Ray's Place Named First Ohio Sports Bar

This month popular Kent bar Ray's Place will be named the first sports bar in Ohio by the Ohio Licensed Beverage Association.

The OLBA will bestow the title to owner Charlie Thomas at the Northeast Ohio Bar Expo in Cleveland on April 22.

Thomas said the bar staked the claim after research conducted by Kent State University associate professor Patrick O'Connor, who penned the book Meet Me at Ray's that will be released this year.

"We haven't found any place yet to match our claim," Thomas said. "Pat has some compelling information."

O'Connor started researching the bar about two years ago for the book, which commemorates the bar's 75th anniversary slinging brews in downtown Kent.

O'Connor set up a website encouraging former employees and customers to share their memories for the book.

"We had about 200 submissions," O'Connor said.

Hanging on the wall in Ray's is a newspaper article from 1946 promoting the bar's installation of a TV — mostly for watching baseball games and other sports.

As part of the 200 memory submissions, mostly from customers, O'Connor said they got a story from someone who said he watched the Cleveland Indians win the 1948 World Series on that same TV.

"Which lead me to say, ‘I wonder what the first sports bar in the country was?'" O'Connor said.

His research took him through library catalogues, websites and to numerous phone calls and emails to various organizations, including the OLBA.

O'Connor said, surprisingly, he found restaurant organizations nationwide like the OLBA have no specific category for "sports bar." Other bars across the country have used the title, including franchises such as Buffalo Wild Wings, and some have even staked a claim to being among the country's first sports bars.

"I dug through libraries, university libraries, public libraries, and everybody would say ‘Gee I don’t know, nobody ever asks that question,'" he said.

O'Connor said having the OLBA back the claim lends weight to the argument for Ray's Place.

As for Thomas, he said the newspaper article proves that Ray's has been showing sports on TV since at least 1946.

"Somebody has to prove us wrong," Thomas said. "I have run ads in the paper for many years saying Ray's has been showing sports on TV since 1948. Now everybody claims to be a sports bar!"