This Round Was In Honor Of ​“Buddy”

“Wait a minute!” called out Leo Vigue, as decades of Rudy’s regulars presented their favorite bartender with a ​“Big Daddy” birthday cake.

“The numbers are wrong,” he protested.

The crowd helped him change the ​“75” into a wishful ​“57.”

They cheered as he blew out the candles. But as they gathered Sunday in a room where the bartender has held court for over four decades at the famed Elm Street watering hole, they didn’t let the years of stories disappear.

“Leo, get up on the bar and take your pants off!” called out a loving heckler, as the memories poured forth.

Vigue, a diehard Red Sox fan with French-Canadian roots, has been pouring drinks at Rudy’s Bar and Grille at 372 Elm St. since before John F. Kennedy was shot. He has become so iconic there that people often mistake him for ​“Rudy.” At his party, friends praised the lifelong bachelor for creating a sense of family at the neighborhood drinking hole.

The senior bartender can still be found manning the beer spouts on afternoons and early evenings, sometimes straining to hear customers’ orders. He showed up to his party Sunday sporting his fierce allegiances with a New England Patriots jacket and a Red Sox cap. Under a jacket, his thick winter sweater bore a small Obama pin. Every few minutes, he found another familiar face, some who had returned from miles away to drink with their trusty pal.

For a lucky few, he remembered their names. The rest, he just called ​“Buddy.”

His habit of greeting everyone with that word has earned him the nickname ​“Buddy.” The word could be found Sunday on the back of softball-style 75th birthday T‑shirts, designed by Kevin Sanchez Walsh based on furtive bar-time sketches of the bartender in his element.

Every ​“Buddy” who showed up to the party — firemen, musicians, former college athletes – came with a Leo story. Many were too off-color to repeat. Others, the bartender claimed, were wild rumors. A few, he confirmed, were true.

Marty Hallier, a regular who owns property in the area, told of how Vigue would get ​“bombed” with water balloons from a group of regulars at the bar. Hallier (pictured, with Vigue and Tommy King, left to right) and his wife Andi have known the bartender for decades. Rudy’s was, and still is, a big hangout for firemen. They used to come from a block away at the Elm Street firehouse, in a building recently occupied by Cosi Restaurant. Firemen got into a habit of ribbing their bartending buddy. When Vigue would walk by the firehouse, they’d let loose a drenching cannonade.

At the time of the ambush, Vigue was often walking and reading a newspaper, added Tom Gould, a retired battalion chief. When Vigue’s newspaper got soaked, he’d go back and buy another one. They’d bomb that one, too.

The balloon attacks subsided in 1975, when Gould locked up the firehouse for good. Vigue still had another surprise coming, however. The firehouse became Fitzwilly’s restaurant, which later became a nightclub. The first week the club opened, there was a shooting out in the street. A bullet hit the Rudy’s window. Vigue was inside. The bullet, the legend goes, missed him by a few feet. A picture of him and the bullet hole hangs beside the bar.

A Knock On The Door

Vigue first landed at Rudy’s in 1953. A stint in the Army had brought him south from his native Maine. A country boy, he grew up picking potatoes on his grandfather’s farm in Quebec. Starting in 1950, during the Korean War, he spent two years in the service, cooking food for the Navy on a base in Washington, D.C.

In 1953, he heard about a job at New Haven’s Winchester arms factory. Vigue showed up in New Haven. He quit after one day.

He soon found another job at a paper factory, and a place that would become home for the rest of his life. At that time, Rudy’s was a one-room, working-class bar next to a barber shop. When Vigue moved to work at the Bigelow Boiler works on River Street, he kept drinking at Rudy’s. Sometime around 1960, he landed a job there as a bartender.

Ever since, he’s been mixing drinks in the homey den. Over the years, the place has stayed ​“pretty much the same,” he said. The bar took over the barber shop next door, adding big rooms and a stage. The clientele expanded to include more college kids. The carvings on the wooden tables grew deeper.

Sometimes, he did think of leaving. (“I got fed up.”) Three times, he got fired. (“I told my boss to go shit.”) But each time, he stayed in the job.

Vigue moved house a few times, but always lived within a few blocks of the bar.

On occasion, surprise visitors showed up at his apartment.

In Vigue’s early days in New Haven, in a holdover from Connecticut’s restrictive Blue Laws, it was illegal to have sex before marriage. Cops who spotted a man going into an apartment with a woman would go in and bust the couple, Vigue recalled. One day, the cops burst in on him when he had a woman inside. She hid under the bed. They found her, took them down to police headquarters, and slapped them each with a $25 fine.

