JAVIER RUIZ, OWNER OF ICONIC 14TH ST. 123 BAR, CHECKS OUT AT 83

By Juan Montoya

For more than 50 years, the 123 Bar has been an oasis for blue-collar, working-class customers seeking a cool respite from their daily toil. 

Mechanics, day laborers, shrimpers, port workers, and an occasional lawyer or bondsman would be welcomed by owner Javier Ruiz who started the bar with his late brother Elias after running the Paradise Bar in downtown Brownsville when the downtown market square area was dotted with small cantinas where conjuntos and musicos would stroll from bar to bar selling their wares.

That era, alas, came to an end when the city decided to upgrade its downtown image and pressured the working-class joints to close seeking to establish an entertainment zone more appealing to the gentrified crowd willing to fork over up to $5 a beer or more. A domestic beer at the 123 was recently raised to $2.50.

Yesterday, the Javier Ruiz era at the 123 Bar came to its own end. At 83, Ruiz  - who was raised and lived in La Muralla barrio where he raised his family - died from a lingering illness with his wife Berta at his bedside. 

Johnny Ruiz, his son and heir apparent, vows to keep his father's iconic watering hole going at the same site. A site, which local lore holds, that was the place where Chelo Silva, La Reina del Bolero of the 1950s who went to on to achieve worldwide fame, was discovered by the Crixell brothers while she waited at tables at her parents' restaurant before it became a bar.

"My father and my uncle were musicians and heard her sing as she waited on tables and talked her reluctant parents into letting her sing at the kermess at Guadalupe Church on 13th and Lincoln streets," the late Vincent Crixell, a  pharmacist, once told a reporter. "That was her first public performance, and the rest is history."

The clientele of the 123 and other joints on the strip has changed over the years. 

During the years that shrimping was in its heyday, thirsty shrimpers would come into town after weeks or months at sea and take over the bar and splurge their salary advances awaiting their captains to get paid for their catch. Brawls were common and the entire strip from the intersection of Southmost Blvd. and 14th Street to Luis Lucio's Resaca Bar on the U.S. 77-83 frontage road was  crawling with deck hands and working-class landlubbers letting off steam and trying to hit on the bar girls of the cantinas. The merriment would often end when angry wives or house mates appeared at the door and dragged off the wayward would-be Lotharios.

The bar itself has also evolved from the days when a tree trunk served as a bar anchor and branched out to the ceiling. Today, color television screens dot the walls and an ATM machine is available for customers to withdraw currency. The garish paintings of women in seductive contortions on the walls and men's bathroom remain.

The decor is a kind of Early Southmost/Muralla kitsch.

Polita, a longtime 123 Bar employee remembers that musicos would often ply their wares at the bar and perform at $2 a song, with customers often asking for their sentimental favorite tunes, corridos or melancholy ballads about a long-lost love, Un Viejo Amor.

"Mira los pelados, chille y chille y mame y mame," she would often say disapprovingly. (Look at them, crying and crying and drinking and drinking.")

The clientele has changed over the years and as shrimping died down, a different crowd established itself at bars like the 123. Those were years when patrons appeared in souped-up pickup trucks with tinted windows draped in gold chains and diamond-studded belt buckles. Over time that, too, died down and the number of bars along the strip has decreased until only places like El Mante, Chapa's, Charley's, El Tenampa,  La Cartorce Bar and Monkey's are left.

Gone are Domino's, Whitey's, the Long Shot, El Tejano Bar, the Border Lounge, Las Cabañitas, El Rincon de Pancho, and El Siete Mares as the old customers die off and the younger crowd drifts toward upscale bars north of Boca Chica Blvd. 

Yet, through all those years, Javier had managed to turn the bar into a family business and raised several generations who pitched in to keep the family business going. As his health deteriorated, his wife Berta would often sit with him in his favorite corner perch looking over the clientele and the blaring jukebox (la pianola, llorona, or chillona). During the football season, Cowboys fan crowded in to play la porra (the numbers).

"Que chulada," Javier would often exclaim overlooking the scene pulling up on his shirt collar.

The house specialty, micheladas (a spiced up beer with clamato), is a favorite with those seeking to have a taste of the hair of the dog that bit them the night before.  

"We're going to keep the bar open," said son Johnny. "My father never closed and we are only going to close during his funeral and open again. That's a tradition that he wanted us to keep." 

Ruiz said that funeral arrangements will be announced later.