SAVANNAH — The bar rules posted at the Original Pinkie Masters are strictly enforced.
No credit. No smoking. No standing on the bar.
Pinkie’s, an iconic watering hole in the downtown historic district, is cash only and burning a heater inside a business is against the law in Savannah. As for the third no-no, there is one exception.
Jimmy Carter is allowed on the counter.
Carter made Pinkie Masters quietly famous in 1978 when as president of the United States he hopped atop the bar to deliver a speech. A plaque marks the spot where Carter, a proud teetotaler, climbed onto the perch, raised a Pabst Blue Ribbon and eulogized the tavern’s namesake, a friend who’d died months earlier.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Masters was a political power broker and his bar a Democratic Party epicenter, Savannah’s version of Manuel Maloof and his Atlanta haunt, Manuel’s Tavern. Any Democrat with statewide aspirations, be they a local lawyer or a southwest Georgia peanut farmer, paid tribute at Pinkie Masters.
“Most people knew if you were looking for someone in government or politics in Savannah, if you stayed at Pinkie’s long enough, you’d find them,” said Wayne Franklin, a Pinkie’s regular since the time he was old enough to drink in the early 1970s. “More like they’d find you.”
For Carter, who celebrated his 100th birthday in October, the connection to Pinkie, both man and bar, went beyond using the tavern for political publicity stunts or to schmooze donors. The plaque, along with all the Carter memorabilia that still graces the bar’s walls, is not unlike the foamy head of a perfectly poured draft beer — eye catching, but far from all of the drink.
Carter’s words from the bar top that day, March 17, 1978, hint at a genuine bond: “I hope none of us ever forget the kind of warmth and friendship that Pinkie showed us.”
Credit: Justin Taylor for The Atlanta Journal Constitution
Credit: Justin Taylor for The Atlanta Journal Constitution
That fondness has spawned a string of urban legends over the decades, like how Carter first announced his run for president atop the bar (he didn’t) or how Carter’s embrace of the campaign bumper sticker was inspired by small wooden “Carter” signs Pinkie crafted to hang off the back of bar regulars’ cars (speculation).
The true nature of the relationship can be found deep in the Masters’ family records and the childhood memories of one of Pinkie’s descendants, his much younger cousin Tommy Sullivan. The cards, letters, telegrams, photos, video reels and anecdotes reveal a connection forged on Sunday suppers, pickup softball games and late-night political strategy sessions.
“Carter was close with Pinkie, his brother Charlie, their sisters, the whole family,” said Sullivan, who’s been the keeper of the family’s history since Charlie Masters died in 2017. “And for a man who didn’t drink, he loved Pinkie Masters bar.”
Food and fellowship, with a side of politics
Votes first brought Carter to Savannah, but chicken and pasta kept him coming back.
Pinkie Masters, born Luis Christopher Masterpolis, opened what was originally known as The Rainbow Grill in 1951. Located on the corner of Harris and Drayton streets, the bar is a dark, cramped space that’s as unassuming as neighboring Lafayette Square is charming. A first-generation American whose parents had emigrated to Savannah from Greece, Pinkie was a boxing promoter, a chain smoker and a campaign runner.
Credit: Justin Taylor for The Atlanta Journal Constitution
Credit: Justin Taylor for The Atlanta Journal Constitution
At a time when Savannahians from the Greek and Jewish communities ran the local Democratic Party, his lounge was the nexus of the political universe.
Enter Carter, a young state senator bold enough to challenge a former governor, Ellis Arnall, and a charismatic segregationist, Lester Maddox, in the 1966 gubernatorial primary. While Pinkie backed the winner, Maddox, in that election, Carter had won over the political power broker for the future.
In the campaigns that followed — a gubernatorial win in 1970 and a presidential victory in 1976 — Carter and his advisers would frequent the Georgia coast to consult with the Masters brothers and a prominent Jewish attorney, H. Sol Clark, who Carter would later appoint as a federal appeals court judge.
A mainstay of those visits was a meal at the home of the Masterpolis sisters, three of Pinkie’s unwed siblings who lived together and took care of their mother. Their traditional Sunday supper, slow-cooked, Mediterranean-style chicken served over angel hair pasta, was a Carter favorite, Sullivan said.
“They’d make it every Sunday for people who had come in from out of town to attend the Greek Orthodox church, and it was a draw,” Sullivan said. “I’d go over on Monday and get the leftovers. It was my favorite, too.”
Credit: Justin Taylor for The Atlanta Journal Constitution
Credit: Justin Taylor for The Atlanta Journal Constitution
Sullivan, now 67, has other Carter memories. Carter taking a break from political strategizing by feeding nickels into the tavern’s mechanical slot machine. Carter recruiting tavern regulars to play in a pickup softball game with his staffers and his Secret Service detail during a presidential campaign. Finding letters, Christmas cards and telegrams from Carter and senior administration officials while cleaning out the Masterpolis sisters’ house after their deaths.
