Use Your Energy For The Good With Missy Dalvit
Our gut tells us what’s right or wrong. Using our energy for the good makes a huge difference. Even the smallest good deed that no one notices! The show’s guest today is Missy Dalvit, Owner of The Squeeze-Tavern. Missy shares with Rich how she watched her twin sister recover from a car accident. It helped her realize how crucial it is to help people. Tune in and use your energy for the good!
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Use Your Energy For The Good With Missy Dalvit
I'm excited to welcome Missy Dalvit. I have known Missy for a while, it's a good way to put it. She runs an establishment here in town. I will let you tell everybody about yourself, your business and what you do.
My name is Missy Dalvit. I run a little establishment in a town called The Squeeze. I was lucky enough to acquire this business several years ago. It is the most lovely little anomaly of a place that has been open since 1947. It was opened by two little gentlemen with their GI Bill after the war. It started as a little hamburger joint. It has been in the same place since, in the same little, small brick building on the Northside of Denver. It has been a complete blessing. I'm surrounded by the most excellent people there.
It closed down for a while.
For a short time. It did close down for a few months when the owner previous to me passed away. After her passing in the middle of trying to change the business ownership over and going through all we needed to go through to open it, it took about thirteen months to get it reopened.
We may talk about that some or we may not. We will see where the conversation goes. The conversation starts where all my conversations start. Close your eyes, picture 6 or 7-year-old Missy in the summertime. What did you love to do most?
The first thing that pops into my head was I loved to play sawhorse hockey with my neighbor, Mike Vickerman. He still plays hockey now. He would set up two sawhorses in his basement and practice shooting pucks into them. I love to do that with him probably to play in the neighborhood with our friends and ride our bikes, play with the same kids, wind up Evel Knievel toy and painting on my grandma's driveway with water. Those are the things that I'm picturing. What a silly thing but we had the best time doing those simple things.
I don't have any difficulty at all to imagine that. What I would like to do is figure out how that connects to what you love most about your work.
I probably spent a lot of time with my grandparents. One of my favorite things about my job is hearing from all of my patrons about the little stories in their life that made them who they are. It's a little bit older of a crowd. It's a neighborhood bar. It’s how these little great stories in their life made them who they are and getting those little snapshots of time from them that I'm blessed to hear. When I worked with you at Miller Heiman, your head down working on the computer and you don't necessarily get that talk time with people that you necessarily do. In this job, in this little dive bar and neighborhood bar, I get to hear the greatest stories from people. I love that.
People do pass through Denver and some of them live here, you might want to say the name of your establishment.
It's called The Squeeze. It was formerly called The Squeeze Inn. We shortened it because that's what everybody calls it, The Squeeze. It's a tiny little neighborhood bar that is graced with blue-collar workers, lots of firefighters, police officers, people out for a ride on their motorcycles, and a ton of hot riders. A lot of the people have been around North Denver for a long time. The heart of the city. It's the greatest melding of people I could have imagined.
It’s a place people should stop in if they were in Denver and see you.
I don't know if you would agree, you come in and you feel like you went back in time a little bit. It still has the same backbar coolers that were put in when it was built by these two little North siders, Joe Morrow and Roxie De Nuzi. You can feel the history when you walk in.
Those are great memories of when you were young and a great life you are leading when you are in your work life. Tell me about your most painful memories.
I was thinking about this. One of the most painful memories I had was, my twin sister, me and my dad were in a car accident when I was four. We were driving down Wadsworth by our house. It was in this a little Fiat convertible that was a friend of my dad's that didn't have any seatbelts in it. A young girl not paying attention swerved into oncoming traffic and hit us head-on. My twin sister happened to be in the front seat. There were no seatbelts. She just hit the windshield and was in a coma for almost a month. That was a very traumatic event. I can picture it. I can remember riding in the ambulance to the hospital and everything. Clear as day.
How old were you?
Energy For The Good: The best thing about this job is to hear little stories in people’s lives that made them who they are.
We were four, my twin sister and me. I was in the back seat and I happened to not get as quite as hurt as her. I’ve got jostled around. I remember my arm hurting and riding in the ambulance to the hospital that my sister was very hurt. She had a lot of brain damage. She had surgery after surgery after that accident. It put a tremendous amount of stress on our family. That was rough.
It’s horrible at any age but at four it's tough. You don’t know what to think.
I remember my parents were at the hospital for the duration. I was where I ever I had to be, whoever could help watch me. From then on, I learned to be self-reliant and be super helpful. My sister had to learn to walk again, how to do everything all over again at that age. It was a quick grow-up fast time.
In a way, it gave you a bit of a gift of your own.
It was very hard but that's how you have to look at these defining moments in your life. It was terrible. A lot of bad things happened. I did learn how important it was to be strong for myself, for my parents and for my sister, and how important it is to help people.
What energizes you?
There are two things. People that are out in the world fighting the good fight, doing things that matter. Even down to the smallest little things that most people would never even notice. Energy spent towards good as opposed to some people put so much energy into bad. Look at what would happen in the world. The second thing that energizes me is kids. I love kids so much. That's probably one of my favorite things on the planet. It's little kids and their innocent view of things.
Those two come together in one thing that I can think of. Talk a little bit about bicycles.
I help out with a charity. I don't even know how many years ago. I ended up with a ton of bikes from my sister-in-law or family members. “My kids outgrew this bike. I don't need it anymore.” I ended up with an abundance of bikes and I thought, “This is such a waste to take these to the dump or to give them to Goodwill to be resold when they are not that great, to begin with. What can I do with these bikes?” I started researching on the internet and found an organization called Recycled Bicycles. I found two gentlemen that collected bicycles. In their free time, they fixed them up so that they could be redistributed into the community.
