In September 2022 we celebrated turning 75 with a party that we will never forget. The same week, the Kansas City Star put us on the front page! Writer David Hudnall somehow managed to perfectly sum up 75 years worth of stories. We can’t thank you enough, David.

Here it is in full:

If there exists such a thing as the quintessential Kansas City bar, a strong case could be made that Kelly’s Westport Inn is it.

Part of that is about history. Kelly’s occupies the oldest building in Kansas City, constructed in 1851 at the northwest corner of Westport Road and Pennsylvania Avenue. It is also one of the oldest continually operating taverns in the city, with a liquor license that dates back to 1934. The same family has owned it for 75 years as of this month. Bartenders on staff have been known to stick around for 30 or 40 years. 

Warm memories don’t keep the barstools warm, though. A bar needs customers, and Kelly’s has lasted three-quarters of a century in Westport by attracting a wide variety of them. Post-college partiers on the weekends. A regular table of old-timers, known affectionately as the Squirrels, on certain school nights. Professional athletes blowing off steam after a game. Quiet types liable to pull an old paperback off the shelf of the bar’s “library” during the day. Westport service-industry workers who know a seat at a Kelly’s swivel stool can offer solitude or friendly conversation, whichever they might be in the mood for after their shift.

“There’s nothing trendy about what we do here,” says Colleen Kelly, a third-generation owner of the bar. “It’s just a place where everyone is welcome. Gay, straight, black, white, young, old. Our regulars don’t fit a mold. The sign above the door says ‘Welcome,’ and we mean it.”

What’s written in newspapers is often discussed inside bars, but what happens inside bars isn’t often written about in newspapers. It makes a certain amount of sense. Newspapers traffic in verifiable facts and tend to be averse to profanities. If the absence of profanities doesn’t ruin a good bar story, an abundance of facts surely will. Bar owners, who fail to see the value in publicly sharing tales of idiocy and disreputable behavior pertaining to the business they run, present another obstacle.

So, caveat: If you want to hear the one about the priest, the pair of lovebirds and a Kansas City health inspector — it has a good punchline, and it’s supposedly true — you’re better off dropping by Kelly’s this Saturday, Sept. 17. From 11 a.m. to 2 a.m., former bartenders will return to work one-hour shifts, musicians who once performed at the bar will play sets, and hundreds if not thousands of old friends will catch up, tell tales, and celebrate 75 years of Kelly’s Westport Inn. 

To add to the commemoration, The Star recently spoke to a few dozen past and current staff, regulars and the Kelly family about the bar and what it means to the city. Here is that story, in their words.

EARLY DAYS

In 1934, shortly after Prohibition was repealed, a liquor license was granted to The Wrestlers Inn, at 500 Westport Road. It later became known as The Westport Inn, and in February of 1947, an Irish immigrant named Randal Kelly was hired to tend bar there. 

Randy Kelly, son of Randal Kelly and former manager of Kelly’s: Dad came over in 1926 from County Clare, Ireland, where he’d been a schoolteacher. He kind of bounced around the country for a while. 

Kyle Kelly, son of Randal Kelly and co-owner of Kelly’s: He trained as a machinist in the Army in Kansas City in the early 1940s and while he was here he went to a USO dance and was introduced to my mom. They got married in 1943. After the war, they lived in San Francisco for a few years, then my mom got pregnant and they moved back to Kansas City and Dad started working at the Westport Inn. It was three retired Kansas City, Missouri, police detectives that owned it. Their names were Brock, Ghent and Zahner. On October 25th of 1947, Dad and Brock bought out Ghent and Zahner and formed a 50-50 partnership.

Randy Kelly: Art Brock wasn’t much of a talker…

Joe Latona, former employee: Old man Brock, the story was that he was a cop during the Pendergast days. Apparently, he was a big deal on the police force back when KC was wide open. So he had a lot of, I guess, connections. 

Randy Kelly: …whereas Dad was kind of your classic Irish immigrant. He had a fantastic wit — a comeback for everything. He also had the brogue, which is favorable in America. That accent is endearing to a lot of people. Before long, everybody was calling the bar “Kelly’s” because he was kind of the personality of the place.