The treasure trove includes a condolence letter to Pinkie’s widow, Mary, following her husband’s death from lung cancer and signed “Mary, we love you. — J.”; a cable to Charlie Masters informing him that the family’s ancestral home, Greece, had rejoined NATO; and video reels of visits to Plains during Carter’s presidency, including one where bar regulars joined in a softball game hosted by the president.
In one of those home movies, Carter tells Pinkie that Savannah is his favorite city in Georgia and “I’m going to remember the folks who were good to me when I didn’t have any friends.”
A sampling of Carter memorabilia papers the walls of Pinkie Masters today. A photo of a smiling Carter and Pinkie, cigarette between his lips, in the Oval Office. A signed photo from Carter’s inaugural parade addressed to Charlie Masters. A newspaper clipping showing a Pinkie’s patron affixing a “Carter for President” bumper sticker to a car in 1974, before Carter officially launched his bid. A picture of Carter posing with Pinkie and Mary Masters inside the bar.
“We ran out of room to hang stuff,” said Matt Garappolo, a longtime regular who bought the stripped shell of the bar along with business partner Mike Warren in 2016 after a lease dispute led to a temporary closure. “The link between Carter and the Masters family runs deeper than any of us know.”
Credit: Justin Taylor for The Atlanta Journal Constitution
Credit: Justin Taylor for The Atlanta Journal Constitution
Carter’s famed appearance at the tavern on St. Patrick’s Day in 1978, the first since Pinkie’s death, is a public testament. The then-president was in town to address the annual Hibernian Society dinner, a gala that dates to the early 1800s and typically attracts high-profile VIPs as speakers. The pre-dinner reception was at the DeSoto Hotel, located next door to Pinkie’s bar.
Soon after Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, arrived ahead of the reception, the president and his bodyguards ducked across Drayton Street into the bar. According to a report in the next day’s Savannah Morning News, Carter was helped up onto the bar by Charlie Masters to pay his final respects.
Carter “began a 10-minute eulogy for his friend, Pinkie Masters,” wrote Gordon Gardner in an anniversary piece 25 years later, a story that hangs in Pinkie Masters to this day. “ … I got the best story of that St. Patrick’s day in Savannah.”
‘I’m back’: The legacy continues
Carter’s Pinkie’s connection didn’t end with the death of the tavern owner — or that of his own political career, which came two years later with a loss to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election.
Carter figured in at least two more memorable Pinkie Masters moments over the last four decades.
The first came in 2002, when a then-77-year-old Carter sneaked into the tavern. Bartender Dirk Hardison recalls seeing a familiar-looking elderly man being helped onto the top of a trash can and then the bar and proclaim “I’m back” to a room of incredulous patrons.
“I don’t remember anything else he said,” said Hardison, who now pours drinks down the street from Pinkie Masters at O’Connell’s Pub. “I was so stunned.”
Carter’s latest and probably last brush with Pinkie’s bar happened in 2017. During the lease dispute that led to the tavern’s purchase by Garappolo and Warren, the plaque commemorating Carter’s eulogy was removed and disappeared.
The marker found its way back under mysterious circumstances — “I can’t talk about it” is the only explanation Garappolo will offer — and was polished, replaced and rededicated on St. Patrick’s Day 2017, 39 years to the day from Carter’s speech.
Credit: Justin Taylor for The Atlanta Journal Constitution
Credit: Justin Taylor for The Atlanta Journal Constitution
Not long after, the bar received a congratulatory letter from Carter. “I will never forget standing on the bar to say thank you,” it read.
Other political figures have visited over the years in hopes the Pinkie Masters magic that helped Carter will rub off on them. Al Gore made a pitch during his 2000 presidential campaign. Carter’s grandson, Jason, stopped at Pinkie’s while running for governor in 2014.
Today’s Pinkie’s is not the political hub of yesteryear. No longer do young attorneys and business leaders huddle in corner booths plotting alliances ahead of runs for local office. The mayor, Van Johnson, is not a regular the way John Rousakis, who led the city for 20 years, once was. And the Chatham Democratic Party is now a much larger and more diverse organization.
“You’ll never come in here and have a cable news channel on, so you don’t have that spark that lights off political discussions,” Garappolo said. “There’s irony in the fact that things never get too political in here.”
The one politics-related subject frequently mentioned in Pinkie’s — usually by a customer who sits at the bar stool in front of the Carter plaque — is the former president’s health. A cancer survivor, Carter has been in hospice care in his hometown Plains for nearly two years.
“When he goes, you know they’ll be a big send-off here,” said Burke Stewart, a bartender and Pinkie’s unofficial Carter historian. “Somebody other than Carter may even get to stand on the bar.”
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