Twilite Club revival challenges owners
By Cole Boehler
For the Montana Tavern Times
The story of Glendive's Twilite Club has a familiar ring to it.
It is a large, brick, corner facility on the main drag built many decades ago when the town seemed to have an unlimited prospect of prosperity.
The railroads were booming, the rich soil and plentiful water from the lower Yellowstone River meant agriculture would thrive, and residual oilfield activity added a third leg to the area's economic stool.
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Rennie Spaulding has made several improvements.
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Oil has proven to be boom-and-bust, and now provides employment at receding levels. The railroad still moves a lot of freight through town but repair and maintenance facilities are nowadays minimal and so are train crews. Farming continues to thrive but is also subject to the vagaries of ever-shifting crop prices, and bigger, more efficient machines means far fewer people are needed to do the planting, cultivating, irrigating and harvesting.
Thus, the town grew from its birth until hitting its zenith in the 1960s when over 7,000 folks lived there, but has seen population declines since, especially from 1980 to 1990 when almost 1,200 residents left. Today, population is estimated at 4,600.
The Twilite is a large facility with a spacious and comfortable dining room and a good-sized bar. It still exudes a certain amount of class and charm from a previous era. There is a meeting/banquet room and once were apartments upstairs that have, unfortunately, been rendered useless by past neglect, a leaky roof and substantial water damage.
According to current owners, Renald "Rennie" and Anne Spaulding, the Twilite was owned and operated by the Nichols family for a good two decades, up until the Spauldings bought it in Sept. of 2008. Prior to that it was known as the H&M Saloon and Cedar Grill, H&M for Harry and Margaret Nichols.
Unfortunately the senior Nichols passed away and left the big facility and responsibility to eight children who, with various individuals at various times, tried their hands at running the place.
Rennie says they tried hard, too, but it proved to be too much. And that led to some neglect and the inevitable consequences.
"Everything was bent, broken or twisted," Rennie says. "Lots of things were patched. There was a hole in the wall behind every picture," he says with a laugh.
He ticks off a long list of improvements the Spauldings have made which represent significant financial investments, among them, first, a new roof, but also new carpets, new window coverings, new ceiling fans, new refrigeration compressors, an extensive security system and just on and on.
Much of the improvement came in the form of sorting through stuff that had accumulated over the decades – a majority of which went to the landfill – and sorting and reorganizing that which remained useful and functional.
Rennie takes this writer through the expansive basement and reveals neatly stacked and organized equipment, cookware, glassware, silverware, decorations and so much more. It looks like a giant "yard sale" for restaurants could be conducted using the decent pieces he has salvaged.
Both Spauldings are working the Twilite full time, seven days a week, with Anne opening and Rennie closing. "We often get to have lunch together," Rennie quips.
So does the couple get any leisure time?
"In the last three years we had a week in a cabin cruiser on Lake Superior," says Rennie. Boating is their main hobby and that hobby, a 23-foot cabin cruiser, is landlocked in a storage shed.
"It's been more work than we expected," Rennie admits, "and we work a lot when it’s closed. We haven't paid ourselves for over a year. Every dime we get goes back in. We need it functional, operational, where things will last."
He also admits at this point he is more fond of, and enthusiastic about, the business than is Anne. "I love the bar part of it, but the cafe has been hard. It's hard to satisfy people 100 percent" when it comes to meals.
The couple says the Oct. 1, 2009, smoking ban implementation saw a dramatic dip in business, dropping revenues 25-30 percent.
Getting and keeping steady help is also a challenge, Anne says. "If we could hire enough good help it would be better," she says. "It's a small workforce here in Glendive.”
"We're making headway," Rennie says. "So far it's been a good investment. It's been a project. We want to make it better."
One of the Spaulding's first "betterment" projects was to mellow the bar crowd.
Rennie says, "It was a very rowdy place. You need to control that. We get trouble stopped pretty quickly now. It seldom even gets started," perhaps due to using four or five bouncers on a big night.
"We do DJs and live bands," Rennie explains. "We have a younger crowd, 25-30 years old. We have to cater to them, the party crowd. The kids want the walls rattling and one spot to jump up and down," he says with a laugh.
"We work well with the police. They've thanked us for maintaining an orderly place. And the crowd knows the security cameras are up and so behave better."
The Spauldings are originally from the western end of the state – the Bozeman area primarily. Rennie has done a little of everything: a union painter for almost two decades, a logger and truck driver, a body man and auto mechanic, a 13-year railroader with the Milwaukee and Burlington Northern, a backhoe operator ...
Anne, who is the far more reticent of the two, worked for Target and Wal Mart for two decades.
The couple has two sons, the oldest a mechanical engineer and the youngest is a master plumber.
The Spauldings wound up developing trailer courts and storage unit facilities in the Bozeman/Belgrade area. Upon selling them, they had substantial gains, so looked for IRS 1031 investments to keep capital gains taxes to a minimum. They closed in on a marina at Coueur d'Alene only to have the deal fall through after fourth months of work, then looked at several other propositions, none of which panned out.
A friend in Glendive told the Spauldings about the Twilite and said the sellers were motivated so the Spauldings took a look, made an offer and closed the deal.
So, how has the transition from the mountainous west to the eastern river valley been?
"Well, it's a small town," Anne allows, "with limited shopping, but these are super people. It's a very friendly town where people care about each other."
Rennie adds, "It doesn't make any difference to me as long as I'm working and eating."
"If we stay, we'll start rebuilding the (apartments) upstairs," Rennie says with a touch of resignation. "We'll just keep cleaning and fixing."