{"id":2382,"date":"2025-02-02T15:05:18","date_gmt":"2025-02-02T21:05:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/?p=2382"},"modified":"2025-02-02T15:06:10","modified_gmt":"2025-02-02T21:06:10","slug":"the-oasis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/?p=2382","title":{"rendered":"The Oasis"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I got friends in low places
\nWhere the whiskey drowns
\nAnd the beer chases my blues away
\nAnd I’ll be okay
\nYeah, I’m not big on social graces
\nThink I’ll slip on down to the Oasis<\/p>\n

Friends in low places<\/em> \u2013 Garth Brooks<\/p>\n

Country music is not my genre, but there are songs that can fit in the Country category and the Rock Category simultaneously. Music by The Marshall Tucker Band comes to mind. But one country song I could not avoid while living in Crawford County, Iowa, was Friends In Low Places<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Long before Garth Brooks recorded one of his most famous songs, the Oasis in Denison, Iowa, was exactly what Brooks described in his song. I have written about this bar previously at https:\/\/iowappa.com\/?p=1898<\/a>:<\/p>\n

We pulled in the Oasis parking lot (Yes, in Denison, Iowa, there is a bar called the Oasis, and it was there long before Garth Brooks wrote his famous song\u00a0Friends In Low Places<\/a>).\u00a0 Once inside, Homer went to the bar while Norton and I sat at a table in the darkest part of the bar.\u00a0 Homer came to the table with three beers.\u00a0 I drank that beer with no problem.\u00a0 Besides Millie, the bartender, we were the only people in the bar.\u00a0 Millie is another story for a future blog.<\/p>\n

Recently, I discovered that the Oasis has closed \u201cpermanently.\u201d The Oasis was along Highway 30 in Denison, and Highway 30 was my route to and from work. I stopped there often on my way home, but never on the way to work. I did encounter a few people who did stop there prior to their work shift, but not me.<\/p>\n

If I could describe The Oasis as I knew it in the 1970s through 1980s, I would say it was similar to \u201cCheers,\u201d but with a country flavor. It had its bartender Coach in Millie. Millie was tending bar when I was served in the 1960s, and she was still there when I left Denison in the early 1990s. There was a joke that when the bar sold, she went with it, like all the fixtures.<\/p>\n

One afternoon, Byron, my co-worker, and I got off work early and decided to have a beer. We walked into The Oasis and sat at the bar. We were the only two customers in the establishment at the time. Millie was cleaning the big mirror behind the various bottles of liquor on the backside of the bar. I have never seen anyone clean the same spot over and over and over again like it took her that day. After several minutes, one of us asked (nicely, I should add) if we could get a couple of beers. She didn\u2019t stop cleaning for a second, but said: \u201cCan\u2019t you see I\u2019m busy!\u201d And we waited a few more minutes until she was done cleaning the mirror and put away all her cleaning supplies, washed her hands, placed her hands on her hips and said, \u201cwhat do you want?\u201d We were regulars. She knew we wanted a can of Pabst and a bottle of Bud Lite. But that was Millie.<\/p>\n

We weren\u2019t the only regulars. There was LaDelle and Butch; Jerry and his wife; Marv; Pappi, the owner; Roger; the two businessmen next door; sometimes Chappy; and many more that would make the list go on and on.<\/p>\n

One occasional customer would come in on a mid-afternoon and order two Pepsi\u2019s. He pulled out a chair on one side of the square table and walked to the other side where he sat. Millie would bring the two Pepsi\u2019s (after a number of visits she would greet him at the table with two Pepsi\u2019s before he even ordered), and place one in front of him and the other in front of the vacant chair on the opposite side of the table from him. He would continue to talk to the invisible person on the other side of the table, and from time-to-time he could become quite hostile toward his guest. But they never got into a fight.<\/p>\n

Late one night, when I was working the night shift, I came in and ordered a beer. I sat down with Gale and visited for the duration of that beer. As I was about to order another, Gale said that I shouldn\u2019t drive home. He would drive my car to Vail and have Pappi pick him up and drive him back to Denison. I never argued. I wonder to this day what made them think I was drunk. It could be that they were used to me coming in around 5:00 pm rather than 10:30 pm. It doesn\u2019t hurt to refrain from arguing with drunks and fools.<\/p>\n

When I noticed last month that the Oasis was \u2018permanently\u2019 closed, I figured Millie retired and could not be replaced, or she went to that mirror-washing place in paradise. What would Denison\u2019s Oasis be without Millie?<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I got friends in low places Where the whiskey drowns And the beer chases my blues away And I’ll be okay Yeah, I’m not big on social graces Think I’ll slip on down to the Oasis Friends in low places … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1112,1316,1317,1318,802],"class_list":["post-2382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crawford-county-iowa","tag-garth-brooks","tag-marshall-tucker-band","tag-millie","tag-the-oasis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2382"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2384,"href":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2382\/revisions\/2384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iowappa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}