Town Misses A Fixture Nobby Inn Welcomed Newcomers, And Old-Timers Felt They Owned It

It was a place where, if you sat long enough, everyone in the world eventually would come by.

Or it seemed that way until New Year’s Eve, when, after 61 years, the Nobby Inn closed.

To call it a bar and restaurant would be technically correct, but the description doesn’t convey essential detail. For much of its history the Nobby was an axis around which Moscow revolved.

“They used to say to new people in town, ‘If you want to learn about Moscow, start at the Nobby.’ I don’t know how many people have told me the Nobby was the place for their first meal and their first drink in Moscow,” owner Tom Mayburry said. His late father, Wayne, and a partner, were co-founders.

In 1936, “nobby” denoted style and sophistication, which might have been a stretch for a place that served its secret-recipe pea soup, hamburgers and chicken-fried steak. But the Nobby grew into the name. It adopted such touches as giving customers polished coins when making change.

Tom Mayburry presided as owner from 1977 until this year. Three potential sales fell apart in the past year, and after having lunch last December with another local restaurateur who couldn’t stay away from his own place despite seven heart attacks, Mayburry saw his future looming.

He decided simply to close the Nobby Inn. He now has a part-time job at the University of Idaho and takes classes at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston and at UI, where he is working on a master’s degree in education.

After the Nobby closed, Zeoma Dvorak, 77, walked up Main Street past the darkened Nobby Inn to The Vox coffeehouse. She pulled out a chair, “and the tears just started rolling down my cheeks. I didn’t realize until then how much I missed it.”

Nobby Inn patrons eventually came to feel the place was theirs. Richard Naskali, the UI arboretum director who ate three meals a day at the Nobby, assumed the right to admonish customers about wearing their caps at dinner and to harangue Mayburry about putting low-fat items on the menu.

“I tried to be not too much of a bastard about this stuff,” he said.

Before you knew it, you could be running your life from the place.

“I’ve done search warrants at the Nobby bar,” Idaho Magistrate Bill Hamlett said.

“When I had my collapsed lung and was discharged from the hospital the first thing I did was walk down to the Nobby and have a smoke and a drink.”

That bar. It was inhabited by as colorful an array of characters as a Charles Dickens novel. Its cigarette machine paid off less frequently than a Vegas slot. The sound of people pounding it in frustration was a back beat to the hum of bar conversation for years.

“It was really what a bar was supposed to be,” Hamlett said. “Nick really was glad to see you when you came in. You felt like a guest in his home. You contributed to the civilized nature of the bar. You were part of the body politic of the bar, and Nick was a very congenial host, if you got by the attitude.”

Nick Roberts moved up Main Street to the Nobby Inn from the Idaho Hotel in April 1963. He reigned behind the bar for 30 years.

Moscow, as a university town, sees its share of prominent individuals.

Roberts said he served drinks to serial killer Ted Bundy, and he helped throw political activist Abbie Hoffman out of the dining room. He discussed “weights and measures in physics, and the universe” with Isaac Asimov, who practically invented science fiction.

“The bar was a place to prick up your ears and keep your mouth shut,” said Dvorak, who ate lunch there every day with her husband Joe, now dead, at a table under a drawing of O.J. Simpson. It showed Simpson scoring a touchdown for USC against UCLA. He signed it, “To Nick and the boys at Nobby.”

After the Nobby closed, Edith Day, a waitress who worked there for 20 years, made the 35-mile drive from Lewiston to Moscow to bring a copy of the New York Times to Dvorak. That was the Nobby Inn at its best.

It survived a robbery, a streaker, a flasher, and a restroom fire during dinner on an Idaho homecoming weekend - “Not a customer left,” Mayburry said. Then, in 1968, a sit-in by UI students began when a political science faculty member wrote a check to the restaurant on a piece of bark that was refused.

A longtime patron suffered a fatal heart attack at the cash register, and “of course, the joke was that he died when he saw his bill,” Mayburry said.

Responding to an explosion of laughter in the bar, Mayburry once found a lunchtime regular drenched in mustard and Roberts sagely nodding his head.

“I told him it was unscrewed.”

When Mayburry closed the Nobby Inn, he simply locked the door. It’s sitting there, darkened but intact.

“I was down there a little while ago …,” he said. “You know, I could almost hear the laughter.”

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