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 Billy Goat Saloon featured in international T-shirt club
1/26/2012 By: By Melanie Brubaker Mazur
Times editor
There’s fashion. Then there’s Gem Village fashion, Billy Goat Saloon style. The comfy T-shirts and hoodies are worn by locals throughout the area, and folks periodically pull off the highway to buy a shirt as they drive along the highway and pass the bar’s distinctive sign with the goat head. And this month, the Billy Goat is receiving some national attention from www.divebartshirt.com.
The club features a shirt a month from “the best bars you’ve never heard of.” Memberships are $22 per month, and members receive a shirt from a selected bar.
And we’re not talking high-falutin’ and cocktail-sippin’ bars, but dive bars.
“It’s dark, and the floor creaks, and the roof leaks,” owner Ashley Tarkington said of her establishment in Gem Village, where dollar bills, T-shirts and photos of customers decorate the walls. “It’s the kind of place I like to hang out in.”
The Goat is the club’s featured bar of the month for January. After the end of the month, the shirt goes into the website’s “retired shirts” lineup, with a description of the bar and its locale. In the meantime, people also have been ordering shirts from the saloon’s website. www.thebillygoatsaloon.com.
Tarkington is a Fort Lewis College graduate, a personal trainer by trade, and a beer slinger by choice. At 34 years old, she takes her job seriously and considers herself fortunate to have taken the helm of a long-standing Southwest Colorado tradition.
Ashleigh started working at the bar in college and then left graduate school in California to come back and help the dying owner. The regulars who file in day in and day out, no matter the weather, is what keeps her going. She purchased the dive, built in 1952, eight years ago. Friday night, the Goat has live music and is a favorite for people who want to dance.
The owner and her customers come up with some innovative ways to promote what they fondly refer to as “The Goat.” Next Tuesday is In ‘n Out Burger night, when Tarkington’s boyfriend brings the fast food burgers in from Arizona as he’s driving home from his job in California. Tarkington hopes the publicity from the T-shirt club can help her through the winter, which can be tough months for local businesses. The club has about 5,000 members around the world, so that’s a lot of people with “Billy Goat Saloon” on their shirts.
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