David Duncan, longtime customer: I got transferred by my job from New York to Kansas City. In New York, I used to hang out at the White Horse Tavern, on Houston Street. The people I knew at the bar said, “If you’re headed to Kansas City, find Kelly’s.” I got here a week later and pick up the phone book: There’s no Kelly’s in there. It wasn’t until much later that somebody dragged me to the Westport Inn that I figured it out. Art Brock worked the day shift and served all the workers who’d come in from Manor Bakery. Randal worked the night shift. So the daytime crowd called it Westport Inn, but everybody else knew it as Kelly’s.

Kyle Kelly: My main early memories of the bar are coming up with my brothers on Sundays. It was closed on Sundays in those days and we had a set of chores to finish every week. My dad would do book work and we would clean the slats, SOS the stainless steel, wax the floors.

Randy Kelly: We didn’t see Dad much at home. I think he was struggling to make ends meet in those days. It was a pretty modest neighborhood kind of joint. So he was at the bar a lot. But, you know, that’s what it took to make it cook. And he had it down. He could walk into the bar to close up at the end of the night and take a look at how many cigarette butts were on the floor and — with just that information — he could guess within 20 bucks what was in the cash register. I mean, it was uncanny.

Pat Kelly, son of Randall Kelly and co-owner of Kelly’s: The bar in those days opened at 6 a.m. because you had Manor Bakery next door. They worked round-the-clock shifts over there, so there’d be employees getting off work at 7 or 8 in the morning every day. So a lot of those people became our regulars.

Pat Francke, customer: There’d be dozens of them in there drinking in the morning, wearing their white uniforms with the white bakers’ caps. 

Pat Kelly: Dad had a little tin box behind the bar where he kept alphabetized IOUs from the guys at the bakery who needed a few extra days until payday. I remember flipping through the tin box one day and seeing one called “Toothless Harry, Manor Bakery.” That kind of thing was not uncommon. 

Joe Latona: Everything seemed like it was on a barter system. (Bob) Browne of Browne’s (Irish Market) would come by and drop off some corned beef for Mr. Kelly. Then Mr. Kelly would say, “Send him a few quarts of Irish whiskey.” You had all these old characters coming around. Dave from Dave’s Stagecoach, Mr. Meierhoff (of Meierhoff’s restaurant). They’d sit at the front table and chew the fat with Mr. Kelly. There were always handicapped people coming around the bar, too, selling light bulbs and brooms and things like that. Mr. Kelly couldn’t say no to them. He knew they were down in the jacks and he’d take care of them. The Kellys were always good about that sort of thing.

WESTPORT BECOMES WESTPORT

The 1960s and 1970s saw Westport transition from a modest family neighborhood to ground zero for the hippie counterculture to a destination for college students. These were also the years when the torch of ownership was gradually passed to Randal’s children. Randy Kelly began working at the bar in 1966, Pat Kelly in 1969 and Kyle Kelly in 1970. Upon the death of Art Brock in 1977, the bar was renamed Kelly’s Westport Inn. 

Marge Finley, customer: I’ve been coming in since 1959. I was just out of college and new in town. Catty-corner from Kelly’s back then was the Coldwater Hotel, which was called that because they didn’t have any hot water. It was a real fleabag type of place. But you also had people from Rockhurst College coming over to Kelly’s, some artists. In the early ’60s, you’d come in certain nights and it could be a little bit intellectual. Talk of books and politics and things like that. I remember the opera singers would come in after their performances — this is when the opera was at the Rockhill Theatre, on Troost — and stand on the steps where the ramp in the bar now is, and sing for everyone. And then every night around midnight, you had the reporters from The Kansas City Star and The Kansas City Times rushing in to get a beer before the bar closed.

Randy Kelly: I started working at the bar full time in about 1966 or 1967, and we were still serving 10-cent beers at that point. I mean, it was pretty old-school through most of the ’60s. 

