The golden heart of Portland’s grouchiest bartender
I’m sitting on the little bench outside Ruski’s, the neighborhood tavern in Portland’s West End. It’s the summer of 2013. I’m alone, smoking a cigarette, having just devoured my Eggs Benedict among the weekend crowd packed inside the boisterous barroom. The front door opens and the waitress and bartender, Beth, walks out. Without a word, she sits down next to me and lights a cig, takes a deep haul.
I try to act casual, but this is a big deal. Beth is a local legend, a veteran of Portland’s un-gentrified hospitality industry, back when the night’s special might be a knuckle sandwich, with rings. She’s both revered and feared by newcomer customers like me and my friends, who watch her work in a perpetual state of disgusted aggravation, complaining and cracking wise in a gruff smoker’s voice with that distinctive city Mainer accent.
Will she speak to me? She does.
“I’m thinking I might get one of those Jazzies,” Beth begins, then takes another long drag.
“You mean, like a scooter?” I ask, confused.
“Yeah,” she says, exhaling slowly. “It’ll be the first car I ever owned.”
I laugh, we make more small talk and, butts extinguished, head back inside. I rejoin my group at our table and Beth goes back behind the bar to trade barbs with the regulars, many of whom have known her for decades.
“She told me she wants a Jazzy,” I tell my friends incredulously, and we laugh as we picture her driving down the street in one of those motorized wheelchairs. “Beth is hilarious,” someone says, and we all agree, even though we’re all a little scared of her.
We want Beth to like us, but have only a vague idea why. Nobody would describe her as nice. It doesn’t always seem like she wants to serve us. We would never ask for a coffee refill before she offered it, and would let our drained Bloody Mary glasses sit 15 minutes or more before lining the pints along the edge of the table in mute hope of being offered another.
We didn’t keep coming back to Ruski’s for the service. We went for its old-school, no-bullshit Portland authenticity, a realness expressed most strongly, and loudly, through the bartender who embodied it, Beth Milton. If we could somehow get on this grouchy townie’s good side, we figured we’d finally be in.
Granted, Beth’s salty authenticity is not everyone’s cup of tea. What some consider lovable sarcasm, others consider rudeness or uncouthness. In a city now renowned for its erudite and stylish “mixologists,” Beth slings PBRs, drinks vodka with Kool-Aid and can be downright mean sometimes.
I started working as a Ruski’s bartender in 2016. Getting to know Beth while decompressing with post-shift drinks and smoking on that bench in all seasons, I gradually realized her bulldog attitude is a mask, a hard shell protecting a kind soul who’s survived more adversities than the brunch crowd would understand.
Beth acts tough because she is tough. She had to get and stay tough to make it through a tumultuous childhood in one of Portland’s so-called slums. She had to be nervy and resilient for 35 years as a commercial fisherman’s wife. And she had to thicken her skin during a decades-long career behind the bars of some of Portland’s rowdiest dives — well before dive bars were safe enough places for people like me and my friends to even enter.
•••
Betheileen Twombly is the youngest of five kids born to Dora and Russell Twombly. Originally from Presque Isle, Dora was working for Russell’s mother at a restaurant his mom owned in the White Mountains of New Hampshire when they met. The young couple moved with their growing family back and forth between Maine and New Hampshire as Russell chased work at New England shipyards.
Before Beth was two years old, her father suffered a stroke that paralyzed the entire left side of his body and confined him to a wheelchair. The family lived in an upper-story apartment on Fox Street in Portland’s working-class Bayside neighborhood, not far from the busy intersection at Franklin Street. One of Beth’s earliest memories is of her father hollering at her to stop leaning out the window from which the little busybody loved to spy all the action below.
There are other early childhood memories. Beth recalls sitting in her father’s lap in his wheelchair. And she remembers his frequent seizures, how her brother Ralph would kneel on their father’s chest holding a wooden spoon clenched between Russell’s teeth to prevent him from biting off his tongue.
Before Beth turned three, her father had a seizure so severe that they called an ambulance. Russell was a very tall man. He wouldn’t fit on a stretcher, so the paramedics carried him out in a sling of bedsheets.
A lifetime later, not long before Beth’s husband, John Milton, died, she called an ambulance to take John to the hospital and made a point of requesting they send someone capable of handling his big fisherman’s frame. The EMT who showed up knew all about Beth and John, being a longtime Ruski’s regular.
