The closure of the Army, Navy, Air Force Veterans (ANAF Vets) Legion Unit #298 (aka the Taurus Club) at 23rd & Main in 2019 preceded the pandemic. It had nothing to do with poor sales and everything to do with the inevitable accumulation of licensing improprieties that plague businesses run by people concerned less with profit than with living life in the moment.
Opened in the early-1950s, the Legion was both a pub for vets and for those in the neighbourhood who enjoyed an inexpensive draft without having to order food to do so (Vancouver liquor laws being what they were until the 1980s). The Legion also had a gorgeous shuffle board that the Galloway-Chong-Henderson Salon was partial to, a salon that met every Thursday night until the Henderson part moved to Victoria and the Galloway part learned the hard way that nothing good ever comes from drinking with your students.
A couple months ago I noticed the legion had reopened as a private business, and then a couple week's ago the name: Hero's Walk. Okay, so that's the new name. But is it really? Surely the owners don't mean "hero" in the singular; not when so many of us are exploring/celebrating our relational links to ancestry, identity, political economy, aesthetics, etc. Unless the apostrophe is less a possessive or a contraction than a stand-in for the letter "e" in "heroes". Is that it? Like the "and" in rock 'n' roll is an "'n'"? Heroes Welcome is a better name.
Oddly enough, just south of Hero's Welcome, a sign for an upcoming show whose title plays on its subject, the musical explorer Frank Zappa, who in 1974 put out a album called Apostrophe.
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