Joe Latona: The 1970s in Kansas City were kind of like the 1960s everywhere else in the country. It really did take that long back then for the culture to come in from the coasts. 

Dennis Giangreco, publisher of the Westport Trucker, 1969-1974: The Vanguard opened around 1965 on Main Street, and they booked folk singers and folk acts. That was one of the first places in the Westport area to cater to younger people. By 1970, there were a lot of head shops and coffee shops and clothing shops operating in Westport. 

Kyle Kelly: In the late ’60s, early ’70s, the bar moved from being a neighborhood “pub” in the traditional sense of the word to more of a younger hangout. Part of that was me and my brothers started working here. There was a younger energy in the staffing. But also Westport was becoming a hippie destination in Kansas City. So we started to see a very big cross section of customers. My dad was quoted in the newspaper around that time about welcoming hippies to the bar. Very typical of him, he said, “The hippies all have money. They don’t buy soap — maybe that’s why they have money.” 

Chuck Haddix, radio host and local historian: Westport was affordable, and the hippies gravitated to the cheap rents. Plus, Westport had always been a “whatever goes” type of place anyway. 

Kyle Kelly: I don’t think there were more than five liquor licenses in Westport as late as 1971. When Don Anderson built Westport Square, I’d say that was one of the bigger complexion changers in Westport history. It brought a degree of professionalism to Westport, replacing these properties that were basically flophouses. Gentrification, I guess you’d call it. 

Pat Kelly: They built a whole block of businesses straight catty-corner from us. All of a sudden you had a nice restaurant, The Prospect, right down the street. 

Randy Kelly: The early ’70s, that’s when the business really started to really take off. We had the bar packed Wednesday, Friday, Saturday. I hired Mike Donegan who went on to open Stroud’s, and Mike Leahy and a couple other superstars. I bartended with Donegan every Friday night. He was just phenomenal with people. By 1973, we were really going.

Mark Weber, former employee: There wasn’t competition like there is now. Kansas served 3.2 beer and they had private clubs where you had to be a member to go drink in them. So nobody was going over there. If you were going out in Kansas City, it was the River Quay, Westport or the Plaza. And then the River Quay blew up and it was just Westport and the Plaza. 

Chuck Rosley, former employee: It was wall-to-wall several nights a week. I was a beer waiter, which meant I had to roam around the crowd selling beer, carrying two full trays with eight beers on each tray. You’d yell, “Beer man coming through, beer man coming through!” 

Randy Kelly: We were selling so much beer. My recollection is that we were Budweiser’s largest draft beer account in the state of Missouri.

Kyle Kelly: My brother Randy and my dad would fight constantly about making changes to the bar. We didn’t have air conditioning for a long time. We had these old big Air King fans on pedestals in the corners. You stand in front of one and it blows your head off. My dad thought that was enough. 

Randy Kelly: I finally talked Dad into getting the air conditioning done. Then the candle shop at the back of the building caught on fire. So that freed up the lease. I thought we should expand the back bar into that space. Dad wouldn’t do it. I finally said, “OK, Dad, if that’s your opinion, you own the business, that’s your right, but I will be leaving. I’m not going to sit and watch this place go stagnant.” I really dug my heels in, I was a young punk about it. He didn’t talk to me for three weeks. Finally he came to me and said, “How much do you think it’ll cost?” I said $10,000. Pulled the number out of nowhere. But we went down to the bank and I had to co-sign the note and we got the money and built the bar. 

Kyle Kelly: Randy has always been a little more entrepreneurial than Pat and me. He left in 1977. He saw an opportunity at the Lake of the Ozarks. He’s been down there ever since. 

Randy Kelly: Do you have brothers? We fussed. We fussed a bunch. And I didn’t want to go through the rest of my life fighting with my brothers, and that’s where it was heading. I was 28, made of Kryptonite, and a guy came into the bar who owned a marina at the Lake of the Ozarks. He said it was for sale. I said, “How much?” And from the time we had that conversation to when I moved into that old marina, it was 27 days. I mean, I was gone. Sold my house, got out of the bar. I thought I’d do it for three or four years. Here it’s been 45 years, and my kids run it now.