That’s another remarkable thing about Beth: it seems like she knows everyone in town, and everybody knows her. But local fame has its downsides. Years ago, craving a break from working and socializing with the same old faces, Beth flew to Florida for a vacation. She put her bags in her room, went for a leisurely walk, and fewer than three puffs into a joint she heard someone yelling from a porch: “Ruski’s!”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Beth muttered, rolling her big eyes. So much for anonymity, even in Florida.
That day they removed Russell wrapped in bedsheets was the last he’d spend at home with his family. Doctors determined the seizures were symptoms of a brain abscess. The abscess could be removed, but that was an extremely high-risk procedure in those days. Russell was desperate to end the painful spasms and agreed to go under the knife. He awoke as the first patient to survive brain surgery at Maine Medical Center.
But Beth’s dad never fully recovered. After a year at Maine Med, he lived out his days with limited brain function inside the state mental institution — a grim facility, built in 1840 as the Maine Insane Hospital, over an hour away in Augusta.
Left alone with five children in the 1950s, Dora had to be tough to manage it all, and she was. By day, she worked at the Sparhawk Mill in Yarmouth making braided rugs. Every night, after making supper for the kids, she’d visit Russell at Maine Med during the year he spent there post-surgery.
Dora smoked, but only drank on weekends. She was a no-nonsense mom who didn’t tolerate displays of emotion. Crying was to be done in private, if at all. The Twombly brood were expected to handle themselves with steely strength at all times.
The burden of single working motherhood eventually grew too heavy, so Dora sent Beth, the baby of the family, to live with her aunt and uncle in Falmouth. When Dora’s father died, Beth’s grandmother, Nina, moved in with her other daughter in Falmouth, too.
Beth began attending Graves School, a two-room schoolhouse in Falmouth built in 1947, but was distraught to be separated from her mom and siblings. Halfway through first grade, Beth was struggling. She spent weekends with her family on Fox Street, and when it was time to return to Falmouth, Beth would become inconsolable. She remembers grabbing chair legs and doorframes, throwing explosive tantrums and begging to stay.
At a family gathering when Beth was seven, her uncle drew a firm line: “She’s here or she’s there, Dora,” he said. “What is it going to be?”
Beth’s mother decided to hold a family vote. “We can have her home,” Dora told her other kids, “but you have to help take care of her.” Beth’s three oldest siblings, Lynne, Grant and Ralph, all voted to bring their sister back. Her sister Kristie, closest in age to Beth and enjoying her status as the “baby sister” in the household, voted no. She and Beth still laugh about that vote these days.
Beth moved home and Nina, her grandmother, came with her. She walked to North School, in Portland’s East End, until the fourth grade. After attending the bucolic country schoolhouse in Falmouth, North School felt overwhelming, a cacophony of intimidating city kids. Beth said North School was run like “a friggin’ bootcamp” and she felt like “a fish outta water.”
Now a trendy part of town nicknamed “Yeast Bayside” for its many craft breweries, Beth’s childhood neighborhood had deteriorated from disinvestment due to the racist practices of bankers and real estate brokers known as redlining. During the “urban renewal” era of the late ’50s and early ’60s, the immigrant-rich area was targeted for slum clearance to make way for the widening of Franklin Street into Franklin Arterial.
The apartment building containing the Twomblys’ flat was among nearly 150 low-rent dwellings (and 27 mom-and-pop businesses) razed to ease the flow of downtown office traffic from the new interstate. The family moved to an apartment on Charles Street, on the West End near Maine Med, and Beth completed fifth and sixth grades at Butler School, a brick building designed by famed architect Francis Fassett in High Victorian Gothic style.
A few years after moving across town, the family’s home on Charles Street was marked for demolition to make way for one of Maine Med’s early expansions. They relocated to Thomas Street, not far from Portland’s historic Western Cemetery, which, thankfully, was not getting any bigger.
Blue-collar families were leaving the peninsula in droves in those days (for the Deering neighborhoods, if they could afford it) and childless young professionals were moving in. North and Butler schools have long since been converted into subsidized housing for destitute and disabled seniors, some of whom may have been students there. When Beth sees Butler these days, she remembers the refrigerated vending machine that dispensed the coldest, most delicious red apples for a nickel.
Dora had begun dating a neighbor in Bayside named George, who moved in with them shortly before the family was forced to relocate. George and, in time, all of Beth’s siblings worked at the Hannaford Brothers grocery store in the Old Port.
