Vic's - A Slice Of Days Gone-By In Tacoma's Hilltop -- Swing Music, Italian Sausage And Old-Time Camaraderie

A red-and-white sign announces the place - "Vic's cafe" - but two nondescript doors with various locks trick strangers into concluding the place isn't open for business.

Yet, every day, Monday through Saturday, about 50 people travel here to Martin Luther King Jr. Way and South 16th Street in Hilltop from Tacoma's North End, Brown's Point, Spanaway, even Gig Harbor.

Mostly 60-, 70-, 80-year-old men - retired plumbers, painters, gas-company workers, milk deliverers, health inspectors - push open an uninviting door and trickle into a place where everybody knows their names.

This is their hangout, a joint painted Kelly green on the inside where swing music plays on the radio and an aroma of grease and fried Italian sausage wafts through the air.

If you're one of Vic's regulars, you're greeted on a first-name basis and get a pat on the back. You can pour your own coffee, pop open the refrigerator and cook your own eggs or roll dice to wager with the proprietor whether you'll get a free meal or pay double the price.

George Nicholson, 60, wears the flag of Ireland on his Greek fisherman's cap. He sips coffee and reads the paper in the rear of the restaurant at the Round Table, a table that is covered in faded red-and-white-checked plastic with a stuffed toy monkey propped on top. It is the only table in the place. Most people sit at one of five green booths or at the red Formica counter with 14 red stools.

Beside Nicholson sits Frank Morrone, 74, gobbling French toast dripping with syrup and butter, and a side of bacon. John Garitone dines on coffee.

The trio chat about what's in the newspaper, sports, married life, a recent vacation. "It's just a habit. Something to kill time," Nicholson says.

A similar scene unfolds each morning and repeats itself at lunchtime, when another crew strolls in. No one comes here in the evening. Hilltop is still plagued by crime, and Vic's doesn't open for dinner.

Former grocery store

Most of the guys - and, occasionally, women - grew up in the neighborhood, went to school with proprietor, Vic Miele, or his son, Frankie, and recall how the cafe was once a grocery store with penny candy and a soda fountain in the front.

In 1910, Joe Miele, Vic's dad, was a kid from Italy who grew up in Hilltop and opened a grocery store in a building where he and his family lived upstairs.

Today, the street that travels through the city's most violent neighborhood is bleak and barren. Miele's old house is decrepit and sagging, sitting next to a weed-strewn, empty lot.

Vic took over the place from his father after World War II and turned it into a full-time cafe. Now 83, Miele is bespectacled, hard of hearing and seemingly tireless. Every morning, he drives to the restaurant at 5 a.m.

In his white shirt, pants and apron, Miele works the counter, greets, serves, busses and cleans. Louis Rousseau, 75, who ran the old K Street Grill for 50 years, volunteers as the cook.

In the cafe's better days, the place attracted the city's movers and shakers, and celebrities like world-champion boxer Rocky Marciano. Ahmad Rashad, the NBC sports commentator and former football star, who grew up nearby, once ate here.

Strangers hardly set foot here anymore. Diehard customers keep the cafe alive.

Tony Anderson, 37, settles down at the Round Table and with a familiarity cultivated over years yells "Uncle Vic!" and calls him an Italian word he refuses to translate. Miele fires back at Anderson, calling him the same thing and reaches under the counter for a leather cup and dice.

They roll for their prize: either a free Italian omelet, potatoes and salad for Anderson or an extra $4 for Miele.

A flick of the wrist and Anderson gloats.

"Hey, @$! # &, this omelet tastes good," shouts Anderson, delivering his routine line of victory.

"I hope you choke," Miele yells, not skipping a beat.

The front door opens, and an older man scuffles in. "Brother Bill," holler the customers, nodding approvingly.

"It feels good here. You get a lot of attention when you walk in," says Skip Browne, a 49-year-old writer who used to hang with the old guys in a back room to play pinochle and gin.

Taking care of each other

They come here because their wives have thrown them out or because they can't cook and this is where the best Italian sausage is, or because there's no nicer guy than Vic, and who else would put up with them in this way?

They thrive on the food, the Saturday-morning liar's-poker games, the companionship captured in photographs taped above the Round Table: the annual Christmas party of cold cuts laid out buffet-style. Five bucks, all you can eat.

Everyone takes care of everyone else, and everyone watches over Vic and the cafe. A broken heater is fixed. A droopy porch is torn down. Streamers festoon the walls on holidays: green for St. Patrick's Day, pastels for Easter.

The effort is put forth out of love and fear. The place won't last past Miele's lifetime. No one in the family plans to take over the cafe, and the old building, too costly to renovate up to local codes, will most likely get torn down.

"I don't know where we're going to go," Anderson says. "We're going to be like lost souls, like vagabonds in the desert."