Up in smoke

BOISE – Tim Adamson doesn’t want to think about where he’s going to spend his mornings when the Sav-On Cafe closes at the end of next week.

The greasy spoon and “private smokers club” in downtown Boise is where he goes to socialize. He makes the 10-minute walk from his house two or three times a week, and he knows all the other regulars.

Sav-On is the only place in Boise where someone like Adamson can go at 8 a.m. for a meal, a cup of coffee and a smoke, he says, stuffing loose tobacco into a cigarette-rolling contraption.

Adamson is one of Sav-On’s die-hards who spend hours in the place that got a rebel reputation seven years ago, when owner Clancy McCool took advantage of a loophole in the state tobacco ban.

The Clean Indoor Air Act said restaurants could not allow smoking. But other businesses could, such as bars and bowling alleys and “social, fraternal and religious organizations.”

So McCool rebranded the diner as a smoking club, with an annual membership fee of $1.

“We called the state, and they pretty much told us that we had to put (a sign) in the window, in at least 1-inch letters,” said Lianne Fairchild, the only waitress. “That cracked me up.”

Sav-On suddenly found a group of loyal customers – tobacco-puffing restaurant refugees who could no longer indulge anywhere else.

“One guy comes for breakfast and lunch” almost every day, McCool said.

The smoking irked state lawmakers. But neither their protests nor the declining popularity of tobacco did the business in.

Instead, Sav-On’s 70-year run ends next week because of the economy and “some pressure from the landlord to have us stop the smoking,” McCool said.

That forced his hand, and now McCool, who has owned Sav-On for 15 years, will spend more time at his second job, making sailboat parts in Garden City.

“I’m going from cooking to running a bandsaw,” McCool says. “The knives there take off big body parts; the knives here only take off small ones.”

Fairchild has no idea where she’ll work now. As the only waitress, she and McCool developed a rhythm, hollering back and forth and giving each other a hard time.

Fairchild waitressed off-and-on for about 40 years, but the customers at Sav-On are “some of the most generous people I’ve ever met.” It is not rare for a customer to notice a complete stranger struggling to pay for coffee and pull Fairchild aside to order a whole meal for the person, she said.

“This is one of the few jobs I’ve had where I wanted to come to work,” she says.

Adamson is going to miss her, too, and the diner’s unique, smoke-filled ambience.

He gestures to the retro-meets-dive decor – pinup girls, orange paint, a portrait of McCool in a wide-brimmed hat, an out-of-season Santa.

Aside from the loss of a place where he can light up with friends, Adamson dreads having to go to a chain restaurant where “everything’s exactly the same.”