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Bye-Bye Birdie: landmark Exeter bar closing

Tiny Klapal is closing his Ooh Ooh Bird Inn, a family business, Saturday

By Jack Smiles jsmiles@psdispatch.com
Times Leader Staff Writer

Back in the anthracite heyday miners working the Exeter colliery bellied up to the bar at Veronica Shonk’s Cafe. Standing with a foot on the rail, they drank 12 cent bottles of Stegmaier’s or Bartell’s beer and spit juice from their chaws and cigars into five spittoons.

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Tiny Klapal at the Ooh, Ooh Bird Inn with some of his license plate collection on the wall behind him.

Photo by Jack Smiles

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Veronica’s grandson Andrew “Tiny” Klapal’s job was cleaning those spittoons with sawdust and a hose.

That was Tiny’s first bar job. His last will be saying good-bye to his patrons when the closes his landmark Ooh, Ooh Bird Caf� for the last time come Saturday.

In 1954 the business was moved into a new bar built next door to Shonk’s at 724 Tunkhannock Avenue. It was rechristened Martha’s Caf�, after Veronica’s daughter and Tiny’s mother. Martha ran the bar while her husband Andrew worked in the Harry Colliery in Swoyersville.

In 1972 the year his father died and his mother retired, Tiny, then 31, took over the business and changed the name to the Ooh Ooh Bird Inn. In the now-it-can-be-told department the name came from an incident that happened on a trip to Super Bowl IV in New Orleans in 1970. In New Orleans with his friend Ticy Marianacci, Tiny bought some Dunking Birds as souvenirs. Dunking, or Dippy Birds are a glass novelty item which act as a sort of perpetual-motion device. Anyway, Tiny put one of the birds on a chair. Ticy accidentally sat on it and when it broke, he said, “Uh, oh” which sounded more like “Ooh-Ooh.”

In the Ooh Ooh glory days, Tiny ran dart leagues and sponsored softball and Little League teams and bus trips to sports events. The bar developed a reputation for dynamite chicken wings and a fun, no-trouble, family-values atmosphere.

Tiny married one of his customers, Georgia Sutton, in a legendary ceremony held in the bucket of a pay loader. That was typical Tiny who became as well-known for his corny jokes as for his wings.

Tiny is a big, in more ways than one, football fan and says he as missed no more than 10 Wyoming Area games in the 42 year history of the school. At Exeter High School in the 1950s he was a kicker for the football team, where he played under an assumed name to hide the fact that he was 12 years old. A car accident a few years later ended his football career.

In 1999 Tiny changed name from the Ooh-Ooh Bird Inn to Caf� joking, “There were too many patrons that would come in late at night for a room since it was called an inn, so we changed the name to caf�.”

Tiny and Georgia have two daughters, Karen Nocito and Andrea Waters. Though they helped out at Tiny’s they don’t want to take it over completely, so with Tiny ready to retire to bar will close Saturday. There’ll be a buffet and Tiny invites all his old patrons to stop by, that is, what’s left of them. Tiny said 91 of his regular customers have died since he took over in 1972. That he would know that is also typical of Tiny. He’s a collector of facts and stuff.

He recalls that when he was growing up working for his grandmother at Shonk’s, the cigarettes in the bar’s machine were 28 cents a pack. Customers put 30 cents in the machine which dispensed the packs with the change, two pennies, in the pack’s cellophane wrapper. Many of the customers left the pennies on the bar. Tiny collected them and says he has $800 worth.

His most famous collection is his license plates which cover just about every square foot of the bar’s walls. There are more than 900 of them from all 50 states and all over the world. There’s an original 1913 PA plate and plates from Saudi Arabia and Australia.

Here’s another Tiny fact: Pennsylvania issued new license plates every year until 1959, after which they began issuing stickers.