Kyle Kelly: We lost eight full-time employees in 1977, including Randy. Mike Donegan and Jim Hogan left to open Stroud’s. Pat and I kinda looked at each other like, “Well, this is on us now.” Because Randy really was our boss back then. But we picked up and did what we needed to do. Randy left in the spring of that year. Art Brock had died in February. He and my dad had a buy-sell agreement, so we bought out Brock’s estate, and in June we incorporated and changed the name to Kelly’s Westport Inn.

‘SQUIRRELS’ AND CELEBRITIES 

As Kelly’s grew in popularity, it began to attract an ever-broader cross section of customers. That included a ragtag group of regulars called the Squirrels, professional athletes, and boldface comedy names in town to perform next door at Stanford and Sons.

Rita Pearce, former employee: I started working at Kelly’s in 1981. I worked days. The thing you have to remember about back then is that you had a lot more people, professional people, who just drank during the work day. They’d come for lunch from nearby businesses and just stick around. There was a table in front that was always Hallmark employees, very artistic, very smart people. They’d come in at 11 in the morning and they’d still be in there drinking when I got off at 3 p.m. Then there was a political table, with (owner of the Kelly’s building) George Wiedenmann and his political cronies and news people. They were in three to four times a week. And then the Squirrel table. I’m sure you’ve heard about them. 

Joe Andrade, former employee: It was this regular table with a mix of folks: a painter, a lawyer, an electrician, a salesman. They’d sit back there and order “swill,” which is what they called the cheapest possible beer we served. I think it was Pabst or Busch when I was there.

Bob Moore, longtime customer: Kelly’s used to serve these tiny little beers in little shell glasses, like a jelly jar. Ten ounce glasses maybe. They called them “dimeys” because they cost 10 cents back then, and the old guys at the bar who were trying to get away from their wives or whatever could sit in there all day nursing these dimeys without breaking the bank. Well, there was this group of younger regulars who hung out at this table toward the back of the bar, and they figured out that it was cheaper to order a bunch of individual dimeys than full pints of beer. 

So one night the bar is busy and they’re back there constantly ordering new beers, the little glasses are piling up on their table, the bar’s running out of glasses. Randal, Mr. Kelly, is getting annoyed. He says, “Why don’t we have any glasses?” And Sam goes, “If it weren’t for all those squirrels in the back ordering their little beers, we’d have ‘em!” And that stuck.

Steve Christensen: I suppose I’m a Squirrel, yeah. It’s sort of a “Cheers” thing: a group of people from different walks of life that meet up and make jokes at the bar. The jokes build over time.

Kyle Kelly: It is true that several of them have had their mail delivered to the bar over the years. 

John Shehane: We’ll bet on anything. I think Kyle came into the bar once and caught us betting on a dating game. He was like, “This is a new low.” 

Bob Moore: Did they tell you they bought a horse? 

John Shehane: We did buy a horse once. About 12 of us decided to go in on it. He cost $2,000 — $600 for the horse, the rest to the vet and the trainer — and his name was Mr. Cannon. We took him to Illinois, to Fairmont Park, and raced him for a few years. His first time out, he got second place, and we’d placed quinella bets on him, so we made all our money back and then some. He raced all season and then the next year too. I think Mr. Cannon earned $4,800 all told.

Mark Weber: There were always pro athletes coming into the bar. I think that started in the ’80s sometime. 

Joe Andrade: Red was always good friends with the pros. They’d come into the bar and the first thing they’d say is, “Where’s Red, is Red around?” I went to Chicago for a Cubs game and everybody knew him there too. He could show up at Wrigley with a suitcase and they would store his suitcase for him. 

David “Red” Cross, employee: For a long while, it was a given that George Brett and Jamie Quirk would be in here every Wednesday and Saturday night. They got all the young Royals coming in. And all the ballplayers talk to each other, so visiting teams would hear that Kelly’s is a good place to go when you’re in Kansas City, that you can come in and not get mobbed. So it became a word-of-mouth thing. 

