Photograph by Matthew Suárez

The Silver Fox owns its status as a sunrise sipper saloon. The first patron every morning gets a rubber bracelet emblazoned with “6:00 a.m. club.”

The bar at the corner of 30th Street and Adams Avenue is named Polite Provisions. The outfit that runs it, Consortium Holdings, bills it as “an ode to the extinct neighborhood institution that is the neighborhood drugstore/soda fountain.” It’s a wonderfully tasteful sort of place that serves complicated, fascinating craft cocktails, and it opens, tastefully, at 4 pm on weekdays and noon on the weekends. But I can remember a time before Polite Provisions, when the drinking hole that graced the corner of Adams Avenue and 30th Street was named Homer’s, and had a big sign reading: “Open at 6:00 am.” Like a siren’s sweet serenade, that sign beckoned, urging passersby to stop in for an eye-opener.

In 1980, I was in high school, and I drove by Homer’s five times a week as our carpool headed to deposit my sisters at Our Lady of Peace — typically, two minutes after the bell rang. Once the girls were dropped off and sprinting to class, the Hyatt boys and I leisurely headed to Saints, often in my three-on-the-floor Dodge Dart, with AC/DC or David Bowie blasting from after-market speakers. We saw Homer’s sign and we heard its siren song, and we cursed the powers that declared us too young to start the day off right with a breakfast beer. It seemed as natural an act as dumping a couple of plastic shot glasses of hot sauce on an order of Roberto’s rolled tacos. Hell, it was almost a sin not to. By way of formal protest, we made a solemn pact to throw back a couple of brews one day at this mecca of morning merriment. We just needed serviceable fake IDs, or to turn 21.

Sadly, we never darkened Homer’s doors. Like most underage drinkers living in San Diego back then, we drank at Tijuana Tilly’s, or at Ski Beach, or at college parties. By the time we were 21, the idea of hitting a neighborhood dive like Homer’s couldn’t compete with the attractions of the PB bar scene. When I finally rediscovered Adams Avenue in my 30s, it was to drink at Rosie O’Grady’s. By then, Homer’s had shuttered its doors.

Also by then, my desire to drink first thing in the morning had cooled some. In college, noon seemed a reasonable time to crack a cold one. (Though I did occasionally employ the old imbiber’s caveat: it’s noon someplace.) But by the time I entered the grown-up work world, I had set 5 pm as a respectable start to happy hour. Still, visiting a bar before breakfast remained an itch left unscratched. It wasn’t a habit I wanted to form, but it was an adventure I still wanted to have.

A Little Context

Before I get too many Irish coffees into this story, a bit of context might be helpful. I am both an imbiber and a scholar of drinking. As a social scientist — or field alcohologist — I’ve spent 30 years studying how, when, where, and why people drink. A good deal of that work has occurred in bars, but of course, not all. For instance, in a study where my team collected breath alcohol samples from 1400 people attending over 200 randomly selected parties at SDSU, we found that women out-drank men at costume parties with sexually explicit themes (basically any theme that included “ho” in the title). Our study went viral before going viral was a thing. We even ended up in The Onion! Another time, I put fake recycling bins in a retirement home in order to estimate how much the residents drank — I suspected that they had under-reported their drinking in interviews. We ran the program for a year and learned there was almost a perfect relationship between how much they drank and the arrival of their social security checks. By mid-month, everyone was sober, and stayed that way until the next check came.

My personal drinking and my science are not, it should be noted, mutually exclusive. I don’t believe a scientist can truly understand drinking until they spend some time in bars, drinking and talking with the patrons. As I have explained to friends after a few cocktails, a little debauchery often fuels my investigations. But research aside, I like to drink. Most alcohol researchers do. I find life a little fuller when I sip a glass of Anderson Valley Cabernet with an elk steak, or nurse a neat Kentucky bourbon by the firepit, or slurp a couple cold .394s on a hot afternoon at Petco. I also like the allure of bars, what they represent, and their place in history.

Historically, people met in bars (or their variations—pubs, taverns, clubs) to do everything from socializing to planning revolutions. I say historically, but things haven’t changed all that much. Who doesn’t know of some marriage, friendship, business partnership, grudge, feud, or breakup that somehow involved a bar? For me, at their best, bars have potential to be what the late writer and famous sociologist Ray Oldenburg called a “third place” — a place we could go to chill, a place that wasn’t home or work. A place like the titular bar in the ’80s TV hit Cheers, where, as the theme song put it, “everybody knows your name.”

I’ve had a few places where I was a regular of sorts. In college, I had a Kelly’s Pub on El Cajon Boulevard and Billy Bone’s in PB. In the late ’90s, my softball team drank after games at Lou Jones on Adams. But for the same reasons that most of us would list (e.g., having a kid, working too much, having to drive, etc.), I have never really experienced a true third-place type of bar. I hoped I might find one by hitting the morning shift.