Later, if it wasn’t the cops knocking on the door, it might have been the Rudy’s softball team.

The team, the Mugglers, ran from 1980 to 1997. They played on Sunday mornings. They’d come back to Rudy’s, often victorious, ready to rejoice at 9 a.m. The bar didn’t open until noon, said Tim Johns, who pitched for the team for 13 years. He and two softball buddies hung out near a window seat Sunday, wearing Happy Birthday Buddy shirts and selling raffle tickets. Johns came wearing the team’s logo, two beer mugs clinking.

Finding Rudy’s closed, the team would go looking for Vigue, who lived just down the street, Johns said.

“Leo!” they’d call, banging on his door.

“Whaddya want?” would come a shouted reply. ​“All right, all right.” Sure enough, he’d open up the bar and let them celebrate.

Vigue made the rounds Sunday with a glass of red wine, sometimes forgetting where he had set it down. He got teary-eyed a few times, and was teased accordingly, as he welcomed dozens of people whose lives he has touched.

Leo & Cleo

Ushering him away from the crowd, a photographer asked someone to hoist the birthday man up in a chair. Two brothers obliged.

“Smile,” the photographer coaxed.

“I’m worried I’m gonna fall,” said a pale-faced Vigue.

After lowering him to safety, the brothers, Steve and Mike DiVerniero (pictured, left to right), told how they grew to love and respect the man they had lifted up.

The brothers started going to Rudy’s the ​’70s, when they were students at Southern Connecticut State University. Rudy’s was a big swimmers’ bar. They were big swimmers.

At the time, Leo had a beagle named Cleo. The two were never apart. When Leo was working, Cleo would guard the front door, making patrons step over him to get inside. The two appeared on T‑shirts together, as mascots of the bar. When Cleo died, he was buried in a grave behind Rudy’s.

Leo kept shuffling through the neighborhood. These days, he heads to Patricia’s Restaurant for two meals a day, sometimes in socks and sporty flip-flops. Save for a trip to the casino, he keeps within a close orbit of the bar and the Dwight area.

“This neighborhood is his universe,” said Mike. In the ​’70s, Vigue drew them into his world. Every Wednesday, they’d show up at Rudy’s for lunch, when he cooked his signature beef stew.

The brothers got to know him well. They learned a trick: If you offered Vigue a blackberry bourbon, he’d pop his dentures out to drink it.

Over time, they shared big life moments, too.

One night in 1978, as Vigue saw sparks fly as he poured Steve a pitcher of Budweiser. A young woman named Ellen stood nearby. Mistaking Steve for someone else, she struck up a conversation. They hit it off. Two years later, they got married. For years, they went back to Rudy’s for their wedding anniversaries. Sunday, Vigue told them he still remembered the night they met.

“He’s a true man of dignity and respect,” said Mike, ​“even though you can get him to take his teeth out.”

An Anthem Sung

After a meal of baked ziti and crisp green beans prepared for 80 people, the crowd lured the bartender into the front room with a traditional song.

“Leo, Leo,” they sung and swayed, ​“how would you like to bite my ass?”

The song’s brief lyrics were scrawled on a batting helmet of Vigue’s archenemy, the New York Yankees. The helmet sat on a shelf in the bar, according to one Rudy’s regular. Over the years, as the Red Sox suffered 86 years without winning a championship, Vigue made many bets with, and got taunted by, many Yankees fans. He heard the song a lot. It became his anthem. People would sing it every night, as a general statement of goading appreciation.

“Leo, Leo, how would you like to bite my ass?” came the sweet melody Sunday, sung by a chorus of regulars old and new, and a core crew of firefighters including the current chief, Michael Grant.

After the song came a request.

“Leo, get up on the bar and take your pants off!” cried a voice.

Vigue didn’t care to repeat the performance of what happened years ago at a rowdy birthday party.

“People dared me to go up on the bar and drop my pants,” he recalled. ​“I don’t remember why.”

He remained on the ground, where friends bestowed him with a framed drawing based on a photo taken of him about 50 years ago.

Some said he looked like Clark Gable. Others called him ​“Brando.”

Mike DiVerniero summed him up as a ​“lovable, like a Yogi Berra type of a guy” who is everyone’s friend.

“I come here three, four times a year, and it’s as if I’d never left,” he said.

“That’s because of Leo.”