s surface, returning with a smile or wielding a prop sword. In the booths around the bar, patrons sip short glasses of neat spirits or lean over straws in teal blue Fishbowls, Sip ‘n Dip’s signature drink comprised of 64 ounces of fruit juices and 10 shots of various kinds of rum.īut another light radiates from the opposite direction of the mermaids where a petite woman is seated behind the bar’s organ, eyes focused on the three tiers of keys in front of her.
Behind the glass, women in bikini tops and mermaid tails, their long hair floating in veils around them, swim, shimmy and flirt with bar goers on the other side of the glass. A time capsule of the 1960s tiki craze, the bar’s only window looks into the motel’s pool, casting an aquamarine glow over the yellow and blue vinyl chairs and thatched grass wallcoverings of the interior. The sidewalks are nearly empty, but the Sip ‘n Dip Lounge on the upper level of the O’Haire Motor Inn attracts the town’s nostalgia-thirsty drinkers like moths to a lantern. On a recent Friday night on the streets of the city of Great Falls, Montana, there’s a deceptively cold stillness.
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