The Contos family shares memories and talks about the future of their family-run businesses.
Spend enough time squinting up at the iconic sign snaking above Pete’s Satire Lounge and you’ll almost find yourself flung to the Colfax Avenue of yesteryear. It’s a humming memorial to the days when neon used to ring the block — from the Aladdin Theatre to the Playboy Lounge to advertisements for “topless talent” at Sid King’s Crazy Horse Bar just down the way.
It was at the Assumption of the Theotokos church, then located at Sixth and Pennsylvania, where Pete Contos first met Elizabeth “Liz” Zavaras in 1957 — just two years after he stepped off the plane from Greece. Born and raised in Denver to Greek immigrant parents, Liz is about as solidly “old Denver” as it comes.
“We made a deal when we bought it: He took care of hiring, firing, the menu, whatever went on in the place,” Liz says, “and I took care of everything else: the books, the checks, managing the money, managing it all. I told him, ‘I’m not going to tell you what to do, and you don’t tell me what to do, and we’ll be just fine.’” In all those years, Pete only ever signed one check — which created a problem when the bank didn’t recognize the signature and took it for fraud.
Nikki, who also learned her way around the dish pit, remembers it much the same way. “It was run-of-the-mill people. When you think of a bar that’s literally Cheers, that’s what it was,” she says. “The same people every day after work.” Then there were all those magical moments that happen much more frequently in bars than in front of living room fireplaces. Author James Michener spent several nights a week in the Satire quietly researching his novelOr the time Clint Eastwood was filming scenes forin front of Sid King’s Crazy Horse, only to wander into the Satire with his orangutan co-star. “Dad sees the monkey and he starts screaming at [Clint Eastwood], ‘Take the monkey out of here!’” Dean remembers.
In unison, Liz, Nikki and Dean all repeat one of Pete’s mantras: Go do something else. “He told me that every day,” Dean recalls. “'Go do something else. Be a lawyer. Be a doctor. Don’t come into this business; it’s not for you.' But it was for me.” While Pete, who into his eighties would stop in to work at each of his operations nearly every day, seemingly drank from an endless font of energy, no dream can last forever. “He was still dreaming through his illness, telling us he saw a really good restaurant up for sale,” Nikki says.
Nikki said she feels responsible for so many families beyond their own — not to mention the pressures from all the folks who feel betrayed when she and her siblings don’t always do things just as Pete would’ve done them. And Liz, who started all this right out of high school, wants to do what any octogenarian does after a successful career: visit family, go to dinner with friends, maybe take in a movie here and there.
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