John Scully, former employee: When the White Sox were in town, you could almost time it to where you knew Frank Thomas was coming in. He loved Kelly’s. He had some deal where he didn’t have to go on the bus with the players after the game. He had his own personal car service. So he’d just head straight to Kelly’s after games. He drank the big 44-ounce cups. Nicest guy you could ever imagine. 

Mark Weber: A few of us on staff did occasionally try to get players from opposing teams drunk the night before games. 

Chris Meneses: I recall getting Bret Boone wasted on Jaegermeister and him going 0-for-5 the next day. 

Mark Weber: I served Joe Montana his first beer in Kansas City. 

Red Cross: What happened was, two former Chiefs, Tom Condon and Kendall Kremer, owned a sports bar called Fuzzy’s. And Condon was also Montana’s agent. And Montana was in town meeting with the Chiefs, so I called Tom and said, “Are you going out with Joe tonight?” They were meeting (Lamar) Hunt and (Carl) Peterson for dinner at Plaza III. I said, “Well, if he’s a beer drinker, swing him by Kelly’s after.”

So I go into work and tell the door guys, “If Montana comes in, tell him I’m in the back.” They laughed in my face. A few hours later, Montana comes in and soon enough there’s hundreds of people trying to get into the bar, gawking at him from the windows outside. We all went to the Granfalloon after and stayed up all night at the Ritz, then he had to fly to Arizona for a tryout the next day wearing the same suit from the night before. 

Chris Meneses: You also had celebrities who stopped by because Stanford and Sons was next door. 

Red Cross: They’d come in before their shows and, you know, get their game face on. 

Chris Meneses: Dave Coulier, aka Uncle Joey from “Full House,” came in once. I was peddling beers by the front door and he showed up with some women. The door guy said he needed to see his ID. He’s like, Really? So he starts digging around for his ID and I step in and go, “Come on, man, we don’t need your ID, cut it out!” And he really didn’t like that. I learned that comedians and celebrities, they don’t like it when you say their catchphrase to them. 

Kyle Kelly: Eddie Griffin, who used to perform next door, later did this show, “Malcolm and Eddie,” that was set in Kansas City and his character lived above Kelly’s. It was all shot in a studio in L.A., but they used pictures of the exterior of our building on the show. And our day bartender at the time, Bob McGuire, had a cameo on the show. He couldn’t speak because of union stuff, I think. But he was sitting in a scene that was supposedly set inside Kelly’s. We got a little money from them for using the likeness of the bar. I wasn’t able to retire from the payment, let’s say.

SPECIAL OCCASIONS

Like most Irish bars, Kelly’s does big business on St. Patrick’s Day. But another tradition attracts crowds nearly as large: The bar’s informal partnership with Iowa State. For years, Kelly’s was so popular with Iowa State students and alumni during the Big 8 (later the Big 12) basketball tournament that a map showing how to reach Kelly’s reputedly appeared regularly in the school’s student newspaper. 

Randy Kelly: St. Patrick’s Day was a frustration for me. When I was growing up, Dad would have the bar open on St. Patrick’s Day, and to handle the larger crowds he’d bring in his drinking buddies and handball buddies and Irish immigrants off the boat to work. But then one year I guess it got so crazy that it scared Dad. 

Kyle Kelly: In 1966, the crowd just got to be too big. Dad described it as busloads of people being brought in from Lawrence and dropped off outside Kelly’s. It was a different level of volume. So he just shut it down. So, for many years the bar wasn’t open on St. Patrick’s Day. 

Randy Kelly: Once I got involved in the bar, we were doing capacity crowds several times a week and were much more capable of handling something like that. But Dad wouldn’t budge. I never worked a St. Patrick’s Day the whole time I was there.

Kyle Kelly: Pat and I started it back up in the early ’80s. Our insurance on the bar renewed every April 1, and we had to come up with 20% down. So we figured being open on St. Patrick’s Day would be a good way to not have to worry about that. We could knock out the insurance premium for the whole year. 

