Last Hand

In the Seventies Five Points gained a reputation--unfairly, the boys say--for crime, drugs, and then gangs. "If you believe the newspapers," says Richard, "then a female is not safe to walk up and down these streets. But every man respects a female on these streets or they won't be around long."

"I've been coming to this place for forty years," says Louis. "No one has been killed. There haven't been no fights, nothing. Just people associating and having fun.

"I'm not saying there's no dope around here. Whatever these guys are doing on the corner down the block is no concern of mine. I wouldn't know a piece of dope if it was laying in front of me."

In 1979 Jesse and Jimmy gave their patrons the bad news: They were getting too old to run the place and were going to close down. "So I organized a little social club," Louis recalls. "We bought the equipment and leased the building, but we were nonprofit. We only charged enough to pay the gas and electricity ...just so's we'd have a place to socialize. We called it the La Paz 12. Zeb King came up with that name."

"There was a club called the La Paz in St. Louis," says Zebedee King, who left that town in 1958 to come to Denver, where he worked as a paramedic at Denver General Hospital until he retired in 1985.

But Denver's La Paz club was more than a place to meet. "We were just a bunch of regular guys who'd buy each other drinks and loan each other money," says Zeb.

"It's more like family," adds Richard. "There are no strangers who walk through that door. It's a brother thing. You never had to go without in a time of need. For forty years, it's been one hell of a friendship."

Frank Wilson arrived in 1955 with the military. When he got out, he joined what was then Denver Tramway and eventually became the Regional Transportation District. "I worked for RTD for 24 years before retiring," he says. "I'd stop off here nearly every day, starting in 1955, after I got off work, from about 3:30 to 5 p.m. It was a good way to blow off steam, so I wouldn't go home and cuss out the wife."

The boys laugh. There was a reason they never bothered to get a telephone in the place. "That way our wives couldn't call to check up on us," says Louis.

"If we had an emergency, we could always run next door to the barbershop," adds Frank.

Of course, there was nothing to stop a spouse from marching down to the club and glaring in through a window until her man, to the delight and derision of his cohorts, scampered out to face her wrath.

"Sometimes the wives and girlfriends would get a little jealous," Richard says. "Many a man lost many a woman 'cause of this place. Meeting here became a custom, then a habit...No matter what else you were doing that night, you stopped here first."

For years the club operated on a shoestring, scraping by with just enough money to pay the rent and utilities. But when the city condemned the building a few years back, the La Paz 12 didn't have enough money to buy it.

That's when some young men bought the building from the city. "You know the type--baggy pants, sweatshirts," Louis says. "Where they got the money, I don't know. But they told us that in a short time, we were gonna have to move. So we sold the pool tables and got ready. But then they lost the money."

The building ultimately wound up in the hands of Barry & Associates, a black-owned business that has already renovated the building next door. 2745 Welton has a National Historic Landmark designation, which means that it either has been recognized as having unique architecture or is associated with an important historic person or event. In this case, it was one of the first major structures in Denver built by an African-American, Jonathan Contree, who constructed it in 1915. With landmark status comes certain grant money, which Barry & Associates is using to renovate the place.

"We're just going to frame it out, redo the front so it looks like it used to, and see who wants to do what with it," says Jay Barry, who owns Barry & Associates with his father. "A restaurant, or maybe another pool hall."

The renovation is part of the revitalization of Five Points, once the heart and forever the soul of Denver's black community. No hard feelings, the boys say; progress is progress.

"We coulda kept operating, but we didn't have the tables anymore," says Louis. "So we just hung around, like we're doing now, talking and playing dominoes and cards and things...until Mr. Barry gets ready for us to go."

"Most of these guys are retired," says Richard. "They could go to the rec center or YMCA, but then they'd have to deal with the young crowd. Here, no one bothers them."