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CHAPTER 9

You’re a Good Ghost, Charlie Brown

HACKETTSTOWN

CHARLIE BROWN’S STEAKHOUSE RESTAURANT is on Grand Avenue in Hackettstown. The restaurant chain, indigenous to New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, has a unique talent for tailoring its restaurants for existing structures rather than leveling them and rebuilding new cookie-cutter restaurants. This Charlie Brown’s building dates back to 1878 as the Clarendon House.

The Clarendon saw reincarnations as a hotel, eatery, pool hall, and brothel. From 1926 to 1947, it was known as The Hackettstown Inn. In 1947, Willie and Ernie Putz, brothers from Germany, purchased and restored the ailing Clarendon building. They added another dining room to the structure in 1956. While Ernie was vacationing in Germany, his brother had a stained glass window made for the bar to face Grand Avenue. In the center of the window is a portrait of Ernie.

Under the Putz brothers’ ownership, the Clarendon was the place to be in Warren County at the end of the work day. Councilmen, school board officials, and prominent citizens all convened here. It was the television show Cheers come to life, complete with Elwood Smith, a.k.a. “Smitty” the bartender, and Lou Morgan the flower farmer. Smitty often got into arguments with the Putz brothers and would be fired, only to have the regular patrons protest so strongly that he would resume his post behind the bar a few days later. Lou was a semipermanent fixture on his bar stool. He paid his bar bill once a year, at the conclusion of his Easter flower sales. He told his dirty jokes at the top of his lungs, often to the offense of some sweet elderly ladies who could hear him out in the dining room. Lou would be asked to leave the bar, but he would return a day or two later thanks again to the regular patrons’ protests.

I first had dinner at Charlie Brown’s in 2003. Some friends of mine, who own a haunted house in Hackettstown that would make any ghost hunter foam at the mouth, treated me and my fiancé to dinner. Now, I admit that when my friends suggested we walk around the corner to Charlie Brown’s, I was not thrilled with the idea. Up to that point, my experiences at other Charlie Brown’s in New Jersey had been very disappointing. I was in for a surprise, not only because of the redeeming qualities of the service and food at this Charlie Brown’s but also because of the ghost stories I heard over dinner.