Elmo's Hideaway

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He took over the Hideaway space after Chess Express left early this year. At sixty-two, he’s in good health, his wife is his best friend, their two kids are grown, and their house in Scio Township is paid for. So he was still smiling even when the Hideaway’s first paying customer, Dick Siegel, had to cancel.

“Siegel got a call and was asked last minute if he wanted to be [Bruce] Springsteen’s warm-up act,” Morales explains. Instead of a small fund-raiser in the Hideaway, Siegel ended up playing the Obama rally at EMU’s baseball stadium. “He had three thousand people,” Morales says, happy for his friend. “It became eleven thousand when Springsteen showed up.”   

[Originally published in November, 2008.]