The Lamplighter

There are maybe about 7-10 bars in San Diego that open at 6 am. Because there is no accurate list of such places, and because my liver isn’t getting any younger, I ended up visiting the four places my elbow-bending buddies recommended the most: The Lamplighter, The Silver Fox, The Alibi, and Norm’s Cocktails. I ended up visiting them all twice.

I started my spirited quest at The Lamplighter on Washington Street. Established in 1957, it’s one of San Diego’s older bars, a classic watering hole. The atmosphere is old-school cool: moody, with a dark interior and the bar sitting center stage. A couple of overhead lanterns that resemble the one on the bar’s logo and large neon “Merry Christmas” and “Cash Only” signs provide light. Comfortable stools and black leatherette padding along the bar edges make for a pleasant bellying-up experience. My brother-in-law grew up working in his family’s bar in the Bar Area; seeing The Lamplighter, he would say it’s a proper bar.

Unfortunately, my first visit there was a bust. I went on a Tuesday around 6:15 am, hoping to find a group of regulars, but instead found the bar empty except for Georgina, the friendly bartender.

“Do you have any morning regulars?” I asked.

“Not so much anymore. We had a group of older regulars who live around here who used to come in when we opened, but they come in later in the day now. We have lots of regulars later in the day.”

“I had several people tell me The Lamplighter had a busy morning scene…”

“It depends on whether or not groups of nurses come in after their night shift. Some mornings, we might have 20 or 30 nurses here; the next morning, only one or two people wander in before 10 am.” Georgina said there was no way to predict when I might capture a throng of thirsty nurses getting their lamps lit. But I trusted my sources about the place, so I decided to make a second visit.

This time, I arrived around 6:30 am on a Thursday. A different barkeep greeted me, and I found seven patrons bellied up to the vintage bar, sipping drinks. I ordered an Irish coffee and watched for a bit. For any teetotalers or less-experienced drinkers out there, this is old-school bar etiquette when visiting a bar for the first time, especially when you’re planning to engage the regulars. Bursting into the conversation uninvited is like to going to a new acquaintance’s house and asking them to make you a ham and cheese sandwich while you use their shitter. Happily, I found that any newbie walking into The Lamplighter before the streetlights click off is quickly pulled into the conversation. A few sips into my Irish coffee, the friendly duo sitting next to me introduced themselves.

“So, are you two regulars?” I asked.

“We come here occasionally,” the female half of the duo replied.

The fellow spoke up. “I work at another bar and got off around 4:30 am. I have today off, so we decided to grab some tacos next door, then walk over here at six.”

“How often do you come out drinking in the morning?”

“About once a month. Mostly after I get off work really late. It’s too hard to kill three or four hours before bars open at six.”

“Do you always start here at The Lamplighter?”

“I like to start here, then I might head over to The Alibi, or if it’s after 8 am, I might hit The Waterfront in Downtown,” he explained.

“I’m only here today because he invited me!” added his companion.

“So, you don’t drink this early regularly?”

“Only when someone asks me to join them or I’m at the casino.” She nursed a screwdriver while we talked, ordering a second before I left.

A couple of sullen, older guys sat at the far end of the bar sipping beers. I asked the bartender if they were regulars. “I think I’ve seen one of them here later in the day. I don’t recognize the other guy,” he said.

A few minutes after I arrived, an intoxicated middle-aged woman loudly strolled in and plopped down on an empty stool. She ordered a double vodka and cranberry. I got the sense this wasn’t her first drink of the day, nor would it be her last. I let her be.

Before I left, the bartender told me that one morning this past spring, staff from all three local hospitals showed up. “We only have one bartender in the morning, and there were at least 30 people here that morning. They had me running.”

“Did they mingle, or did you have to keep them separated like rival street gangs?” I joked.

“Well, a lot of them had worked together at previous jobs. It’s a small community. So yeah, after a while they were mingling, trading stories, and buying drinks for each other.”

A Note to Teetotalers, Prohibitionists, and Bar Haters

If you strongly oppose drinking, or think bars are dens of depravity, but are still reading this — first, let me congratulate you. Second, let me save you the trouble of composing a well-meaning, carefully considered, but slightly smug and indignant letter to the editor. I’ve written them myself — before I realized they just annoyed people. I know I could have written an article about alcohol misuse and its negative health, social, legal, and economic impacts. Crafting a story about irresponsible bar owners and servers would have been be easy enough. Ditto scribbling a story on how the alcohol industry prioritizes profits over the public good. But drinking is never going away, and so I believe it is a social phenomenon worth investigating. Still here? Good!

