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Former naval officers' club in the Philippines at home in Pensacola
By Melissa Nelson
ASSOCIATED PRESS

Quote:

12:13 a.m. November 25, 2005

PENSACOLA, Fla. – The garish, red paisley carpeting is here, as are the red-leather bar stools and the shuffle board table. The names of the past are here, too, engraved in wood by the Filipino artists who, over the years, recorded the exploits and humor of some of the U.S. Navy's most celebrated pilots.
It'd be easy to think the Cubi Bar was back at its home base in the Philippines. But this officers' club that served decades of squadrons is now at home serving military personnel and visitors at the Pensacola Naval Air Station.

Nearly a dozen years ago, the famed club was shut down by a volcanic eruption. It now welcomes many of the same pilots who passed through it on their way to and from deployments to the western Pacific.
On a recent afternoon, Apollo astronaut Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, was among a group of retired Navy and Marine pilots enjoying lunch at the cafe.

"There's a lot of naval history in this room. If these walls could talk, you would have one hell of a story," he said. "It might need some editing and censoring, but you'd have one hell of a story."

The Cubi Bar, which took its name from an acronym for Construction Unit Battalion One, closed after Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991. When the United States later decided to pull troops from the Subic Bay, the bar's fate was sealed.

But a place so dear to so many of the Navy's top pilots could not be left behind.

Navy Capt. Robert Rasmussen, director of the National Museum of Naval Aviation and a former Blue Angel pilot, sent a letter to the Subic Bay commanding officer suggesting the bar be preserved. He learned the commanding officer already had sent a letter to the museum suggesting the same thing.

"Cubi Point was without a doubt the center of Naval aviation in the postwar years, especially during the Vietnam conflict," Rasmussen said.

So the bar was dismantled and packed into crates, along with a fair amount of volcanic ash. It arrived in Pensacola in 1992, and Rasmussen oversaw its reconstruction, down to its exact specifications. The Cubi Bar Cafe opened in 1996.

It features more than 3,000 colorful squadron plaques from the original club that flight squadrons would commission from local artists and present to the bar before returning home from a deployment.

The plaques, which list the names of individual squadron members, are often not plaques at all but ornate carvings of anything from birds to mermaids to chess pieces. They range from the size of a large poster to human-sized carvings of various creatures.

The ornate squadron carvings include an airplane with its fuel line attached to a beer bottle, an ace of spades, a white rabbit in a tuxedo, an Indian chief head and an armored knight. Some bear slogans such as "VS-21 Fighting Red Tails" and "The Last Real 'Harriers in WestPac."

But many of the original plaques aren't displayed in the rebuilt Cubi Bar: They were determined to be too risque for a family atmosphere, said bartender Donnalene Miller.

The new Cubi Bar Cafe doesn't serve the 15-cent beer-and-hot dog special available in the old bar, but it does offer San Miguel beer imported from the Philippines for $3.00 a bottle.

The relocated bar has a familiar feel despite its new location, said Cmdr. Jeremy Gillespie, a former P-3 Orion pilot who found his Patrol Squadron 22 plaque in the back wall of a dining room.

"You can close your eyes and hear Filipino artists imitating the Mamas and the Papas or Jimmy Buffet," he said.

Retired Col. Denis J. "Deej" Kiely, a Marine pilot, said those who lived through the Vietnam days occasionally return to find the names of friends who didn't make it back. The Cubi Bar was a good place to come during a hellish time, he said.

"It was a relief that you were still surviving and you could put it out of your mind for a while that you would have to go back and do it again," Kiely said.

Cernan, who passed through the Cubi Bar as a naval aviator in the late 1950s before joining the space program, said the bar is about tradition and camaraderie. Cernan hasn't found his name among the squadron plaques and believes his is among those in storage.

"It doesn't make a difference whether my name is here or not," he said. "I left a lot of memories, thoughts and memories here."