I was out buying something on Facebook marketplace tonight in Van Nuys, and I realized that I was only a couple blocks from Merle Travis’s old house. As I was driving away, I passed a bar called Ireland’s 32, and I recalled a story that Merle’s stepson, Michael Robinson, told me during the writing of the Travis biography I wrote a few years ago:
“There’s a bar on Burbank Boulevard, the closest bar to our old house over there on Ranchito. If you go behind the building, you’ll see a telephone pole that’s slightly bent. That happened one night when Travis was leaving the place. He had a 1957 Thunderbird and he completely screwed the whole thing up, he somehow got it caught on that telephone pole, and he just kept ramming it and ramming it trying to get free. I bet if you go behind that bar today, that telephone pole is still bent over, just a little bit.”
I can verify that as of tonight, December 23, 2024, Merle Travis’s bent telephone pole still stands, behind Ireland’s 32 bar in Van Nuys, California.