The Silver Fox

My next visit took me to Pacific Beach’s The Silver Fox. My sister Katie McGovern — a PB local, writer, and kindred spirit when it comes to imbibing — agreed to tag along. We rolled in just after opening and were greeted by blaring heavy metal, people shooting pool, and two-thirds of the bar stools filled. I took a quick head count (a habit I owe to my research days): the place had an impressive twenty-five patrons at 6:15 am. There were three older guys (sixtyish), several twentysomethings still partying from the night before, two young couples who appeared to be on dates, and a few guys in their thirties flying solo. Men outnumbered women two to one.

Katie and I each ordered an Irish coffee. When Jesse the bartender returned with our eye-openers, I asked, “Are most of these folks coming from work?”

“Some of our regulars work the nightshift,” he answered. “We get some hospitality people who work a few hours after the bars close, cleaning and restocking. They grab food or go home to change then come in for a couple before heading home to go to bed.”

“How about the older guys down at the other end of the bar?” I asked.

“They are PB locals and regulars here — mostly mornings, but I think I’ve seen them here at night too. They start early and head home by noon most days.”

“How many of these folks are regulars?” I asked.

“Most of the people in here are local and regulars. Actually, I recognize everyone in here but two people.”

“Do you like working the morning shift?” I asked.

“Oh yeah. I like working the morning better than the night shifts. The regulars are super cool. It is a chill party vibe most mornings.”

Katie and I chatted while she enjoyed a Bloody Mary for round two. I was driving, so I settled for a black coffee top-off. “If you didn’t know better, you’d think it was 7 pm on Friday,” Katie noted. That summed it up perfectly.

The Silver Fox owns its status as a sunrise sipper saloon. The first patron every morning gets a rubber bracelet emblazoned with “6:00 am club.” A large billboard above the building announces to the world that “the 6:00 am Club is just downstairs.” And besides the standard Irish coffees and Bloody Marys, they feature several interesting morning offerings, such as the creatively named “PB Screwed and Creamed Itself,” which appropriately features San Diego’s own Skrewball peanut butter whiskey.

Before we headed next door to the Broken Yolk to soak up some booze with a hearty breakfast, Jesse swung by and slipped me a 6 am club bracelet. I wore it for the rest of my pickled pilgrimage.

“Last question: is this a normal crowd for the morning or is this just a Saturday crowd?”

“It’s PB,” replied Jesse. This is normal.”

Besides Jesse and the other friendly bar staff, I got a chance to talk to three tiers of regulars: the old guard, the new old guard, and the future old guard. First up: Pete, the last soldier in a group of old guard regulars who started drinking at the Silver Fox in 1990.

“Do you come in every morning?”

“I try to! I’m in here almost every morning. There used to be five or six of us every morning who met here. I was the youngest of the group, and now I’m the only one who still comes daily.”

“Are you a PB local?”

“I live in Downtown and take the trolley and bus to get here.”

“What keeps bringing you in?”

“Well, some mornings, there are strippers here who come in after their shift,” he said with a laugh, before continuing: “When we first started coming here, there was a grumpy bartender named Cassey who always had a group of pretty women around him. We called them ‘Cassey’s girls.’ He retired a while ago.”

Next, I talked to “Mike” (Not every morning drinker wants their real name in The Reader!), who has been in the club since 2007.

“How did you first find the 6:00 am club?”

“Well, I had just moved to PB, and lived a block away. I was walking to get a coffee early one morning and noticed the Silver Fox was open and people were partying. I came in, and have been coming ever since. When I first started coming, a lot of the people in here now were also here then. We were the young crowd. Now, as the older guys fade out, we are looking at ourselves and saying, ‘Damn, we’re the old guys now.’”

“Are any days more popular for the regulars?”

“Not more popular, but different. Mondays are busy. We like to get here early on Sundays during football season. We pace ourselves and watch at least the first game here.”

“So, you know most of the people in here?”

“Oh yeah! I’d say on any given morning, 80% of the people in here are regulars. Most are here for an hour or two. If there are games on or on the weekends, longer.”

Finally, I talked with “Felicia” a newbie regular and PB resident.

“What drew you to this place?”

“Well, I met some of the regulars and then started coming myself. There are lots of friendly characters here,” she said.

“What do you like the best about drinking here?”

“You gotta like a place that cuts you off one day, then lets you back in the next,” she said with a laugh. “I made a great first impression!”

The Alibi

As with The Lamplighter, numerous people suggested I check out The Alibi if I wanted to experience San Diego’s early morning bar scene. Established in 1936, The Alibi is another San Diego icon. While The Lamplighter had a 1962 ambience, The Alibi’s interior felt more recent, with splashes of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. About a dozen people were drinking when I got there shortly after opening. I ordered my Irish coffee, and quickly learned that The Alibi has several morning regulars, and that almost everyone there knew each other. One guy was enjoying a Mickey D’s breakfast sandwich with his beer. A couple of guys had their dogs with them. There was even a water dish set out for the dogs.

