MANSFIELD — A few days ago I stopped by at Sami’s, the gay bar at Fifth and Wayne, for a chat with owner Sam Ramirez.
It was 6 p.m. on Thursday and Sam was opening the door for the first of the evening crowd, a group of league pool players already lined up at the door.
Once the initial rounds of drinks had been poured, Sam pulled up a stool on the customer side of the bar to tell me a little about his business, now in its fourth year of operation.
“This is such a great space,” I told him, slapping my hand on the old-school island bar and looking around at the pool tables, the dart boards and, unfortunately, the dance floor.
I say unfortunately because it instantly brought to mind the moment a year ago when I tried to dance there like John Travolta. A quiet moan of embarrassment came unbidden to my lips and I disguised it with a cough.
“Back when you found this place,” I asked, “had you been looking for somewhere to open a bar or was the chance to use this location just too good to refuse?”
“Pretty much, because I really wasn’t looking,” Sam told me. “In fact I’d just got my real estate license and I was all set to move to Columbus.
“At the time I’d been working at the Back Room Bar (on Laver Road) and a friend of mine there had recently got possession of this location (on Wayne Street). It had been the Rocking Horse before, and that had closed down a few months earlier.
“So he offered it to me,” Sam continued, “and I basically had about 30 seconds to decide. There was less than a week left to renew the liquor license, so it was a yes or no moment. And I said yes.”
“This wasn’t the first bar you owned, though, was it?” I asked.
“No,” said Sam, “a long time before, me and my partner owned Hollywood Nights, about half-a-mile down the road, but that closed in 2004. For years when people asked if I would open another place I said no. But this really kind of fell in my lap.”
I asked if a lot of work had to be done before they opened.
“Well, when we got here it was in disarray, and I really had no idea what I was gonna do with it. I could have opened and ran it as it was, but I wanted to make changes, I wanted something new.
“That meant a lot of work,” he continued. “We ripped out all the floors, put in a DJ booth and changed just about everything apart from the original bar and the shellacked brickwork.”
Sam explained that one of the challenges he faced when he opened was the out-of-the-way location.
“Back then the city didn’t even have the streets lit back here,” he said. “That’s changed now, but things like that make a difference. The Fourth Street Bar had the same problem.
“The one thing I was sure of,” Sam told me, “was that I wasn’t gonna name the place after myself. People wanted me to but I resisted, and we must’ve gone through hundreds of names. Then eventually I said, OK – we can use my name but it has to be a little different.”
So it became Sami’s Bar rather than Sam’s Bar, but now a lot of folks call him Sami anyway. I mistakenly did myself at least twice during our conversation. I couldn’t help it, we were sat in Sami’s Bar and it said Sami on the wall right behind him.
I pointed to the “Sami’s” logo and told him it was an eye-catching design.
“Yeah, my friend Rosie came up with that,” he told me. “She’s a graphic designer. I painted the wall black and then she painted it right on top. Now I’ve got it everywhere.”
“So how often are you here?” I asked. “I know you’re busy with other things.”
Along with the bar, Sam is a real estate agent here in Mansfield and has part-ownership of Buckeye Thrift.
“Oh, when we first opened I was here every day,” he explained, “but now it’s down to about three days, something like that.
“I have Carrie,” he said, indicating our bartender who was cutting up some lemons. “She’s my superstar, my golden child!”
From the beginning, Sami’s has been able to attract a variety of performers to the venue from the state’s gay scenes, something unheard of outside of the bigger cities in a town of this size.
“We’re sort of in the cross-hairs between Youngstown, Toledo, Cleveland and Columbus,” explained Sam, “and we pull a lot of performers from those areas. And those performers will often bring their entourage with them when they play.”
“Before you opened,” I asked, “were those places you were visiting a lot? Did you have a place in mind that you were modeling Sami’s on?”
“No, not at all,” Sam replied. “I wasn’t really going to gay bars at the time. I’d been working at the Back Room Bar. And before, when it was Joe’s Lounge, I worked there for six years. And I mean, that was a country bar.
“But when I was first looking to get acts here,” Sam explained, “I still knew performers from the Hollywood Nights days – and some of those had become much bigger names. And when we opened up people came in droves.”
This year Sami’s is launching their “Summer Series” entertainment nights featuring, as Sam describes it, “more performers and a stronger show on one night.”
The major weekend of the summer will no doubt be Mansfield’s Pride weekend. Sami’s will be throwing a kick-off party on Friday July 21 and hosting the event’s after-party on Saturday July 22.
“Oh it’s gonna be big,” said Sam. “We’ll have strippers and performers both nights, also a local band called Hagathas Bluff playing on Saturday.”
Outside of the big weekend events, there is usually something going on here. Wednesday night is Talent Night (an open mic) and Thursday is karaoke. And I can say from previous experience that staff and customers alike offer a friendly welcome to first-timers.
I noticed Sam glance up at the pool players.
“Do you play?” I asked.
“Yep, in fact I’ve been an avid league player for 26, 27 years,” he told me.
“I should be playing now,” he added with grin, “I told them to play around me while I talked to you!”
I finished my beer and let the man shoot some pool. Come Pride Weekend, you know where the party’s going to be at.
Sami’s Bar is at 178 Wayne Street, Mansfield.
Check out their Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/samis419/.
