Bobby Baker lounges into the sunset, but his bar goes on
- Sabrina Staires
- Bobby Baker has left the lounge.
On the night of his retirement party, at the bar he’d named after himself, 66-year-old Bobby Baker was busing tables.
It wasn’t heavy work yet – the room hadn’t quite filled up. At the bar, people were watching Baylor’s football team pull out a surprise win over Kansas State. In the back of the room, a handful of bartenders from joints up and down Wornall Road drank alongside several of Baker’s regulars – mostly older, gregarious men with a strong taste for Crown on the rocks – their conversations punctuated by hearty backslapping.
Baker occasionally reminded well-wishers that this was only his “semi-retirement party.” It was November 17, and he had some time left before January 1, the day he plans to turn the Waldo bar over to his daughter, Becky Hamrich.
“It’s made me a good living,” Baker tells me on another recent day, sitting in the small, dark neighborhood favorite that he opened almost 19 years ago. “But I know what my dad means now when he used to say, ‘Everything isn’t always going to be peaches and cream.’
