Big ideas at the new “Office Lounge”...
…offering camaraderie like old times in a favorite “newspaper bar.”
DES MOINES, Iowa, Oct. 23, 2022 – The Office Lounge, a downtown Des Moines bar that was a legendary hangout for Iowa journalists from the 1960s until it closed in the 1990s, is “re-opening” this week, and you’re all invited.
Oh, the original owners-operators Rocky Gabriel, his ex-wife Dorothy Gabriel and their daughter Roxie Gabriel Beck won’t be there. They’re deceased.
But we’ll honor their spirits and the spirit of the little bar where a whole lot of big ideas were launched back when.
The new Office Lounge is re-opening “virtually,” meaning that it’s going to be online, not meaning that it’s going to be virtuous.
On the last Fridays of the month – starting this coming Friday, Oct. 28 – we members of the new “Iowa Writers Collaborative” will be hosting a Zoom call at 12 noon CT. We’ll be talking about the columns and stories we’re working on, asking you for ideas for future pieces we can write, and stirring the discussions on matters of interest to Iowans.
There are 15 of us from across the state – covering a wide variety of topics – who are now writing for the Iowa Writers Collaborative. By mid-week, we’ll each be sending the “Zoom link” for the Friday “Office Lounge” discussions to our paid subscribers. And, note: You can pay at different levels to support our work.
The original Office Lounge occupied a small ground-floor corner of the old Royal Union Building and had an address of 710 Grand Avenue. It offered a side-door entrance just across a narrow alley from the Des Moines Register & Tribune.
The former Des Moines Register & Tribune building backed up to Grand Avenue, and now the Des Moines Marriott Hotel and the Ruan Center are just east.
When Dorothy Gabriel died in 2016, former Register business editor Dave Elbert, now a columnist for the Business Record in Des Moines, wrote that “reporters could dash out of the newsroom, down the back steps and order a drink (at the Office Lounge) in the time it took a copy kid to carry a story to the city desk. If you were quick, you could finish the drink and be back on the fourth floor before the city editor finished reading your story. Copy and desk editors gathered regularly at the Office for ‘a bowl of soup’ between editions.”
And yes, besides all the beer and alcohol, there really was soup and other food.
“Mom (Dorothy) would usually get up at 6 o’clock in the morning, head down to the office and start cooking a big pot of chili and another big pot of whatever was going to be her soup of the day,” recalled daughter Angel Gabriel, now 72, and retired in West Des Moines. “And she had six or eight different kinds of sandwiches we’d have available, too. She’d open up for business at 11 a.m., and it’d be open until 2 a.m., six days a week.
“It was a whole lot of work, but it was a fun job, too,” Angel continued. “We all enjoyed the reporters. A lot of them became like extended family to us. They were such interesting people because, with their jobs, they’d know at least a little bit about almost everything going on in the world. And it would really get interesting at election time, because we’d have a lot of those big-name reporters from the national media coming in at the Office, too.”
Did you catch her name – Angel Gabriel? I asked if she’s heard a lot of cornball lines about her name from the creatively-minded customers of the Office Lounge and others? “Oh yeah,” she said. “I’ve heard them all.”
She was one of eight children of Rocky and Dorothy. Roxie, Ross and Eddie have passed. Surviving are Angel, Peggy Davis in Texas, Celeste Gabriel-Slater in San Diego, Dino Gabriel in Solon IA, and Bobby Gabriel in Des Moines.
“Dad was the original owner of the Office,” Angel said. “When he and Mom split up, he gave her the bar instead of having to pay child support. Mom had to work two jobs at first, to get it up and running right, but she turned it into a good business.”
The original Office Lounge was located right here, now the drive-in entrance to the Des Moines Marriott Hotel.
The Office had to move in 1978 when the Royal Union Building was torn down to make way for the new Des Moines Marriott Hotel. The bar re-opened across Grand Avenue in ground-floor quarters in the then-new Seventh Street Parking Garage, owned by the City of Des Moines. It was just east of the old YWCA. Now, both that parking ramp and the Y-building have been replaced by a newer parking ramp.
Oh, the stories!
“My favorite memory of the Office Lounge,” said Dan Piller, of Des Moines, who covered transportation and later agriculture for the Register, “were the occasions when the phone would ring and Dorothy would call out, ‘All Register guys, get upstairs. A tornado just hit…’ Within minutes, a first-rate, if not slightly inebriated team of seasoned reporters was on duty and ready to crank out news.”
Piller said his wife Jan, who was also a Register newsie years ago, “mentioned to me that she first looked at me favorably – after a day or so of regarding me as a pest who was trying to come on to her – when I asked her down to the Office Lounge after work. I told her the Office was where people really found out what was going on at the paper. At the time – 1973 – it wasn’t so common for women to go down there, and later Dorothy Gabriel told Jan that it was neat that young women staffers, even interns, were now included in the after-work drinking. Jan always mentions this when we talk about how we first got together. It took a while, but eventually we did get together. Today we have good laughs about the Office Lounge days.”
