BAR PILOT

Comments

By Eric on Jul 15, 2009 at 5:02PM

This is an easy one. Many years ago, the Wooden Chicken went by a different name (one that has been lost to history). The owner at the time was an eccentric gentleman who fancied himself a small-time rancher/farmer. In a small plot behind the bar, he kept a vegetable garden. He also amassed a small collection of livestock: a sickly cow, a couple of belligerent goats, and some chickens.

Though the animals were a source of bemusement to many of the bar’s patrons, the owner took his hobby very seriously, and in fact felt a strong emotional bond with his animals, particularly (for reasons that are, again, awash in the sands of time) the chickens. He talked to them, often more verbosely than he would to many of his human companions, and would frequently let them into the bar to stroll around.

It was on one such occasion that tragedy struck. A particularly drunk patron was sitting at the bar, feeling surly and angry at life (as many patrons of the pre-WC establishment often did). The man looked down and saw a chicken pecking idly at the floor by his bar stool. In one fluid (well, OK, it was probably pretty jerky) motion, he climbed off his stool, picked the chicken up with one hand, and flung it full-force into the wall.

There are still those who marvel at how that man made it out of the bar with his hide intact (stories of the owner chasing him with a shotgun abound). The owner, of course, was devastated. To everyone’s amazement, the impact had not killed the chicken. It had badly wounded her, however, leaving her without the use of either of her legs.

Now, the popular version of the story has it that the owner amputated the now-useless limbs and replaced them with crude wooden legs. This is, of course, folly; the veterinarian annals contain no records of hen prosthetics. In point of fact, the owner fashioned tiny wooden splints, in the hopes that the chicken would eventually recover and regain the use of its limbs. Of course, such was not to be the case. After an agonizing day and a half, the regal bird succumbed to her injuries. It was not long thereafter that the owner renamed his establishment in honor of his brave and beloved fowl.

By JC on Jul 15, 2009 at 6:26PM

I’m impressed! I didn’t think my readers had so much free time.

By Yeehaw! on Jul 15, 2009 at 8:15PM

The name is an ode to the tradition of Southern Fried Chicken, a term coined in 1925. However, the Scots introduced this now famous staple to our country brothers and sisters in the 1800s—minus the herbs and spices we’ve come to expect today. Folks on American soil perfected the recipe we’ve all come to expect from the likes of Wooden Chicken, Paula Dean, and other culinary contemporaries. To this day, there are odes to the famous staple, including the most recent number one country western hit by Zac Brown Band, simply titled “Chicken Fried.”

While the Wooden Chicken wasn’t momma’s cookin’—it’s as close as a good ol’ boy named Merl Chagrin from Alabama could hope for in these parts. Plus, it was the one item that sold the best. Rocky mountain oysters never took off, much to Chagrin’s disappointment. As the original structure was a wooden shack, the restaurant was dubbed the Wooden Chicken.

Further, it was a fine living Chagrin could be proud of. He put his children through school, and managed to afford the medical to finally quit using chewing tobacco. The only evidence from his former habit is a Skoal ring in the back pocket of many of his Levis. An important detail, as many of his early customers got a bit of the noxious weed as seasoning in their chicken.

Today, old man Chagrin is retired and his daughter Emmylou runs the joint. It’s rumored she has plans to try to bring back daddy’s rocky mountain oysters, now that Portlanders’ culinary palettes have expanded. Apparently this will also include a new family sauce they hope to patent.