“Do you guys come every morning?” I asked a group sitting in a both.

“Most days. We all live in the neighborhood,” one of the older guys with a dog answered.

“I come before golf…after golf…anytime,” the other dog owner added with a chuckle.

The guy sitting next to me at the bar chimed in, “Most of us are retired. We all golf together and hang out here most mornings.”

One of the female regulars gave me a tour, proudly pointing out the beautiful mural of a naked woman on a wall behind a small booth area at the back end of the bar. She took me to the patio and showed me the “things I want to do before I die” board on the patio, and also her prized Alibi poker chip.

While I was there, a couple of younger guys came in, had a quick drink, and headed out. A few more regulars trickled in. It was not as bustling as The Silver Fox, but it was busy enough to keep the bartender moving. Most people were drinking beer, or that vodka and cranberry cocktail that seems to be a standard day-starter everywhere.

“This is a nice vibe,” I said to the guys in the booth.

“It is. The place turns over in the afternoon and a younger, rowdier crowd shows up. But we all live nearby, and this is a nice way to get the day going.”

Norm’s Cocktails

Three of the bartenders I met during my research suggested Norm’s. Several patrons seconded the motion. That was enough to merit a visit. Norm’s Cocktails is on the La Mesa end of El Cajon Boulevard, in one of the few working-class areas in San Diego that hasn’t either declined or been gentrified. The area reminded me of Adams Avenue back in the late ’70s and early ’80s — before it got briefly sketchy, then became upscale and hip.

A Homer’s-like neighborhood… check.

Norm’s is housed in a single-story building, nothing special, no flashy signage; it looks like the other buildings in the area — it belongs there.

A Homer’s type building… check.

I walked in around 6:30 am on a Friday. The place was laid out in the most basic of bar layouts—a long backlit bar with stools lining one wall, a single pool table in the middle of the room, a few TVs, some cheeky signs, posters for beer promotions, and few random tables with chairs. The booze and beer selection were solid, unpretentious — no $2000 “trophy bottles” spotlit on the top shelf.

On the morning I visited, six guys sat shoulder-to-shoulder at the far end of the small bar. Like me, I’d guess they were all north of 55 years old. They all gave me the once over when I walked in. I later learned the group were regulars, all former Marines, all with self-assigned stools and coffee cups.

I plopped down, bellied up, and ordered my Irish coffee. Jay, the owner and barkeep, made it quickly and set it before me in a normal glass — no decorative chocolate sprinkles, no handmade whipped cream. “So, did you just drive by and see we were open?” he asked.

I explained what I was doing, and we talked about the bar scene in San Diego now and back in the day. “These guys are all regulars…” I said, realizing it was more of a statement than question.

“Yeah, they all live in the neighborhood. They all walk over. Some mornings, they are outside waiting before I get here.”

“Do you have any nighttime regulars?”

“A few, but we do 70% of our business in the day. We have lots of retired guys come in early and hang out for a few hours, then walk home,” Jay explained.

I chatted with the guys at the bar. They were friendly and happy to offer information, but were quick to get back to their conversation about how Clint Eastwood would be a better president than Biden (who they regarded as too old to do the job). When I first explained my story, one regular sternly quipped, “Don’t go writing a story that will draw a bunch of people in here and ruin my mornings!”

Another told me, “We are here most mornings. Jay runs a great place.”

I spoke with a regular named Ron who offered a wealth of information. “I’ve been coming here most mornings for the past five years. This is the best morning bar in San Diego,” he said. “I go to Lamplighter and Alibi occasionally. Several of the guys do. They are all nice places to drink, and I have lots of friends at them, but Norm’s is my home bar. It has great bartenders —Jay and Pam — with great regulars. We self-police the bar and are protective of what we have here. It’s a great place to drink.” That pretty much sums up a third-place bar.

I decided to buy them a round to celebrate the end of my researches. Jay made a pitcher of a vodka, cranberry, OJ, and 7 Up, a tasty concoction he called the Jay-Z, and poured out shooters. Cheers. The round was $18. I chuckled to myself, thinking of all the single drinks I’ve had over the years that cost that much or more. Perhaps it was the hour, perhaps it was the company, perhaps it was the place, but this last drink of the journey tasted better than any of them.

A simple neighborhood third place…Check.

Now, there is only one button left undone. Some morning soon, I will roust my old buddy Joe from bed, drag him over to Norm’s, order a couple Irish whiskeys, and we will toast the ghost of Homer’s.