Rita Pearce: I worked that first year they opened back up for St. Patrick’s Day. I remember the Sunday after, we were told to come in and pick up our tips. I’ll never forget opening the front door and seeing all these tables stacked as high as you imagine with cash. Piles and piles of cash. I had never seen so much money in my life. And the door was unlocked, no police around, nothing. Just Mr. Kelly, Kyle and Pat sitting there counting up all this cash. 

Kyle Kelly: We do about two weeks’ worth of business in 16 hours on St. Patrick’s Day. 

Joe Andrade: You make a substantial amount of cash. I think I would make $500 or $600 on the shift, and that was back in the 1990s. But you earn it.

John Scully: The bar is nine deep for 15 hours straight. I mean, it was a grind. I lived up the street and I remember walking home during my break and sitting in a bathtub for 30 minutes trying to decompress. The money was great, though. 

Red Cross: There are years where you gotta be there at 8 a.m. to open up and you close at 3 a.m. the next day. That’s just the way it is. When it’s time to go on St. Patrick’s Day, you gotta be here. You got all year to rest up for the next one. 

Eddie Delahunt, local musician: I got here from Ireland for the St. Patrick’s Day season in 1989. I was playing up the street at Harling’s. The first place I was taken to off the plane was Kelly’s because it was said to be like an embassy stomping ground for all the Irish in the area. It really was like an Irish pub, reminded me of home. The conversation, the heads turning toward the door. I ended up playing there for about four years on Tuesdays. 

Kyle Kelly: The other big weekend was the Big 8 tournament, which later became the Big 12 tournament. As that grew over the years, we started to see numbers comparable to St. Patrick’s. Day. And that was all because of the Iowa State thing.

Pat Kelly: It was sort of a fluke thing. They held the tournament in Kansas City every year, and so you’d see fans who’d traveled to watch their team. One night there were some Iowa State alums drinking in Kelly’s. And they were having a great time and said, “Let’s meet here same night next year and invite a bunch of people.” 

John Scully: It started with four guys, then eight guys, then 50 guys, then it just exploded in the early ’90s. You’d see these little old ladies walking around in Iowa State gear with 46-ounce cups of beer.

Kyle Kelly: It just totally mushroomed to where there were thousands of Iowa State fans coming in over the course of the weekend. Honestly, you could almost say they put my kids through private education. I remember they won their semifinal game one year and were set to play in the finals the next day, and the whole Iowa State marching band pulled up in a bus and played a couple fight songs inside the bar. Even the Kansas fans on staff were just frozen, standing in attention, just in awe. It was a very cool moment. 

Red Cross: The World Series in 1985 was also nuts. I was at the back bar when (Dane) Iorg got that (game-winning Game 6) hit. We had 700 people jumping up and down all at once. It felt like you were on a trampoline. I thought, “This old floor might be able to handle this.” That was a special night.

TOUGH TIMES

In 1995, after nearly a century of ownership, the Wiedenmann family sold 500 Westport Road to Pat and Kyle Kelly. Things went along fine until 2008, when the global financial crisis led to some of the bar’s leanest and most challenging years. 

Pat Kelly: We leased from the Wiedenmanns for 48 years, and it wasn’t until the last 20 or so years that we even had an actual lease. For a long time it was just a handshake deal. 

Mitch Kelly, co-owner: When they finally got the terms of the sale done, George Wiedenmann said, “I’ve got one more request: When I die, I want my ashes left here in a Ten High bottle.” And so that’s him, up above the bar in that old bottle on the shelf.

Pat Kelly: After we bought it, we did a survey of our customers, asking them what they’d like to see at the bar, changes we could make, all that. The main one was about the bathrooms. There was a trough in the men’s bathroom and just one stool. Guys were peeing in the sink all the time, it was a mess. And the ladies’ room wasn’t much better. 