By x on Jul 15, 2009 at 10:34PM

You didn’t say what the prizes are

By aaronski on Jul 15, 2009 at 10:37PM

Ah, JC! I haves me some fond memories of The Wooden Chicken from my Portland days (circa ‘89-’94); it was a quite a meat market back then. Not sure where the name originates, but its blue-collar charm and pool tables remind me of the watering holes in our hometown. ‘Think I’ll slip on down to the oasis. Oh, I’ve got friends…’

By DK on Jul 15, 2009 at 10:39PM

Actually it is a bit of a misspelling.
In the early days of Portland, the seamen would bring shanghai’d workers from the Orient to build the great Western railroad lines. Thus, the appearance of many ‘China Town’s’ up and down the west coast.
Along with the workers came the forbidden spice – opium (also known as the ‘Wu’)
Illicit ‘Wu Dens’ operated sketchily under the radar, paying off local authorities and plying the sailors, prostitutes and junkies of the underground with their devilish poison.
It was an old man saved from a life of vice and corruption, when one of these infamous dens was raided, near NE Halsey and 116th. Neighbors found the man (Later known as old Mr. Arnold) and took him in, only to later discover his mastery of the cuisine of the far east.
One dish in particular was everyone’s favorite . Mr. Arnold’s plum pepper chicken.
Some even said the secret was opium itself in the batter!
The dish was so successful, he was finally forced to open a restaurant.
The “Wu Den Chicken” was a local favorite for decades (also serving many a Jewish family on Christmas Eve)
Mr. Arnold died in the late 50s and the restaurant sat empty. It was a returning veteran from Vietnam who wanted a place to hang with his biker pals who eventually bought the place – renaming it the ‘Wooden’ chicken, in order to rid itself of any Asian reference due to his memories of the war.
Friends carved a giant wooden bird that sat out front for years, until animal activists hell bent on tying their cause to fighting the timber industry set fire to the bird on fire in the 90s, burning it to the ground.
And that’s how it became what we know today as the Wooden Chicken!

By Ringworm on Jul 15, 2009 at 10:53PM

In 1942, Anton Pfister returned from the war with a vision. Culled from his late, lonely nights spent bounding around the catering kitchens of Paris, Pfister saw the master chefs use cedar planks that gave a smoky flavor to their array of seafood dishes, such as Nice trout and Brussels Mussels. Why not poultry? Or so Pfister asked his commanding officer shortly before his honorable discharge (he’d lost both of his ring fingers in a cigarette-rolling mishap).

His first attempts at cooking filleted chicken on wood tasted like aspirin, but Pfister soon perfected the skill, once feeding a reunion of Asa Lovejoy’s offspring and earning praise from the Oregon Journal for his tarragon-based sauce. It made sense to open a restaurant.

He tried many names. Walking the Plank. Planks A Lot. You’ve Been Planked. Chickenshitz. Nothing worked. Until he found it, the perfect moniker for his artful cuisine: Damn Plankees.

Of course, that name was really stupid and the food actually did taste like chickenshitz and Greg Biffle’s dad bought the place in 1983, ceased using the planks and renamed it Wooden Chicken.