The Twombly kids remained close wherever they were. If one of the bunch had a problem, they’d call a “family meeting” among themselves and work it out. This usually involved telling Beth or Kristie to knock it off and get back in line. Dora’d be none the wiser, but the threat she could be told of bad behavior loomed large.
Beth’s mom was hard, but not heartless. When Beth was about 14, she had a blind date. Not wanting the boy to pick her up at home, she arranged to meet him at the hospital’s main entrance on Charles Street and waited excitedly behind the big glass doors. Her teenage date, likely as nervous as she was, approached the doors, saw Beth, turned on his heels and ran.
“I think he’s still runnin’!” Beth told me with a laugh, but it sure wasn’t funny at the time. When she burst through the apartment door crying forbidden tears, Dora embraced and comforted her with motherly warmth her daughter can still feel to this day.
Beth soon became the only child left at home. Nina lived across the neighborhood on Crescent Street, and Beth would visit her every evening after supper and take a city bus back.
One night when Dora and George were away in New Hampshire, Nina fell ill. Beth could tell something was wrong, but her grandmother insisted she was fine, then took a shower and put on a red dress, as if for a night on the town. She asked Beth to paint her fingernails and toenails red to match, and only then told her granddaughter to run next door and get the landlady, Mrs. Terry, to call an ambulance.
That was the last time Beth saw her grandmother. Nina was one of the only steady presences in her life and had become her best friend. She looked out for Beth until the very end. “Make sure you take the bus home,” she admonished from the gurney as it was hoisted into the ambulance. “I don’t want you walking home in the dark.”
To this day, Beth loves the color red. She wears it in tribute to Nina.
•••
As its original name too loudly announced, the hospital Russell was in also housed patients and prisoners the state had declared “insane.” Accordingly, no one under 16 was allowed inside.
Shortly before Beth’s highly anticipated sixteenth birthday, Russell passed away. She returned from hanging out with friends at Congress Square Lanes, the candlepin bowling alley beneath the Eastland Hotel, to an apartment full of mournful extended family members.
“Your father is going to die tonight,” Dora informed her. “You may go into your room and cry if you like.”
Russell’s funeral was held at the Hay & Peabody home on Congress Street. Another beautiful Fassett building, this one’s now a swanky hotel, restaurant and spa. Beth and Kristie recently snuck in to look around and both insist they caught whiffs of flowers, though none were to be seen.
Beth walked to the funeral home from Portland High School that day and arrived before her relatives. There were several viewings taking place. She entered each room and peered into the coffins, uncertain which one contained her father. After leaving the third and last room, she found her brother Ralph in the hallway.
“He’s there, Beth. That’s him,” Ralph said, directing her back inside the third chamber.
“I said, ‘No, Ralph, that’s not him,’” Beth recalled. “Now this woman’s standing in the hallway looking at me and Ralph like we got two heads.
“He said, ‘Dad is right there. That’s Dad, Beth.’ And I looked at him and I said, ‘Are you sure? Because you got on a green sock and a navy blue sock. You don’t even know what color socks you got on!”
Responding to tragedy with insult humor became a go-to tactic for Beth in later years. And she takes herself far from seriously.
One day when Beth was much younger, Nina took her shopping at the big department store downtown, Porteous, Mitchell and Braun, now occupied by Maine College of Art & Design. In line at the cosmetics counter they bumped into Bette Davis. Beth looked up at the movie star with awe and told Ms. Davis her grandmother had often compared Beth’s eyes to hers.
Davis and her family lived on an estate in Cape Elizabeth in the ’50s (it sold last December for a state record $13.4 million), so this story is probably true, but keep in mind that Beth has also been known to liken her peepers to a Minion’s.
In fact, the slight protrusion of Beth’s eyes resulted from hyperthyroidism. During high school she suffered a thyroid storm so strong that it caused cardiac arrest, and doctors decided to entirely remove the gland. Her recovery was slow, and she was unable to work or attend classes for a time. She returned to school with a doctor’s note that allowed her to leave class if she felt unwell. “So I’d go have a cigarette or a cup of coffee, you know, whenever,” she told me.
Otherwise, Beth describes her high school years as typical of many Portland teens’. She hung around the bowling alley, “partied” and formed friendships that’ve lasted a lifetime.
After graduation, Beth attended Westbrook Junior College on Stevens Avenue (now the University of New England’s Portland campus) and earned a Certified Nurse Educator certificate, specializing in geriatrics. She worked nights at the Jewish Home for Aged on the Eastern Promenade (since renamed The Cedars and relocated to East Deering) for several years, then took an administrative position at Maine Med.
