Purchasing the Players' Retreat
Gus Gusler describes how he became the proprietor of Players' Retreat, a bar and restaurant on Oberlin Road, Raleigh, NC.
Interview on 2012-07-24 00:00:00 -0400
Transcript
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Well it was the bar in Raleigh. When I got here in '67
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it was the first place I went and had a beer,
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so it's like a legend. It's been around forever.
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It's always been a very eclectic place where
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you'll walk in and there'll be a plumber sitting there drinking a PBR
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on Friday afternoon and at the next table the governor's sitting there
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or the mayor, dressed up, eating an early dinner to go to the symphony,
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and everybody gets along. It's always been like that.
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But I worked there my senior year in the kitchen,
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the year I was student body president, for Bernie Hanula, and Mickey, who owned the place.
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It was always funny because Bernie thought it was just really cool. People would come in
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and he would go drag me out of the kitchen and say, "Can you believe I got the student body president making pizzas back here?"
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He just did that all the time.
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But I loved Bernie and Mickey and it was just a great place.
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I never thought about owning a bar
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and a restaurant but the guy who bought it after him,
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from him, Pete Jarrell,
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Pete had never been in the hospitality business
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and it was a struggle for him and it started going downhill
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and a new person bought the building and tripled his rent,
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and it wasn't doing very well anyway. It was in bad shape.
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He called me up and said, you know I've got people who want to buy it
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but they want to change the whole thing and just bastardize the name
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because it's a brand. People know the Players' Retreat. I mean it's been there for sixty-one years.
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He said, "I would rather close it than let that happen, but I know you love this place so much that you would make sure it stayed the PR,
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so I want you to buy it." I said, "I'm not interested in buying it."
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So he said, "No, you want to buy it." I said, "No. I ain't got any money and no interest." He said, "You don't know what the deal is yet." I said, "I don't care what the deal is."
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Finally he tells me the deal
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and I, quote, said, "Why the ____ are you doing this to me? I mean come on."
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And he said, "Because I know you'll keep it," so he pretty much gave it to me.
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I bought it with my heart, not my head.
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I got in there and every piece of equipment in there was
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old as it could be, falling apart, had been held together with baling wire.
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The air conditioner in the kitchen didn't work and I didn't know it because I bought it in November when I didn't need it.
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The first three years, four years, I was spending sixty, eighty hours there.
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It greatly interfered with my law practice. I still was able to do it, I was just killing myself work wise.
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And we've turned it around. I mean it had six employees when I got there; we have fifty-six employees now.
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It's doing really, really well. I've got a great Johnson & Wales graduate chef who studied two years in France
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and had two restaurants of his own. He's probably one of the best chefs in North Carolina.
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He's an old friend of mine and he's in there cooking, and it's just doing great.
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We're still a big part of the university.
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We do-. Elliott Avent, when the baseball team was flying off to go play in the regionals
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at Florida their last dinner was at the PR that night and then they went out and got on the plane and flew down to play,
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so I get all the coaches in there. The chancellor's in there all the time
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and his wife, of course not as much since they moved him over there in the boonies at the new place.
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He can't walk across the street at 11:00 and get a PBR anymore like he used to do.
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But it's just an important part of North Carolina history and NC State history
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so I'm just glad we were able to save it.
This video is an excerpt from a longer interview. Contact the Special Collections Research Center to request the transcript of the full interview.