Mike Messick, customer: The restrooms were in deplorable shape, both of them. I was running construction jobs at the time and Kyle came to me and said, “We can’t get anybody to bid on this, will you do it?” It was a busy time in the market. So I came in and tore everything out. That’s why there’s a plaque with my name on it above the women’s door. The women at the Squirrel table were so happy to have a higher-quality restroom that a plaque was made that says The Mike Messick “Memorial” Restroom. I guess “memorial” is in quotes because I’m not dead yet.

Kyle Kelly: Business has always been pretty steady. We open the doors and people show up. We haven’t seen much reason to change a lot. But 2008 and 2009, that was a real challenge. 

Pat Kelly: It was a perfect storm. The economy was tanking, gas was almost $4 a gallon, Power & Light District had just opened up, and the smoking ban was about to go into effect. 

Kyle Kelly: We saw sales drop over 60% between 2008 and 2010. Pat and I were looking at each other like, “Is one of us going to have to get another job?” I mean, it was bad. We had all these guys who had been with us for 20, 30 years, like Mark Weber and Red, and we didn’t know if we were going to be able to keep them on. 

Pat Kelly: Kyle wanted to put in a rooftop deck because of the smoking ban. I didn’t want to. A deck was going to be a huge investment. It ended up costing 50% more than the building itself had cost us. We had to rebuild the whole wall of the building on Westport Road at one point. But Kyle was right and I was wrong. 

Kyle Kelly: The deck opened March 10, 2010, and that was the beginning of 18 months in a row of record months at the bar. Best January ever, best February ever, best March ever, on and on for 18 months. 

Mark Weber: I sold the first drink up there, a shot of Powers to Pat Francke.

Mitch Kelly: The pandemic was tough for a while. We missed St. Patrick’s Day and the Big 12 tournament that year, which was a blow. We closed for two months, then reopened May 17. We’ve dealt with all the headaches that every other business has. But overall we’ve been pretty lucky. 

Nick VanSant, employee: When we first reopened after that initial two-month shutdown, people weren’t allowed to sit at the bar, so it was table service only. Which gave a lot of bartenders a reminder or a crash course on what it’s like to wait tables. And one result of that is we started dividing the tip pool evenly after shifts between bartenders and those working the floor. Before, it was kind of a free-for-all. And we’ve stuck with that tip-share, which I think has made the staff a more cohesive group, a better team. 

Mitch Kelly: Other things have changed. We have now moved out of the peak Red Bull phase of the early 2000s, which is a good thing. Less toxic testosterone in the bar, less people picking fights. And we move a ton of different craft beer products. I think we were scared of change for a long time in terms of the beer we served, and it was silly to be so loyal to specific beers. Nowadays we change four or five of the beer handles every few weeks, and customers seem to like it. But change is pretty slow for the most part. I always say we keep putting lipstick on things, trying to keep as much of the old stuff as we can. 

Colleen Kelly: Younger people tend to come in three-year increments. I always say, You don’t stand in line at a bar on Friday night if you’re not looking to get laid. So I see people for a few years and then they disappear, they grow up, their priorities change. But I also work day shifts, where you see the same people year after year. I left last Saturday and said “I love you” to 30 people on my way out. This guy Dan Miller, who comes in every Monday, I have to text him if I’m sick. Otherwise he won’t come in. 

Chuck Haddix: It’s a neighborhood bar for the city. It’s a classic. The charm is that it hasn’t changed.

Colleen Kelly: It’s the same faces, same big beers, same barstools. I think there’s a lot of comfort in walking into a place like that and knowing it’ll basically be the same as it was years ago. I always tell people who haven’t been in for years that only two things have changed: You don’t have to piss in a trough, and the TVs are thinner. 

Jim Waters, employee: And the library doesn’t get as much usage these days, either.

THE NEXT GENERATION

Now in their 70s, Pat and Kyle Kelly are making way for the next generation of ownership. Two of Kyle’s three children — Mitch and Colleen — became part owners of the bar in 2013. 

Kyle Kelly: I’d always hoped some of my kids would want to continue on with the bar. Conor (the oldest) made early signs that he wasn’t going to be interested. 

Mitch Kelly: I think more so than Colleen and certainly more so than Conor, I always had an affinity for the bar. I was always back working for Christmas and spring break and summers in college. I’ve basically been working here since I was 21. 

