LEONARD GRAY / L’Observateur / March 15, 2000

Before most of the lounge, restaurant and night club strip in LaPlace, before the opening of the Bonnet Carre Spillway bridge of Airline Highway, there stood the Spillway Bar.

It’s still there and thriving.

“This is an old country bar,” says the current operator, Glynn Weber. “It’salways been a local bar and always will be.”The Norco neighborhood bar stands at the corner of Apple Street and Airline Highway, but the casual visitor may be puzzled as to why the interior seems so small, compared to the long, low exterior.

The building’s history gives the answer.

The Spillway Bar has its origins in Lutcher, where Thomas N. Cannon tookan old movie theater and moved it by barge to Norco. With thepetrochemical boom under way in Norco and the decline in the lumber business in Lutcher, it made sense to relocate.

The building was originally a two-story structure, with rooms on the ground floor, Ruth Cannon Hovland recalls. It still has the original 2-by-12cypress beams and has survived through flood, fire and hurricanes, as solid as ever.

The bar opened on May 27, 1931, and the first day’s receipts totaled $2.50,Cannon likes to say. Of course, back then, a beer was 10 cents and ahighball was 15 cents.

The bar originally included a dance-hall in the rear of the building which is now an apartment. Back then the furnishings included the originalmovie-theater’s ceiling fans, according to Ruth’s husband, Arlo Hovland, 81, who operated the bar from 1932 until 1959.

Its heyday was likely in the 1930s, when the highway stopped in front of the bar and everyone traveling it stopped as well. Ruth recalls clearlywhen Pres. Franklin Roosevelt arrived in Norco to dedicate the BonnetCarre Spillway. “He wore a white linen suit and a Panama hat, riding in anopen touring car,” she says.

As a 12-year-old youngster Ruth worked with her father at the bar, “hopping” cars for tips in its curb service. “I loved being with my daddy.”Her father died in 1975 at the age of 87. Her mother, Lillian Hunt Cannon,died at 96.

Regular customers back in the old days included Russell Long, son of Huey, and a U.S. senator.”I retired at 57 and hired Glynn when he was 18,” Arlo comments as he dishes up a plate of white beans, sausage and rice at the bar’s lunch counter. He remains a regular and drops in every Tuesday for his freelunch.

Hovland operated the bar through the Depression and World War II, from the Huey Long years through the Robert Kennon years when the slot machines were ripped out and through the four-laning of Airline Highway.

“When the interstate went by here, it kind of hurt us,” Hovland recalls.

“When we first opened, Airline Highway stopped here. People had to turndown Apple Street and take the Spillway Road to the other side until the bridge was done in 1935.” Weber began working in the Spillway Bar on June 17, 1959, two weeks after graduating from Destrehan High School. “I’m serving people here nowand I served their fathers and grandfathers.”He recalls a number of exciting times there, such as the night the roof caught fire on Oct. 21, 1969. Arlo recalls, “I was making pizza in the oven, but the thermostat broke and it was on all night at 500 degrees.” After the ceiling fell in the barwas remodeled, but it remains to its original design.

In 1985 the Shell explosion knocked beer bottles onto the floor but did little other damage. “I was counting money that morning,” Weber says.It was the robbery on March 16, 1998 which had the biggest impact on him.

On that day, Dianne Albright was in the bar at 11:38 p.m. when shedemanded another beer just before closing time. She pulled a .380semiautomatic on him.

“I just reached up and one hand grabbed the gun and the other grabbed her wrist and I took the gun away from her,” Weber recalls. She fled the barand was soon caught near the spillway.

Later, he found out she was earlier suspected in robbing a priest in Paradis, a bartender in Waggaman and a Kenner swimwear store clerk and of murdering a man in Lafayette.

“That was my first and only robbery,” he says. “I saw her later in court,pointed a finger at her, and said, ‘I got ya!”‘ The bar is adorned with sports banners, collectable beer bottles (including a full six-pack of Regal Beer) and assorted souvenirs, from a Joe Theismann-autographed golf score-sheet from Belle Terre Country Club to a 1973 New Orleans Saints football, autographed by the whole team.

“As our old matchbooks used to say, it’s where good friends meet,” Weber says, smiling.

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