Clores Coffee Club: The End of an Era

I think it is fair to call it the end of an era in Gainesville: the famous ... maybe infamous would be a better term ... Clores Coffee Club will no longer be meeting at the old Clores Restaurant, on Bradford Street, in downtown Gainesville. For the past half century, especially in the small towns and rural areas of the South, informal groups of businessmen and farmers and others, got together most every day for a morning cup of coffee and conversation. Gainesville has had its share. I guess the old L & K group, in its heyday, was the most recognized in the local political arena. But the group that met at downtown Clores Restaurant has held together better than most, even though its members were long since retired and their numbers had been declining in recent years. Clores Restaurant has been at the same downtown location almost 40 years, and it is likely the coffee club began about that time ... when some of its members were still active in the Jaycees. There were insurance agents, lawyers, business folks, bankers, stock brokers, newspaper and radio people, textile folks, poultry. Anybody could join in, and often did.

As members progressed in life, and in their careers, the group came to include a Federal Judge, Chairman of the Georgia Board of Regents, the publisher of the local paper, radio executives, a State Senator ... I shouldn't have started this, but you get the idea. It is an interesting group, a group that was, and still is, highly interested in this community and a lot of local progress was hatched around that table at Clores.

It was in this light that I got to thinking: has it ever dawned on you that a recording of all those meetings would make a fascinating history of this town? And a collection of the jokes told there would make quite a commentary on the culture of this region ... even though a lot of those would not be printable.

This is Gordon Sawyer from a window on historic Green Street.