by Debbi | Feb 29, 2008 | Famous Folk
Gale Sayers, Kansas football legend and the youngest person to ever be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame (at age 34), made an appearance at The Sandbar once upon a time.
According to former bartender Pat, he was working the door one night when Sayers, nicknamed the "Kansas Comet," and some of his hangers-on arrived. Many nights The Sandbar has a cover charge, and this was one of those nights. Pat informed the group of the $1 cover charge and Mr. Sayers reached for his wallet without argument. (In doing so, he also dropped a twenty on the ground, and Pat graciously picked it up for him.)
A member of the entourage rather rudely told Pat that "Gale Sayers doesn't pay cover charges," to which Pat replied that someone would need to pay it or Gale Sayers wouldn't be coming in the bar. The rude guy paid it.
To his credit, Mr. Sayers himself did not complain about the cover charge and was perfectly willing to pay it. After all, it was just a buck.
Later that night, Mr. Sayers autographed his dollar bill and it was proudly hung on the wall of the bar. I wanted to show you a picture of it, but you try finding a specific dollar bill among the thousands on the wall. And it's probably in Ottawa anyway.
Mr. Sayers will be in Lawrence this weekend. He's written a new book, "Sayers: My Life and Times," and he'll be signing copies in the KU Bookstore on Saturday, March 1, from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.
He's donating 100% of royalties from book sales to the Gale Sayers Center, a not-for-profit organization, and the KU Bookstores will also contribute $5 for each book sold Saturday.
Perhaps he'll make an appearance at The Sandbar this weekend. That would be cool.
In completely unrelated news, but so exciting that I couldn't wait to share it, construction on this year's float began today!
by Debbi | Aug 16, 2007 | Famous Folk
Perhaps one of the more interesting famous people who have been in The Sandbar would be Paul Rudd. You may know him as Mike, Phoebe’s husband, from Friends; or one of the buddies from the 40 Year Old Virgin movie; or, like me, you may know (and love) him best as the older, smarter stepbrother in the movie Clueless.
He’s been in The Sandbar at least once and maybe more than that. The one time we know of, he was dancing on the bar right beside Dave, and Dave didn’t even know who he was until after he was gone. How could he not know, you ask? Well, he’s a lot shorter than you might think. And he was there with a bachelor party, and he was dancing around with one of their inflatable, er, props that was smacking Dave in the face. As you can imagine, Dave had other things on his mind besides wondering if maybe the person next to him happened to be a famous movie star.
One of our patrons, Karissa, tracked him down that night after he left the bar (at Quinton’s, we think) and got a picture, which she sent to us for our collection.
You probably already know that Mr. Rudd grew up in Overland Park, went to Shawnee Mission West (that was a trivia question at The Bottleneck’s Smackdown Trivia), and went to KU briefly. It’s pretty cool to see someone from “around here” make it big, especially when they come back to visit.
by Debbi | Jul 27, 2007 | Famous Folk
The Sandbar is known around town as a place where anyone can go {as long as they're 21, of course.} Over the years, we've had all sorts of people visit our little oasis: students, teachers, doctors, plumbers, city commissioners, lawyers, and even the unemployed. We've even had a few famous folk show up at our door.
Remember Al Bohl? The controversial former athletic director at the University of Kansas and
his wife stopped in on a Saturday afternoon several years ago. Coleen was working and she treated them very well, even running a special hurricane for them. Mr. and Mrs. Bohl were very gracious and friendly customers. Mrs. Bohl even wore the mermaid costume, but I don't know if they danced on the bar. This was back when we kept the Polaroid camera at the bar to take pictures of the mermaids (and famous people). Mr. Bohl kindly autographed the picture for us and it hung on the wall for awhile, until he left KU so gracefully with that "crushed like a dove" speech. The picture disappeared into a desk drawer somewhere, and he hasn't been seen in The Sandbar since.
