Of all the stories Capt. Larry Gross told me, this one was the most outrageous. Keep in mind -- he's already told us about Joe the Parrot, the in-bar drunk cage and shooting holes in the ceiling.
Capt. Larry, the namesake of Captain Larry's, retired from the bar business several years ago. But I heard rumors about people getting their ears pierced, and had to ask the Captain. This is what he told me:
SEAL team four's logo was the skull and bones. So I went and had jewelers make me 40 of these little skull-and-bones earrings.
The deal was, if you wanted to get your ear pierced in the bar, it was a neat thing to get a Capt. Larry's skull-and-bones earring ...
The bird, Joe, used to have a pet of his own, which was a little bar mouse that would go in the bird's cage and eat his food. This little mouse would go into the cage and get up on the perch with Joe and stand next to Joe. We took a couple pictures of it because we thought nobody would ever believe it.
I had a dartboard and a couple American darts. After the bar had closed, the little mouse sometimes would run around on the bar, and we would take the darts and throw them at the mouse. Well, we never got the mouse, and the mouse kept going in Joe's cage.
Now, if you wanted your ear pierced, we took the same American darts that we threw at the mouse. The point of this dart went into a shot glass that the earring was inserted into. The shot glass was filled with vodka. We figured the vodka sterilized the dart.
The person who wanted to get the ear piercing would have to drink the shot of vodka and spit the earring out. I would take the dart and ram it through the ear lobe. The back of the earring was a piece of potato.
Naturally, it would bleed. They had to run around the bar five times. They'd come back to me, I'd take a bottle of vodka, pour it over their bloody ear, clean it off, and stick 'em with the ear ring.
Mostly, it was the cops that did it, some SEALs and the special forces guys. There were only two females I allowed to wear the skull and bones, and you can imagine why. And that's about it for the ear piercings. I know it all sounds unbelievable, but it's truer than you can imagine.
(Baltimore Sun archive photo)