Colleen Kelly: Right before you graduate from journalism school at Mizzou, one of the things they require you to do is meet a J-school alum. So I met this guy, and we were talking, and I was telling him, “I don’t think I want to do any of this stuff.” He was like, “What do your parents do?” I said, “My dad owns a bar. I could probably go work there.” He was like, “Don’t tell anyone I said this, but that’s what you should do. You’re supposed to be behind a bar.” I started October 2008. 

Pat Kelly: I’m 71. This is my 53rd year at Kelly’s. A few years after Colleen and Mitch started in, Kyle came to me and said, “This is a young man’s game.” I said, “I’ve been waiting for you to say that.” So I quit doing nights seven or eight years ago. I still go in every week for a Tuesday meeting with Kyle and Colleen and Mitch, and I do some books, some mail, write some checks, but mostly I’m enjoying my semi-retirement. 

Colleen Kelly: I can’t imagine Kyle ever leaving. I will say, he’s here a lot more in the winter when he can’t play golf. But he won’t just stop coming.

Kyle Kelly: I think one of the redeeming qualities of this job is that I don’t really find it tiresome. There’s also the community aspect. I probably spend 20% of my working hours on things that aren’t directly related to Kelly’s but are more about Westport as a whole. Westport’s not like a shopping center, where the landlord controls everything. In Westport, every landlord has a say in the community. There are two community improvement districts in Westport that I actively serve on. So, it keeps you fresh. 

Mitch Kelly: Colleen and I are fortunate in that we have clear and different strengths. She has a much more creative brain, is great with marketing and social media, and she has a much softer approach with staff. Which serves her well. I think people confide in her more about things, and that’s great. Then my strengths are probably more organizational and business oriented. But I do think I’m a better bartender than her — if you want a drink. If you want to sit and talk, she’s probably the better bartender for you. 

Colleen Kelly: Our personalities are so different. I could never, if my life depended on it, do payroll. And Mitch would rather die than talk to the news. So I think we really complement each other. And we trust each other. I joke sometimes that I’m quicker to apologize to Mitch than I am my husband. Because, like, we’re in this forever.

Randy Kelly: Bars are difficult on your health, your relationships. The fact that I made it out alive is an accomplishment. A bar that has the same ownership over eight or 10 years, that’s a long time. It’s a tough way to earn a living. When I got out, I felt that anything I got involved in, I’d be successful, because I had such a positive spin from what we’d been able to do at the bar. It teaches you a mindset of service that’s really valuable.

Colleen Kelly: There is nobody I know in this city that judges a book by its cover less than Kyle Kelly. And I think that’s because, the longer you work here, you realize you just can’t pass judgment on people anymore. Every person is a person when you’ve worked at a bar long enough. 

Joe Andrade: When you work at a place where people from all walks of life come in, you make all these interesting connections. My first job after Kelly’s I got through a commodities trader who sat at the Squirrel table. 

Nick VanSant: It’s almost like a 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon type of thing, where everybody has a personal story about the bar or knows somebody who worked at the bar. It’s multi-generational, too. You get a lot of, “My parents did this or my grandparents did that.” 

Mark Weber: People come in to reminisce. I can’t tell you how many times couples have walked in and said they met here 30, 40 years ago. I myself met my wife Janet at Kelly’s 38 years ago. Been married 35 years. And now our son Ethan works there, he’s been there 10 years. I’d made a living working there. I figured I couldn’t tell him not to do it. 

Colleen Kelly: I think most people leave their job feeling drained. I leave feeling reenergized. When I’m home, I’m a mom, and I love it, but then I get to leave and go to a job where I’m around the best people: our staff, customers, friends, family. When I go on vacation, and I walk back into the bar after having been gone for seven or 10 days, I get hit with this smell that always brings me right back to being a little kid and having my dad pick me up out of my parents’ bed at 3 am and bring me to my bed. It sounds so cheesy. But I do it every time. I come in and stand by the doorway. And I just take the biggest whiff.