A2 Y THE NEW YORK TIMES, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2020
Last week, “The Daily” aired an episode
about my local bar. Since March, I had
followed the staff of the Hatch, a laid-back
hideaway in downtown Oakland, Calif., to
understand the economic and emotional
impact of the coronavirus shutdowns. (I
wrote about my reporting for Times Insid-
er in June.)
The episode chronicled the challenging
journeys of the owner, bartender and
cleaner as they navigated the pandemic.
After it aired, I received a flood of mes-
sages from listeners wanting to know how
the staff was doing and whether they could
help.
So I called up the story’s subjects for an
update.
The bar’s owner, Louwenda “Pancho”
Kachingwe, answered his phone just after
10 p.m. on Wednesday. (We had developed
a habit of chatting at odd hours.) He was
still at work, alone, outside the bar, build-
ing a patio on the street.
“Yep,” he said. “Just me and my drill.”
The city of Oakland had promised to
shut down the street and give the Hatch
space for extra outdoor seating during the
pandemic, but months had gone by without
action. So he commandeered a few parking
spots himself.
It was another example of Mr. Ka-
chingwe’s won’t-quit attitude. Since I’ve
started following him, he has faced a
monthslong shutdown of his business, a
struggle to get a stimulus loan, protests,
sick employees, a broken refrigerator, a
robbery and wildfire smoke that forced the
bar to close again. But he has persevered
— and business is now finally starting to
improve.
“If I told 2019 Pancho the type of num-
bers we’re doing, he’d be like: ‘Why are we
still open?’ ” he said last Wednesday. “But
in Covid times, this has been pretty good.”
He added: “It had been a steady gush of
bleeding out. It’s now down to a trickle.”
He said he believed the Hatch could
make it through the winter. But he also just
hoped for an end to the pandemic.
Maria, the bar’s undocumented cleaner,had lost her job and learned she had can-
cer while I was reporting the story. When I
reached her last week, she was resting at
home. She now mostly went out only for
chemotherapy sessions, she said.
But she was in good spirits and holding
on to hope. “At the moment they detected
my cancer, I entrusted myself to God,” she
said in Spanish. “I know that he is going to
let me live so that I will see my children
get married, have their children and see
my grandchildren.” She began to cry. “I
know that he is going to help me,” she said.
Her family was continuing to scrape by.
Her son was finding some construction
work, and her stepdaughter was back at
her job at a Toyota dealership. Her chil-
dren, who are U.S. citizens, were able to
get food stamps. And earlier donations to
the Hatch had helped her pay her rent.
After “The Daily” episode aired, the
Hatch received another flood of donations
from listeners wanting to help, some ear-
marked for Maria. She asked me to pass
along a message to those who had donat-
ed: “May God give them more than they
gave me.”
The final subject of the episode, Abel
Oleson, the bartender, had better fortune
during my reporting. For several months,
he received unemployment checks, fatten-
ed by stimulus funds, that roughly doubled
his typical pay at the Hatch.
But that money had largely run out, and
he returned to work several months ago,
where his income was a fraction of what it
was. He was now grappling with waves of
depression. And his mother, who had been
diagnosed with colon cancer months earli-
er, was struggling with treatment. “It’s late
stage,” he said of the cancer. “It’s not a
happy stage.”
He and his girlfriend were able to afford
rent and food, but not much else, and the
days were blending together. “It’s, like,
always a slow drag down,” he said. “I
honestly wish I had more to say, but I just
don’t really see the end in sight.”Inside The Times
THE STORY BEHIND THE STORYOutside the Hatch, a bar in Oakland, Calif., in March. A reporter has chronicled the
neighborhood joint’s fight for survival during the coronavirus pandemic.JIM WILSON/THE NEW YORK TIMESKeeping Up With an Oakland Haunt
By JACK NICASThis article was adapted from “The Daily”
Newsletter. To sign up, visit
nytimes.com/newsletters.October 15, 1954.William Willis, a 61-year-old adventurer, arrived off Pago Pago, Samoa,
after having drifted on a raft 6,000 miles from Callao, Peru, in a voyage that took almost
four months. His companions aboard the 34-foot-long raft, which was named the Seven
Little Sisters and was made of seven balsa logs, consisted only of a cat and a parrot.
Willis had set out to outdo the 4,300-mile journey of the raft Kon-Tiki, led by Thor Heyer-
dahl, which in 1947 drifted from Callao to the Tuamotu Archipelago in the South Pacific.
Willis, who was at sea for 115 days, sailed past Tuamotu to Samoa.
Subscribers can browse the complete Times archives through 2002 at timesmachine.nytimes.com.On This Day in History
A MEMORABLE HEADLINE FROM THE NEW YORK TIMESNEW YORKER GOES TO SAMOA ON RAFT
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