Forty years in, Al Bonner makes taking care of Gene’s Beer Garden, a neighborhood institution, look easy.
A young Al Bonner and his wife were living large when his dream job fell into his lap.
He’d worked in the coal mines for a few years, but he didn’t much like it. Then he and his wife came into a small inheritance. They burned through most of it pretty quickly, Bonner doesn’t mind admitting. He was hanging out at Gene’s Place one day in January 1985 when Frank Perilli, one of the co-owners, looked at him. “He goes, ‘You still want to buy this place?’”
Bonner had been making sure Perilli knew he wanted the bar for years. He’d grown up in the neighborhood, picked up lunch at the bar for teachers sometimes back when he was a student at Second Ward grade school down the street in the ’60s. He’d hung out there with the guys after shifts at the mines. After the inheritance came, he’d picked up construction work here and there and still got to the bar most days. Gene’s wasn’t just a hub of the neighborhood—it was a hub of his life. And the inheritance was dwindling.
“I said, ‘Absolutely.’”
Perilli wanted $100,000 for it. Bonner didn’t haggle. He had about $20,000 left, and he called a friend at First National Bank—also a longtime regular at Gene’s—and asked for $80,000. The paperwork was finished on January 31, and Perilli told Bonner to be at the bar at 8 a.m. on February 1.
That was Frank and brother Joe Perilli’s routine: They’d both show up at 8 to clean and get the chili on. One would leave around 10, then he’d relieve the other at 6 and work until closing. That first day, Frank Perilli showed Bonner how to run the place, including making the chili. “We’re both there in the kitchen. I’m chopping onions, and I’ve got tears and snot—I don’t cook! I’ve never chopped onions! I didn’t know if it was supposed to be that way. I’m thinking, What have I got myself into?”
Later that day, Perilli sat Bonner down to share 41 years of knowledge about how to run Gene’s—it was his older brother, Gene Perilli, who’d started the bar in 1944. “He told me, when you take that money out of that cash register, you put it in the bank. Because your pocket has a hole in it.” He’d seen Bonner’s spending habits. “When the time comes you’re going to need that money, you’re not going to have it.”
Bonner was 28 when Perilli handed him the keys. “I bought the bar in February,” he says, “and we had a 2-year-old, and then we had a set of twins in March, right after.”
Joe Perilli worked for Bonner for a while. He was 59 and planned to retire at 62. One morning three or four months into the new arrangement, he announced that he’d have to leave at 10. It was his day to work the day shift, but Bonner said, “OK. When will you be back?”
“Never.”
Bonner figures he just missed things the way they were. So he asked his friend Dennis Moore to pitch in and hired him.
Bonner is humble about the stewardship that has made Gene’s now the oldest and one of the greatest neighborhood bars in Morgantown—the best for a fifth time in 2025, according to Best of Morgantown voters. “It had a great reputation when I bought it, and I’m just lucky that it’s continued the way it has.” But credit is due to him for hiring good-humored bartenders and managing to update the beer list to grad student tastes and add live local music without losing the bar’s working-class charm.
With regard to Frank Perilli’s financial advice, Bonner says he did pretty well, for a while.
“Did I follow the road the way he told me? No,” he reminisced on Perilli’s death in November 2024. “Did I think there was an easier way? Yes. Was there? Absolutely not! I made lots of mistakes.” Every once in a while over the years, Perilli would drop by the bar and tell Bonner he should have been a millionaire by then. “If I would have listened to him, I might have been.” Still, he considers himself a very lucky man to have had this opportunity.
Thursday, January 30, the day we’re posting this story, is Bonner’s birthday. So stop in at the bar now also known as Gene’s Beer Garden today, tomorrow, or Saturday, the 40th anniversary of the day his dream came true, and tip a glass to Morgantown’s best-loved barkeep.
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