Mike Wegner, also of Des Moines, who had several top editing jobs including sports editor, recalled that the Register’s late-great news editor Jimmy Larson “would retire to the Office between editions, come back and make the next edition better. Not sure how he did it, but he did.
“Another memory is that several of us were in the Office, and out in the alley, someone shouted, ‘He’s got a knife!’ We all dived under the table. We all survived.”
Here’s the alley where the side door of the old Office Lounge, which was located on the left, gave a quick exit to the loading dock and upstairs the newsroom of the Des Moines Register & Tribune.
Because so many media people hung out at the Office Lounge, it wasn’t unusual to see political and sports leaders stop in, too. I can recall the late Des Moines Mayor Richard Olson holding court there a few times. And several state legislators, staffers of the Iowa attorney general and the Polk County attorney.
Richard Gilbert, of Des Moines, remembers stopping in occasionally when he was serving as press secretary to Iowa Governor Robert D. Ray.
“In the ’70s, I made frequent visits to the Office Lounge,” Gilbert said. “I told myself it wasn’t about the beer, that it was an important part of my job as Governor Ray’s press secretary. Bob Ray was an unabashed tea-totaler and so I rationalized my Office Lounge time with self-talk, saying ‘somebody has to do the drinkin’ for the Ray Administration.’
“Entering the bar, I always feared I would be seen as an interloper among a crowd of mostly Register staff. It was a feeling, I suppose, akin to a lion tamer entering the cage. That feeling usually went away after the first couple of cold ones.”
He noted that prior to joining the Ray staff, he’d been editor of two community newspapers in Iowa – in Harlan and Eagle Grove. “From my rural Iowa perch, I had revered the Des Moines Register and had been awed by the almost moral authority its news coverage invoked.
“The sensation of going to the Office Lounge and being in the presence of journalism royalty was quickly offset by a different kind of awe. I watched editors slug down their drinks before pushing back from their place next to the empty pitcher and exit through a side door to the alley adjacent to the ‘hood’ – which is what they called the Register & Tribune loading docks. How these wordsmiths were able to walk, I couldn’t fathom. One minute some could not string a sentence together. Minutes later, they were back to writing headlines for the next edition. Totally awesome!”
For some of us, it was addictive, too. And we were years getting over it. Sadly, some never did. But what we mostly remember is that we loved the Office Lounge.
Others on our Iowa Writers Collaborative team may recall the great newspaper or media bars in their past, too.
There is some nostalgia involved, for sure, but it was the camaraderie that we all treasured most in those dark, sometimes raucous places.
And now we’re going to start sharing that virtually, online, in the bright light of noontime on last Fridays of the month. Paid subscribers should watch for the link arriving in their email, then belly-up with us by Zoom in the new “Office Lounge.”
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You can write me by commenting below here, or by direct email to me at chuck@offenburger.com.
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AN OPPORTUNITY FOR YOU READERS: Julie Gammack, the veteran Iowa journalist, radio talk show host and organizer of good causes, has summoned a group of – so far – 15 of us who are well-known Iowa writers from a variety of backgrounds, experiences and locations. We’re scattered across the state.
The 15 of us now are Gammack, Art Cullen, Mary Swander, Laura Belin, Doug Burns, Debra Engle, Dave Busiek, Jody Gifford, Suzanna de Baca, Bob Leonard, Ed Tibbetts, Dana James, Beth Hoffman, Barry Piatt and me.
We are now all members of the “Iowa Writers Collaborative,” and we’re sharing much of our new work on the “Substack” online platform.
Please consider “subscribing” to receive our individual columns. If you do, you’ll receive our new columns via email. That subscription, by the way, is free if you want it to be. Or you can pay a very modest monthly or yearly fee to us individually. Or you can make more substantial donations to us. Your choice.
Mostly, we all appreciate your readership, feedback, sharing and your ideas for more columns by each of us.
One more enticement: If you are a paying subscriber of any of our columnists, you’ll be invited to join us in a monthly Zoom call to chat about current events in Iowa, story ideas, and whatever’s happening in all our lives. Those sessions, which we’re calling the “Office Lounge” after a long-ago Des Moines bar that was a favorite hangout for Iowa media, will be held during the noon hour on the last Friday of each month, except on holidays, starting this Friday, Oct. 28. If you’re a paid subscriber of any of us, watch for the Zoom link in your email.
Here’s where you can find us and learn more about our writing:
Thank you so much. I miss that part of my life all great memories. I would love to get in contact with the young paper guys and guys that hung out there. I remember making sandwiches and helping mom make her famous soups and chili and a lot of awesome memories. Thanks again for bringing back those great times in my life
How do I know which ones I've subscribed to? I read a column and think I should subscribe, but I probably already have. Maybe you could make it easy for us to just subscribe to one and all?