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thedrifter
05-29-07, 06:02 AM
Daniel Rubin | On the missions of the faithful
By Daniel Rubin
Inquirer Columnist

A certain fever sometimes hits when Marines get together, Philadelphia is mentioned, and whiskey is involved:

Let's raise Tun Tavern.

David Hamilton is the latest warrior to lock in on this quixotic quest.

"When you join the Marines, it is drummed into your head," he says by the window at Downey's on South Street. "It was the first recruitment depot, in 1775. They'd look for a big man, get him drunk, sign him up."

Over lunch Hamilton throws back Dewar's on the rocks - doubles - as he lays out his plan.

He's 63, a silver-haired, sandpaper-voiced, walrus-mustached former Marine captain who served 19 months as a forward observer in Vietnam.

Since moving here two years ago from Boca Raton, Fla., he's been talking up Tun to fellow Marines.

He doesn't want some dusty museum or Atlantic City re-creation. He wants a working tavern, back where it was. The former student of finance at the University of Chicago figures it will cost a couple million.

So our task on this broiler of a day is to find where the historic tavern stood. I tell him this might make a decent column for Memorial Day. He orders another double and says, eyes narrow:

"It isn't any good if it doesn't carry a good punch. Memorial Day is about dead people and crying wives and orphaned kids."


A Revolutionary spot
I've brought copies of letters I found at the Philadelphia Historical Commission. Those files suggest Hamilton faces an uphill battle.

During the 18th century, Tun Tavern, also known as Peggy Mullan's Beefsteak House, stood at King Street and Tun Alley near Carpenter's Wharf.

A plaque at the site used to proclaim the brick-and-stone tavern as the place where in 1775 Capt. Samuel Nicholas opened a "recruiting rendezvous" for two battalions authorized by the Second Continental Congress.

It doesn't mention getting recruits plastered to sign them up, but we can use our imagination.

The tavern was razed in 1781. Plans to resurrect it go back to at least 1959. Another effort followed in 1964, then again in 1974, when the city even announced a ground-breaking.

A property at Spruce and Matthis Streets was made available for $1 a year for the Marine Corps War Memorial Foundation to bring back the tavern. But that was it. Money may have been pocketed. All they got was a lot clotted with trash and weeds.

By 1982, a Marine general pronounced prospects for another Tun Tavern "moribund."


Rolling with it
Hamilton and I walk toward the place described as 215 feet south of Chestnut Street where King Street (now Water Street) crossed.

Rebuilding on the site will be a challenge. First, there is no reliable record, city historical officials have concluded, of what it looked like. Second, the current occupant of that space isn't likely to give it up easily:

It seems that Tun Tavern sat somewhere in the slow lane of I-95 South.

"Fine, so you move it," Hamilton says, rolling with the situation on the ground. "And put up a sign out front that says 'This has been moved because places have changed.' "

We keep going, drawn by a sign for a Vietnam Memorial.

"I used to be able to shoot a man at 1,000 meters," Hamilton remarks offhandedly. He flags a man stepping out of a van sporting a Semper Fi bumper sticker. Hamilton enlists the man, who was not a Marine, but who says he lost a brother in Cambodia, in his search.

The man walks us over to a group of older men sitting by the Korean Memorial, unwrapping sandwiches. Bill Kelly's the president of the Korean Memorial group. No, he wasn't a Marine - went to law school, not the service, he tells Hamilton.

They've come to unveil The Final Farewell, a statue of a Korean War soldier. Rifle in hand, the life-size bronze figure kneels on one knee, head bowed.

"We wanted to have something that diminishes the acts of war in the eyes of those who fought," Kelly explains as Hamilton wanders off. Something that helps brings them peace.

"It's a comrade saying a prayer. Those who see it will know they are not alone."


Contact Daniel Rubin at 215-854-5917 or drubin@phillynews.com. Read his recent work at go.philly.com/danrubin.

Ellie