By x on Jul 16, 2009 at 3:47AM

The flames leapt higher as the erstwhile city of Ilium burned like an offering, fattened for the gods. Agamemnon stood upon a parapet, urging his Achaean soldiers to leave no wall standing, no amphora of wine unplundered. A great wheeled statue of a horse stood just within the tumbled gates, as men bearing torches swirled around it, searching for any flammable thing to incinerate. But the mighty steed had served its purpose as the vessel which had sailed the invaders through the gate. No one mourned when a careless torch touched its pinewood flanks, and its pitch-infused planks ignited like so much matchwood. Now lost to history for all time, the Trojan Horse was to become the subject of doubt and debate for generations of scholars to come. How did the soldiers hidden within its bowels maintain their silence before the moment came to strike? How did they manage to keep from poking one another with their spears in there? And above all, how could anyone be stupid enough to fall for such a dubious prank? Unconcerned with such ponderous riddles, Agamemnon elbowed Odysseus in the ribs and pointed. “Fire is so cool!” he declared. “Heh heh, fiyah,” replied the cunning king of Ithaca. The next morning, the brave Achaeans shook off their hangovers and made their way back to the shoreline, where their navy waited to take them back to Greece. Thousands of years passed, when suddenly – a French castle was besieged by King Arthur. Unable to prevail against the insults and catapulted livestock hurled in the general direction of his knights, he drew inspiration from tales of the ancient siege of Troy. Under the direction of his loyal servant Patsy, a large wooden rabbit was constructed and stealthily wheeled toward the imposing edifice. Having somehow neglected to sequester themselves within it, however, the trick backfired and the wooden bunny was flung back at the chivalrous heroes, and splintered into a multitude of shards. Now lost to history for all time, this Trojan Rabbit was also to become the subject of scholarly scorn and skepticism for ages thenceforward. Sir Bedevere the Wise gave Sir Robin the Not-Quite-So-Brave-As-Sir-Lancelot a wink and a nudge. “Fancy a go in that ride, would you, mate? Know what I mean? Say no more,” quoth he. So Robin didn’t. The next morning, the brave Knights of the Round Table parted ways in quest of easier punch lines. Another thousand years passed without remark, when suddenly – Ricky Bobby was revving his engine on one end of Portland, Oregon’s Sandy Boulevard. On the other end of Sandy sat Greg Biffle, warming up his Ford Fusion for the battle to come. Thousands of spectators lined the sidewalks, having staked out their turf with boundaries of duct tape several days before the event. Handy stuff, that duct tape. The signal was given, and the two vehicles squealed into action amid the smoke of burning rubber. Roaring with power as gallons of fuel were throttled into combustion chambers and exploded against blurring pistons, the two cars hurtled along the diagonally platted roadway, like Peloponnesian javelins, like arrows from a yeoman’s bow. “I ain’t gonna give way,” intoned Ricky to himself, over and over, as he pressed the accelerator deeper into the floorboards. The microphone mounted in his helmet broadcast his words to his pit crew and a worldwide television audience. Meanwhile, Greg’s mantra was similar: “No quarter!” And he shifted into overdrive. As the race cars flew past, onlookers who blinked were unable to witness the streak of color which was all that could be discerned of the vehicles, pasted with the decals of a hundred sponsors. Within seconds, the two men could see the approach of the opposing car. Just like a joust from days of yore, they charged at one another in this nerve-wracking game of chicken – brought to you by Goodyear, Gillette and Pabst Blue Ribbon (note to Pabst marketing associate Debbi Svoboda, I’ll take my payments for the previous product placement in unmarked twenties please.) Ricky Bobby’s last words were: “I promised Texas Ranger I would’n chicken out!” as metal clashed with metal, crumpling both cars to smithereens, pulping both drivers to streaks of sputum upon the pavement, and generally imparting enough gratuitous violence to this tale to make up for all the nasty bits that I left out of the part about Troy and/or the Knights of the Round Table. Lug nuts and cup holders and such were flung high into the air by the force of this high speed collision, and fell to the ground around 125th and Sandy. Having been totaled, the race cars and their drivers are now lost to history forever, while scholars debate about who flinched and who blinked. But there is no dispute regarding Bobby’s final transmission, and his words were immortalized by naming the local watering hole near the crash site after his promise to his son, that he “would’n chicken” out. Unfortunately, the manufacturer of the sign for this establishment made diligent use of a spell-checker, hence the transliteration to “Wooden Chicken”, thus misdirecting the research of many a hapless doctoral candidate who labored under the presumption of continuity in the lineage of large wooden siege animals from horse, to rabbit, to chicken. But, it was not to be.

By SpArKlE_BuRnOuT on Jul 17, 2009 at 8:32PM

Well I’ll be. . .and here all this time I thought the name was simply a redundant penis joke. Yet again, I’ve underestimated the long history and rich culture of Parkrose. I stand before you humbled.

By JC on Jul 21, 2009 at 10:51PM

Sadly, no one came up with the real origin story, but I can’t complain about the quality fiction this post inspired. I’ve consulted with my fellow web department drones, and we like the offerings of X and DK the best thus far. You will be notified about your prizes. I’ll give you my personal note for 90 days. If you haven’t received your prize by then you can keep the note.