FRISCO — Nestled on the wall of the Moose Jaw, just above the celebrity-signed menus and the old softball team photos and the newspaper clipping from the famous pig roast all those years ago, there’s a small but telling sign.

“Be nice or leave,” it says.

It was that kind of atmosphere Lynda Colety had in mind when she opened her iconic bar on Frisco Main Street in November 1973.

She didn’t aspire to much for the Moose Jaw beyond being comfortable and welcoming — “their bar away from home,” she says.

Nearly 35 years later, Colety is still there, working kitchen shifts at age 64, her black hair now a sparkling silver as she presides over the Jaw as “Mama Moose,” the nickname given to her by former Frisco Mayor Tex Etie many years ago.

Colety was lured to Summit from Des Moines, Iowa, after a ski trip. But the typical tale ends there.

Bars run by women are rare even today.

When Colety started the Moose Jaw (with two partners, the last of whom she bought out 25 years ago), she was the only one of her kind in town, the little hippie girl from Iowa slinging cocktails and breaking up brawls in a manner so tough and driven it couldn’t help but endear her to all who saw it.

She still takes satisfaction from providing a place where others want to come, she says.

But she is quick to add that most of her success is due to her employees, a loyal breed who get their health insurance from Mama Moose and who often stay for decades in a world where most just stay for months.

True to the low profile she keeps, Colety resisted for three months to be interviewed for this story.

“Nobody cares what I have to say,” she said.

Then one day she changed her mind, sat down next to the bar and told it how it was — and still is.

In her words …

• This building was originally for the workers that built the Dillon Dam. It was somewhere over by Farmer’s Korner, I believe, then they cut it in half and moved it over here. Since then, it was a furniture store, a grocery store, and they sold donuts in here at some point in time.

• Back in ’73, we had all the spaghetti, salad bar and garlic bread you could eat for $2.50.

• At first, it was very tough (to be a woman running the bar). We had a very diversified clientele. There was the hippies. There was the cowboys. There was the rednecks. So we’d have to kinda divide them up, you know, put each of them in their own corner.

• There were a few brawls back in those days, but it’s tamed down quite a bit since then. I can tell by how the bathrooms look. People are more respectful now. But back in the ’70s, it was pretty rootin’ tootin'.

• God yes, I stepped in the middle of my share of brawls.

• I think the scariest was when the Hell’s Angels camped out in Officer’s Gulch. They pretty much made the Moose Jaw their home base. One night, this guy jumped on his motorcycle — this was before we had any buildup down by the marina — and went straight down Main Street and landed in the lake on his Harley. He missed the Summit Boulevard turn.

• Shortly after we opened up, we had a real nut in here, and he had a knife and we had to subdue him. But I’ve always had really good patrons who would jump to our rescue. We always had backup, our local big guys. So it never got to the point of being scary.

• I definitely believe in covering my employees. That’s why I pay their health insurance. No 401-K’s, though. I decided against that. But when they actually do leave, which is few and far between, I try to give ’em a good-sized bonus.

• We’ve had some famous people in here — John Ritter, Vance Johnson, Keith Hernandez, a whole group of New York firefighters. But I had to go to Frisco Liquor to meet John Elway. I wanted him to come down here and sign a menu!

• For me, it’s certainly made a nice living. It took a long time, but eventually it paid off. The first year you probably net nothing. But if you do it correctly, you can make medium six figures eventually.

• The feeling when people come to your bar is a really nice feeling. It’s a high. We even had one lady, a local lady, she was on her way to the hospital to have a baby. And they stopped in here and she had a Motherlode before she went to the hospital, then she stopped here when she got out of the hospital.

• I met my last husband, my current husband, in this bar in 1974. He was living in Manitou as a musician. And one of the girls who was working here had gone down to Manitou and heard him play, and she said: “Oh, you gotta have this guy come up, he’s real good.” And she also said: “I think you’re gonna fall in love with him.” And she was right.

• If somebody had told me I’d be here for 35 years, I would’ve said they were smoking wacky weed.

Devon O’Neil is a freelance writer living in Breckenridge. He can be reached at devononeil@hotmail.com.