Bar Brat

As America was rolling toward the social and cultural sea change that was the late 1960s, a spunky, precocious, and perceptive little girl was growing up in bars in isolated Colorado mountain towns. While her mother worked in the Branding Iron in Nederland or The Stage Stop in Rollinsville, little Cheryl spun around on bar stools, eavesdropped on patrons’ titillating conversations, and watched the local drunks brawl. She knew more than she should have at her age about some things and less than she wished she did about others—like how to balance the excitement she loved with the comfort of normalcy she craved.

When the first waves of hippies and Hell’s Angels invaded her quiet little town, Cheryl had a front row seat to the cultural and sometimes violently physical clashes. Yet in some ways it was no more unsettling than much of the rest of her unconventional life. Told with humor, vivid detail, and a child’s sharp sense of contradiction, Cheryl Rowe’s memoir of her early life makes the reader fall in love with a little girl who finds herself in a wildly unpredictable adult world—and makes the best of it.