By Walker Joyce
Where else but in our fair state could you board a boat that hasn’t sailed in 86 years?
I refer to the beloved Flagship in Union on Rt. 22 (it’s a local legend). It’s been “docked” there in the median of that east-west thoroughfare for nearly a century and has undergone more changes than almost any commercial structure still standing.
No small achievement here in the Wrecking Ball State!
It was “launched” in 1938, on the site of an old roadhouse named Donahue’s. After that tavern-nightclub burned down, a man named Charles Fritz bought the land and decided to build his own restaurant-entertainment combo in the shape of a ship.
This was during the height of trans-Atlantic luxury liners, not to mention the Mississippi Show Boats of lore, and the hit Broadway musical about that 19thcentury phenomenon.
Once completed, the vessel instantly became an area milestone, a gleaming white behemoth, trimmed with nautical flags and proclaimed by a navy signalman statue, standing on a neon tower!
225 feet long and 70 feet wide, it had the words FLAGSHIP SHOW BOAT festooned on its top deck. It may have been the state’s (if not the nation’s) first Dinner Theatre, a format that eventually became a craze, beginning in the 60’s.
The house band was a cluster of guys called the Korn Kobblers, a unit that combined comedy with traditional music. In addition to standard instruments, they played washboards and other hand-made pieces and dressed like Bowery Bums. Their greatest claim to fame was opening for Guy Lombardo at the 1940 World’s Fair.
You can see clips of their antics on YouTube.
Given its proximity to Manhattan, many name acts appeared at the Flagship, including Jackie Gleason and even Dean Martin in his pre-Jerry Lewis days.
Alas, this incarnation only lasted until 1942, when it also burned down. But it rose from the ashes like a Phoenix, in the same design. The new Flagship mostly featured glitzy, Vegas-style revues, with chorus girls in flashy outfits, and billing bragging about “77 costume changes!”
Comics like Jackie Mason returned, doing two shows a night, Tuesdays through Sundays.
But times and tastes kept changing, along with competition from big-screen movies and especially TV. By the 1950s, stores began to overtake the landscape, and the Flagship was “re-Christened” as a haberdashery. This was when major league ball players still had to get off-season jobs (!!), and Yankee shortstop Phil Rizzuto, who lived in Union, worked there for a while selling men’s suits!
The Ship returned to Show Biz in the late 60s, trying out a Go-Go bar called the Cheeta Lounge. When it morphed into a standard supper club in the mid-70s, my father, a popular Irish storyteller, appeared there.
When the 80s dawned, the Flagship was rebuilt into a bigger 3rd version, and its golden age of retail began. The maritime space hosted Brick Church Appliance in 1986. Later, it became a furniture emporium, another electronics outlet in the Wiz empire, and today, it’s one of the largest shops in the P.C. Richard chain.
Amazingly, the Flagship is STILL afloat!
