Bobbing for Apple bar names, I’ve come up empty

The South-Hillyard. End of the Roll.

The Golden Gadfly …

I’ve been wracking my brain since I heard that Bob Apple’s planning to open a South Hill sports bar.

Apple is best known to Spokane for the following two contributions:

1. He spent eight years as an independent and outspoken member of the Spokane City Council.

2. He once refused to stock toilet paper in The Comet, the Hillyard tavern he owned.

This public servant has gone beyond the call of booty in supplying the Clark Column with comedic fodder.

Plus Bob’s a good-natured, affable guy.

So as a way of saying thanks, I want to give Apple a great name for the new watering hole that he hopes to have open come Super Bowl Sunday.

Trouble is, nothing I’ve come up with is worth the contents of a saloon spittoon.

So I’m turning to you readers for help.

Submit the perfect name. I’ll give you some cool prizes and buy you a drink at the Appletini, when it opens.

Naw, that’s no good, either.

Apple has final right of refusal, of course. But he also told me he is totally open to suggestions.

A snappy name over a bar can be like a magnet to those with a thirst.

Apple’s smart enough to know this.

So send me your ideas via the contact info below. Make sure to leave your name and a working phone number.

It’s the least we can do for this man.

Quite frankly, the 2005 Apple toilet paper tiff is one of my all-time favorite tales.

Apple claimed he was forced to remove TP from the Comet commode because so many of his customers were paper pilferers.

There’s a commentary on the Hillyard bar scene.

But the anti-theft system that Apple installed turned this already hilarious story into a legendary side-splitter.

Just like checking out books at a library, Comet clientele had to borrow a roll of TP from the bartender before waddling to the can.

Such a “potty protocol,” I wrote at the time, “could also create a lot of confusion when ordering a beer.

“For example: Say ‘gimme a Heinie’ at the Comet and you just might actually end up with something for your heinie.”

Always trying to be helpful, I bought a case of wipe-age at Costco and then hand-delivered it to Apple at City Hall.

Subject matter this juicy doesn’t come around very often.

But Apple wasn’t always the butt of my jokes.

He established himself over the years as a voice for the common folk.

Apple was also the only city official who was consistently on the right side of the Otto Zehm scandal.

Wrongfully reported as a possible ATM thief in 2006, Zehm was beaten mercilessly in a convenience store by the responding police officer, Karl Thompson Jr.

To Spokane’s shame, our leaders either backed Thompson outright or stuck their cowardly noggins in the sand.

Not Apple.

Thompson’s subsequent conviction and federal imprisonment puts the ex-councilman in a pretty exclusive club.

But when his hopes for higher office failed, Apple decided to go back to serving the public on a more elemental level.

Whatever he calls it will be located at 56th and Regal, which is in the heart of my old Ferris High School stomping grounds.

When I asked him what sort of décor he was shooting for, Apple was quick to quip that a “counter and some stools” would be good.

Apple also added that he was “getting kind of old and fat” and will consider a couch “so I can lay down a lot.”

Funny man.

I just hope he takes into account the societal differences in owning a bar in the South Hill vs. Hillyard.

Hillyard drinkers, for example, settle arguments with their fists while South Hill sippers resolve differences through protracted litigation and whining.

Oh, and one other thing, Bob.

Remember you’re on the South Hill now, so there’d better be Charmin in the you-know-where.