By this time, Beth had met the love of her life, John Milton. John was a giant who stood six-foot-seven. They had friends in common and both frequented Sangillo’s, a tavern on India Street near Portland’s eastern waterfront. “Like my husband always said, ‘I met my thrill at Sangillo’s Grill,’” Beth told me.
John was reserved and good-tempered, a genuine gentleman. Lord knows what filthy language filled the foul air aboard the fishing boats he worked on, but in Beth’s presence, John never swore.
“It took me seven years to get him to walk down that aisle,” Beth recalled. “As a commercial fisherman, he was gone ten days at a time. Home for three, sometimes he’d come home, turn around, go out for another ten days.”
“I was twenty-eight and he was twenty-nine and we had lived together for over seven years,” she continued. “I didn’t think he was ever gonna marry me. I kinda made him. He called me ship-to-shore one night and I said, ‘We’re either gonna do this or we’re not. All our friends are getting married. We were engaged before anybody.’ You know, blowing off steam like I know I can do. And then he called me back and told me to set a date.”
“We fought the whole day of the wedding,” Beth remembers. It was 1985. “I had a cold and I couldn’t stop coughing all the way up the aisle. He kept saying, ‘You gotta keep doing that?’ John was a stickler for appropriate behavior in formal settings.”
Beth told me she would have spent every waking moment by John’s side if he’d let her. She worried about him constantly while he was out at sea. Her sister Lynne lost her first husband when his fishing vessel sank, a tragedy that took the whole crew.
John’s job provided good income, so Beth worked mostly to keep from fretting while he was fishing. In 2007, John’s hand was caught in a reel and badly injured, thus ending his lifelong livelihood. He passed away in 2019.
The Miltons lived on Salem Street and frequented the neighborhood bars — Popeye’s Icehouse and, naturally, Ruski’s, owned since 1985 by Steve and Rose Harris, who opened Rosie’s Restaurant & Pub in the Old Port two years later. In 2005 they sold Ruski’s to one of their cooks, Josh Whaley, and his wife Monica, who still own it.
Popeye’s famously had the ass end of a plane protruding from its roof and visible from the Casco Bay Bridge. The Portland City Council shut the bar down 2o years ago when the streets around it gentrified and new neighbors complained about drunken Popeye’s patrons pissing on their petunias. It’s now occupied by a New Age medicine center, sans Cessna.
Beth tells an amusing story about Popeye’s owner Bernie Orne, who later opened Weekend at Bernie’s Beach Club in Old Orchard and, like the character in that comedy, is deceased. One night Bernie invited some regulars to his house and Beth joined a group of women there for a few drinks.
“This guy was drunk, just a fucking idiot,” she said of Bernie, who’d emerged from the shower wearing a towel. While casually chatting with the ladies, the towel fell off.
“The girls with me all went out the door and I just stood right there talking to him,” Beth said. “Never skipped a beat. I couldn’t move. But anyway, he had offered me a job and I was going to start on … I think it was a Friday night. This is ’87.”
Though she filled in from time to time at Popeye’s, Beth didn’t love the place. “It was a shithole,” she said. Ruski’s wasn’t much better back then, but Steve and Rose worked hard to root out the roughest customers.
The late Steve Harris, another giant of a man with a heart to match, seldom seen without a cigarette and a whiskey glass in hand, was known to grab a bat from behind the bar and chase unruly patrons out the door. He told Bollard editor Chris Busby that he gave one asshole a “triple-lifetime ban.” When the offender asked what that meant, Steve replied, “You’re barred, your kids are banned too, and if your kids ever have kids, they can’t come in either!”
Beth had gotten friendly with one of the bartenders at Ruski’s and got to know Steve and Rose, who knew John from high school. One fateful day in 1989, Rose called her and said, “I want to make you an offer. And I don’t think you can refuse.”
The job at Ruski’s offered decent hourly pay and good tips, plus health insurance, but it was still a dangerous joint. “She’ll never make it,” Steve said of Beth, but he mentored her all the same, teaching her how to be tough as nails and take no shit behind the bar. Beth became the first woman trusted to handle night shifts and eventually became bar manager, a position she held for over a decade.
Ruski’s “was a hardcore bar,” Beth recalled. “That’s probably why I’m as hard as I am. Because I had to be or I would have been terrified in that place. People would come in that weren’t allowed in there. Half the neighborhood couldn’t drink in the bar because they just caused nothing but hate and discontent.”
