Sarah Ransom

Sarah Ransom, the crusty old bartender and owner of the Dry Creek Cafe beer joint at 4812 Mount Bonnell Road, died Thursday night at Scott & White Memorial Hospital in Temple. She would have been 96 next Thursday.

If you walked into the Dry Creek Cafe, you knew you'd get verbally whiplashed by Sarah, known affectionately as "the meanest bartender in Austin, Texas." And she didn't mind the reputation.

Still, Sarah was loved by many of the folks at the receiving end of one of her spoken-word canings.

She was a hard worker. She ran the place from 1956 until about six years ago. And most of the time she ran it by herself.

"Oh, gosh, everybody that came in there knew they were going to get chewed out in one form or another," said Jay "Buddy" Reynolds, a former state representative and her son. He now owns the bar and lives in a house he built behind the place.

One cause for abuse from Ransom was leaving empty beer bottles on the upstairs deck, because she didn't want to climb the stairs to collect them. If you didn't bring your empties back downstairs to the bar, you'd get hammered.

"If you wanted another beer, you better have empty beer bottles," her son recalled. "If you didn't have one, she'd just tell you where the door was and get out."

Reynolds recalled that his mother had posted her own version of the 23rd Psalm on the back of the front door of the beer joint that ended with "I shall fear no evil because I'm the meanest SOB in the valley." "She had it glued up for a long time," Reynolds said. "I used to read it all the time."

Many's the customer who can tell you stories about how she laid into somebody. Eddie Wilson, owner of Threadgill's Restaurants in Austin and one of a few people she seemed to like, recalls the time he sent a kid out there with instructions on what to do to keep from getting cussed out.

Wilson recalled that Ransom kept an ugly ceramic pig on the bar as a tip jar. The kid Wilson sent out there made the mistake of leaving a $1 tip on the counter. Wilson says she hollered at the kid as he was leaving, "Hey boy, come here." When the kid returned to the bar to ask what the problem was, she bellowed at him, "The damn dollar goes in the pig."

Austin attorney and musician Bobby Earl Smith was so taken with her that he wrote a song back in the '70s called the "Dry Creek Inn." But when he went to the bar to take photos of the building for an album cover, he was not well-received.

"We were out there snapping away and all of a sudden the door flies open and Sarah says, 'Bobby Smith, I know what you're doing and get your ass out of here.' I hauled tail. I'm not crazy," Smith said.

Smith added, however, that Ransom was a good mother. He was impressed after talking with her children about how she kept on them about hard work and a good education as they were growing up.

Going places with her was another kind of education.

Reynolds remembers the time five or six years ago when he took his mother to the bank, and the teller suggested to her that she'd do better if she kept more of her money in savings and less in her checking account.

"She said, 'You mind your -(blankin') business and I'll mind mine,'" Reynolds said. "I said, 'Don't feel bad. She told me the same thing.'"Reynolds added that his mother was married four times and outlived all of her husbands. "Oh, God yeah, she put them in the grave," Reynolds said. "She was like living with a bobcat or a black widow spider."

Ransom is survived by her son, Buddy; her daughter, Frances Phillips of the San Diego area; a brother, Lee Boyd of Arlington; two sisters, Mary Barker of Giddings, and Dolly Mabry of Vancouver, Wash.; 12 grandchildren; 37 great-grandchildren; and two great-great-grandchildren.

John Kelso American-Statesman