SO THE OLD LEGEND GOES… Back in the early 70’s, a 31-year-old shipyard worker bought into an historic sports bar on 6th Ave in Tacoma, the local watering hole where he was a regular, looking for his shot at independence. A few years into ownership, people were asking the shipyard-worker-turned-bar-owner Lennard Manke to bring the ‘world famous’ Cloverleaf pizza to Bremerton.
The city, however, was not too keen on another tavern coming to town at the time. So the story goes, he started a petition, and collected signatures of support on green paper clovers, put them all into a sack, emptied them out on the desks at city hall.
“I don’t know if that’s true,” current Cloverleaf co-owner Kyle Welling says. “But it makes for a good story.”
As is typical with tavern lore, that’s not exactly how it happened. There was no ‘Miracle On 34th Street’ moment. But there was as petition. And Manke did end up opening the Bremerton location of Cloverleaf Tavern in 1973. He would go on to open the Hi-Yu-Hee-Hee in Gig Harbor, The Little Leaf in Lakewood, another bar in Spanaway and Lennard K’s Boat House in Allyn while running the Tacoma Cloverleaf for three decades before retiring in 2006.
And the signed clovers with names, dates and messages of support are still under glass on the clover shaped bar top at the now historic East Bremerton sports bar that celebrates 50 years this year.
Kyle Welling has co-owned and operated the Bremerton Cloverleaf with his brother Kevin for the past 16 of those 50 years. He says there are generations of customers, some with ties to those names under glass on the bar top, that have been frequenting the pub since it opened.
Local comedian and community philanthropist Cris Larsen probably knows a few of those names.
“I’ve got some totally unbelievable stories that we are not gonna print,” Larsen laughs.
Larsen, known by his stage name The Great Cris, has been hosting comedy night fundraisers in the backroom of the Cloverleaf for decades.
Two thousand seven hundred and eighty six shows to be exact, he counts. It all started as a way to provide uniform costs and tournament fees for the many local softball teams the tavern sponsored. More and more community teams started getting involved with the fundraisers, then some local schools started getting involved and by the late 90s all the way through to the start of the pandemic, Cris says they were doing 100-130 shows a year, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars each year for local organizations.
He notes names like Mitch Hedburg, Craig Gass, Kermit Apio and Brad Upton among the long list of featured comedians. “All those big names, we brought to The Cloverleaf,” Cris says.
At that time, the Cloverleaf was owned by Paul Peterson, who had taken over from Manke in the late 1980s. Under Peterson and his business partners—first Roger Paschal, then Charlie Cates who was the first to bring in liquor changing the establishment’s designation from tavern to sports bar and grill—The Cloverleaf’s involvement in the local sports community flourished. Framed jerseys and tournament trophies from those days still hang in the rafters.
“They had a dozen softball teams back in the day,” Cris says. “One for each division, plus the women’s team, plus the co-ed one. And it was The Cloverleaf’s team that first made teams that brought the special ed guys in. That had never been done. And here these guys were going to state in regular tournaments and winning.”
The United Shamrocks—a united slowpitch softball team which paired a line up of half special ed players and half partners—would go on to win five state titles and a Bremerton City League division title. Peterson coached hundreds of local sports teams, not counting the ones sponsored by the tavern, throughout his career. And in the early 2000s, the Cloverleaf was on the board of owners of the Kitsap Bluejackets, a collegiate summer league that used to play at the Kitsap Fairgrounds. Meanwhile, in the early 2000s, Kyle was becoming a regular at The Cloverleaf.
“I used to be a customer here,” Kyle says nearly two decades later. “I used to sit at a table called C3, and I used to come every day after work and have beers.”
Kevin and Kyle had grown up here, son of the storied CKHS teacher and softball coach Bruce Welling. After high school, Kevin went on to complete a bachelors in business adminstration from the University of Washington and started his career in audio/video sales. Kyle went on to study computer science and mathematics at Western Washington University, completed a Masters of Software Engineering at Seattle University and began a government career in software.
The brothers bought the Cloverleaf in 2007 when Kyle, the younger brother, was 28 years old. With already established careers, I ask Kyle what made them want to own a bar and restaurant.
“Stupidity,” he laughs.
Kevin is currently senior vice president of sales for a nationwide audio/video company. Kyle still works full-time in government software.
Nearly every morning before he starts his day job, Kyle is at the Cloverleaf. He’s there in the evenings and on weekends when he’s not shuttling their four kids to-and-from sports practices, games or tournaments. When I ask what he does in his free time, he says he’ll tell me when he retires. When I ask what he’s looking forward to, he says retirement.
Beneath that well-earned longing for retirement, there is a sentiment within the Cloverleaf’s walls that is palpably important to Kyle. It comes out when he’s talking about the renovations and remodeling they’ve put into the tavern’s back room event space. It comes out even more as he talks about the staff that have been with him from the beginning, some who have been there even longer than he has.
“For me it all comes back to community,” Kyle says. “In some ways, this is like the ‘Cheers’ for the area. The history and the people and all the different things the Cloverleaf has sponsored in the community over the years. All the fundraisers.”
As we look over photo collages from anniversaries past, former super bowl parties and the like, some of the Cloverleaf’s long-tenured bartenders are reminiscing and remembering patrons and employees from over the years. Kyle goes to the front of the restaurant and comes back with another former bartender named Mary who used to wait on him and his friends back when he was a regular at table C3. She is there tonight celebrating her son’s 16th birthday. The Cloverleaf was his choice for birthday dinner.
“The Cloverleaf has an amazing, genuine, authentic ability to be not just bar but also a family,” Mary says. “This is a family and a cornerstone of a community that is inspiring and should definitely be told about.” // BILLMAN
The Cloverleaf’s 50th Anniversary Party a 1970’s Theme Party starts at 5 p.m. July 22 with throwback menu items, throwback pricing on select items, a 70’s costume contest and a special release Cloverleaf Peanut Butter Stout brewed by Silver City, 1240 Hollis St., Bremerton.