“The neighborhood was pretty poverty-stricken,” she added. “We did a lot of benefits for Christmas and tried to take care of Reiche [elementary] school and their needs. We started out adopting like one or two families. … We had an auction at Ruski’s every year. We would pick one day and go to Rose’s house and just wrap gifts from morning till night. Harris Charities did a lot for the West End.”
She and John lived around the corner on Salem Street for 30 years. Emily Campobasso, a longtime bartender at the once similarly treacherous Commercial Street Pub on the waterfront, lived with her hunky fisherman husband across the street from the Miltons. When her man would shuck off his shirt to wash his truck, Beth would bring a lawn chair and a cooler of beer to the end of her driveway and watch. “Ya missed a spot!” she might yell between drags. John, meanwhile, would be puttering around the house, nonplussed. He knew Beth adored him.
Beth left Ruski’s after 15 years with Rose and Steve. They threw her a retirement party, and she said she sat there and cried the entire night.
Beth briefly worked at Paul & Val’s Firehouse Tavern on Congress Street. “I absolutely hated that job,” she remembers. “Worst job I had in my entire life.” But a coworker there also worked at the Portland Elks Lodge on outer Congress near the jetport. Beth liked the idea of bartending at a charitable private club where everyday folks were members.
Steve Harris, a member of the local Eagles Club, joined the Elks just to come visit her there. He was “one of my closest friends,” Beth said. “I was the best fucking bartender they ever had, and Steve said to me years later, ‘Beth, who would have thought that?’ He goes, ‘I couldn’t stand you.’”
Philanthropic social clubs like the Elks’ have declined with changing times, but it was a good fit for Beth. She managed the bar for a spell and got deeply involved with the organization, chairing committees and filling various official roles. She was chosen to hold the top position of Exalted Ruler in 2009.
While still working at the Elks, Beth returned to Ruski’s in 2013. “She came with the bar,” the Whaleys joke, but then wonder aloud, “What is Ruski’s without Beth?”
•••
By the beginning of the 1990s, Beth was already a neighborhood institution. When she retired again, for good this time, late last year, she’d achieved icon status.
Hilarious anecdotes about Beth’s blow-ups behind the bar could fill several volumes, like her long-running love/hate relationship with the crotchety Portland illustrator Bil Harrison, a regular who’d trade insults with her from the corner stool for hours. Beth was briefly the custodian of Harrison’s ashes before they were given to his son, who lives out west. She kept the remains in an urn under her couch and complained that Bil kept heckling her from there, interrupting her TV shows.
Swamped during chaotic shifts, Beth would often storm out the front door for a smoke break. Returning, she’d greet the room with a friendly wave and loudly reintroduce herself as “Sybil, Beth’s twin sister,” the joke being that calming her nic fit had transformed her into a mild-mannered Dr. Jekyll-type character.
Three summers ago, the glossy magazine Down East featured Ruski’s as one of the “24 Maine Restaurants That Have Stood the Test of Time.” This press briefly attracted a flurry of new customers from the country club set, who mystified Beth by inquiring about the tavern’s “tasting menu” and asking to be shown “the dining room.”
“Do you take reservations?” one couple asked her on the phone. Given her infamous intolerance for fools, one might expect Beth would blow up at this question.
“Sure,” she happily replied. “What time would you like to arrive?” They told her tomorrow at 6 p.m. would be fine. “See ya then!” Beth cheerily rasped, knowing she wasn’t working the next day.
Beth lives with her sister Kristie in Westbrook, paints abstract art with acrylics, and is home more often than not these days. But she gets restless. When she visits Ruski’s, Beth’s received like a queen and mobbed by friends and admirers of “the Girl,” as she also calls herself sometimes. She loves the attention but laments it’s hard to get quality time with her favorites — yet more tribulations of a local celebrity.
Busby recalls that when The Bollard’s series on the life of legendary Portland outlaw biker, bodybuilder and face-breaker Jake Sawyer was running in the magazine years ago, Beth was one of the few locals unimpressed by Jake’s wild tales of debauchery. In part, that’s because she’s as tough as he ever was, and in part, it’s because she’s got stories from her past to match his.
For now, those tales will remain untold. Several of her siblings are still alive, and Beth is hesitant to prompt them to call another “family meeting” about her misbehavior.
But maybe, if you’re on the bench outside Ruski’s on the right day at the right time, Beth, or Sybil, the Girl who became an Exalted Ruler, will sit down beside you, light up a smoke and tell you one.