They would take these little bikes and either take them to inner-city schools where kids didn't have a bike, Indian reservations or donate to homeless people so that they could have a mode of transportation to get to work or whatever they needed to do. I started collecting bikes and it was super small scale, it was the first note to my son's football team. “Does anybody have any bikes that they are not using? I'm trying to collect them for this organization.” By word of mouth, people knew that I collected these bikes. People call me pretty much daily to collect these. I’m happy to say I have donated to two different organizations between 700 and 800 bikes that have been fixed up and redistributed into the community to people that are needing them. It's awesome.
There are people in the world that do good.
It might not mean anything to a lot of people. If I help one person, I'm so happy about that. I can think of one person, in particular, we had a hard time finding a bike for because she can't shift gears. She had massive hip surgery. We were on a mission to find this very specific bike and found it. She was beyond grateful and didn't have anything to give and return. I somehow found out through the grapevine that my kids went to Columbine High School. She had a Columbine T-shirt that she sent home to me. The little things that you do make a difference. That's important for people to realize in this climate of all this bad stuff going on.
It's a big thing to them. What drains you?
The first thing that pops into my mind is people that are lazy and to go back to what I was saying, people that put so much energy into bad when they could be doing good. I think of how hard it must have been to come up with some of these schemes up to steal someone's identity or whatever. There are a lot of thought that went into that. There are a lot of brainpower and thinking for something that just bad. I wish many people would spend more time and spend their energy on stuff that's good to do the next right thing.
Close your eyes again. What would you like to accomplish in your life? You’ve got a lot of life ahead of you, would that change everything for you if you accomplished it?
Energy For The Good: Time spent on people is never a waste.
I'm not sure that any one thing changes everything. You like to do a lot of athletic events like I do. I'm fairly competitive. If I could accomplish some goals related to athletics and being healthy, that always is a big deal. We have to appreciate our bodies and the capabilities that they do have. At the end of the day, does it mean that much when I finish a half marathon or another triathlon? No, but I do believe that it does take a special combination of will and mental fortitude to train for those events and to take care of your body.
It is the only true home that we will ever have. I have seen people not appreciate what your body is capable of doing. If I could accomplish some things that I haven't quite been able to accomplish where there's a lovely blend of your mental and physical fortitude coming together, it's a special thing. At the end of the day, the most important thing is appreciating our own health and what we can do. Having peaceful family life, being able to do the things with my kids that I want to do and enjoy simple things. Appreciate them.
We have talked about your business. What are you tolerating in your business?
The only thing I even have to tolerate is the COVID restrictions and all of the things that we have had to deal with in 2020. It was a business that was getting started for me. I never had done this exact thing before. Everyone kept telling me, the first two years are the hardest. They were hard trying to learn the ropes of this business and what worked and what wasn't working. It was hitting the most excellent stride and then we’ve got shut down. Trying to learn a new business and run a new business for me, and then having to deal with all of these ramifications while I was going through the most awful time of my life as it was already was very hard. Trying to come out of that and recover from what's gone on.
In all of that, what's working for you?
What's working for me and what will always work to a certain extent is caring about the people that come into my establishment. I worry and care about them. I want them to feel at home. I want them, at the end of the day when they come over, they might as well be in my living room and feel like this is a family of sorts. They do feel that way. Time spent put into people never is a waste, ever.
What's not working?
There’s not a whole lot that isn't working. The weather is not working with me. We have exponentially better a time when the weather is nice. There are always things that can be done better. We can be more organized. Work-life balance is always a struggle of what you are going to put your energies into. It's working pretty well. It's still always little tweaks that need to be made with what works better with your inventory or your employees. I'm blessed with a group of fabulous employees that are great people. I trust them. I'm beyond blessed with the most excellent patrons I could have ever asked for that helped me make it through 2020. As far as that goes, I don't have a whole lot of bad to say. I have never had a job where I didn't get up and go, “I don't want to go to work.” I don't ever feel like that. I'm excited to go see my patrons. Some days are better than others but it's a happy experience for the most part. That's such a blessing.
By the fact that you call them your patrons, that says a lot.
How so? What do you think about that?
You don't call them your customers. There's a big difference between a patron and a customer.
They are my good friends. I love them.
That's a signal. This could have been the first question but it's the last question. What role for you does faith play in all of this? Everything we have talked about, your life, what you are doing, where you are going and what you want to be.
It's huge. I'm discovering that more daily. I've gotten much more serious about my faith. I started going to adoration every week at my church and developing a closer relationship with God. Paying attention to the cues of the universe and how much it does make a difference. Matthew Kelly writes a bunch of books that I love that I was introduced to at my church. I grabbed one before I went into adoration one day and started reading his books. One of his main themes is your gut will tell you what's right and what's wrong. We can choose to pay attention to it or ignore it. At the end of the day, if you put one foot forward, one foot in front of the other and do the next right thing, good things come to you. I have spent a lot of time in my life worrying about some stuff that I can control and some stuff that I can't control. I'm finding that I worry far less now. If I keep doing what is right and what is good, the world, the universe, my God and my life will be okay. It will be good and I will be taken care of.
It makes a big difference.
Energy For The Good: Appreciate your health and what your body is capable of doing.
It's probably one of the only reasons that I'm alive.
I'm glad that was the last question. It puts wrapping paper around everything and ties a bow on it. I’m pleased that you agreed to be on the show.
I’m happy that you invited me. I'm honored.
The honor is mine to be able to sit and chat with you for a while, talk about things that are important to you and let the world know who you are. Have people stop by I-70 and Sheridan and stop into The Squeeze, come and see you and all of your friends. It’s an important conversation. I appreciate you joining us and we look forward to the next episode. Thanks, Missy.
Thanks so much. Have a lovely day.
I will. You, too.
I will talk to you soon.
