By Teri Vance
John Schafer’s mother had a little sign that read, “Bloom where you’re planted.”
And in the dim lighting and swirling smoke of the Mark Twain Saloon in Virginia City, he has blossomed.
On a recent morning, a customer walked in and greeted John by gesturing to the pies behind the bar.
“Those look good,” he said.
“They’re from your apples,” John replied, taking a drag on his cigarette. “They look plastic, they look so good.”
Even at 11:00 in the morning, customers are starting to fill the stools around the bar. Some are tourists, just stepping in from the bright sunshine to grab a beer before meandering back out to explore the historic town on its old wooden sidewalks.
Most of them, though, are regulars. They set their cigarette lighters down on the bar in front of them, open a book or fall into conversation with neighbors and friends.
Jimmy Gill, 77, a Comstock resident for close to 40 years, stops by every day.
“It’s pretty much my place,” he said. “It’s where I come for my coffee and my morning paper and my crossword.”
If it feels like a family atmosphere, it is because John is carrying on the tradition of his mother Dolores “Dee” Schafer, who made a name for herself as a sharp and successful businesswoman in Virginia City before she retired in 2000.
She died Feb. 28 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease.
Dee married Francis Schafer in 1948 and they moved to South Lake Tahoe from Sebastopol, Calif., in 1958. In 1968, Francis died unexpectedly, leaving Dee to raise five children alone.
“She had a breakdown. She wigged,” John said. “But, all of the sudden, she just pulled herself out of it. I think it helped her focus. She just became more determined.”
Dee earned her contractor’s license to finish the remaining jobs for her husband’s South Lake Tahoe business. In addition to the gift shop she owned there, she set out to expand her holdings by purchasing businesses in Virginia City. The first was the Territorial Enterprise, Nevada’s first newspaper, made famous by writers including Mark Twain and Dan DeQuille.
John remembers a local man, who went by the moniker Buffalo Bill, introduced Dee as his niece to help her be more readily accepted in the small, tight-knit town.
At one point, she owned seven businesses on C Street, including the Cartwright Emporium, which sold knickknacks made mostly in Japan, an unpopular sentiment in the post-World War II era.
“We had to peel ‘Made in Japan’ stickers off every goddamn salt and pepper shaker and plate,” John recalled.
Part of her success — at a time when women were not typically involved in business — can be attributed to the place.
“Virginia City has always been live and let live. It’s what all of Nevada used to be,” John said. “You didn’t tell people what to do.”
And part of it, John said, was just her personality. He asked her a few years ago if it was difficult negotiating as a woman.
“You know, I never thought about my sex when I was making a business deal,” John remembers her saying. “It just never occurred to me.”
Not that it was always easy. John said there were times people thought they could take advantage of her because she was a woman — but usually not more than once.
“It didn’t take her long to savvy up,” he said. “She was nice, but she didn’t let people push her around.”
Though the Territorial Enterprise went defunct shortly after she bought the building, Dee maintained rights to the name, going to court to preserve its integrity when other publications tried to use it. John, who graduated from journalism school, resurrected it briefly in 1983 before Dee finally sold it in the late 1980s.
She also purchased the shop across the street from the Territorial Enterprise. At the time, a family of clairvoyants lived in the back rooms and told fortunes out front.
“She loved them,” John said. “They paid their rent once a year, in cash.”
In 1972, she decided to turn it into a bar, becoming one of the first women in Nevada to obtain a non-restricted gaming license.
Schafer
“But she bought a shop up the street for the gypsies,” John remembered. “She really liked them. She wanted them to have a place to go.”
In homage to the newspaper across the street, she dubbed her new watering hole the Mark Twain Saloon. During opening night, she learned it had operated under the same name in the 1920s.
“It was sort of meant to be,” John said.
She had a friend in Reno who was a Budweiser distributor, and called on him for an exclusive agreement.
“We were the only bar in town that had Budweiser on tap,” John recalled. “It was 35 cents a glass.”
When Dee retired in 2000, she sold the saloon to John, who, after traveling the world, had decided to return to the roots his mother planted by chance in the historic mining town.
Dee’s legacy is still felt in the bar — a portrait of her with John and his daughter hangs above the doorway — and throughout the town.
“She was a fascinating lady,” said Gill, a longtime patron. “Talking to her was like having a conversation with a bunch of different professors. And she had a lot of pepper in her tush.”
John decided against a memorial service for his mom in Virginia City, opting to hold it in Reno where she lived at the time of her death.
Instead, he plans to throw her a birthday party on July 27, this year and every year. He knows she will be there in spirit, if not in body, as he would have preferred.
“If it would have been legal, I would have stuffed my mom and put her behind the bar,” he said. “She loved serving people. She loved to talk. She brought a lot of happiness to people.”