The Avondale Meadows neighborhood was constructed in 1948 to accommodate America’s soldiers returning home from World War II. Located along the Fall Creek Greenway and less than four miles from downtown Indianapolis, it quickly became the Baby Boomer epicenter of the Circle City. By the 1950s and 1960s, the Meadows area was the place to live, work and play in Indianapolis. It was home to one of the first suburban shopping centers in Indianapolis and it had its own Ho- Jo’s! Opened in September of 1956, it was known as Howard Johnson’s In the Meadows.
The Meadows Shopping Center was the largest retail area outside downtown when it opened in 1957, with two grocery stores, two dime stores and a variety of other shops. The 1940s post-War boom turned the Meadows into a suburban destination featuring many single family homes as well as several large apartment complexes in the area. The apartments were home to the up-and-coming young doctors, lawyers and business people and professionals who would subsequently assume important civic and corporate leadership positions in the Indianapolis community.
These same first generation Yuppies drove the nightlife in the Meadows to a fever pitch in the late-1960s and early 1970s. The area was home to Meadows Bowl in an age when bowling leagues occupied every night of the week and were considered the height of working class team building exercises. In 1975, Meadows Bowl hosted the acclaimed WIBC World Championships which attracted 5,720 teams over 50 days to vie for $413,949 in prize money. As an old eastsider, I vividly remember heading out to the Meadows Bowl every Thursday night with my dad and his RCA bowling team. It was a nightly ritual for our little band of “bowling orphans” to run the Meadows shopping center in search of fun. The graveyard behind the Meadows was a favorite haunt of ours as well.
The Meadows was home to several trendy nightclubs and bars including one of the city’s most famous: Neto’s in the Meadows. Owned by legendary 1967-76 ABA Indiana Pacers 6’9” power forward/center Bob Netolicky, it was a nightclub that easily lived up to the reputation of its owner/namesake perfectly, reflecting the excellence and eccentricity that made him famous. “Neto” was a four-time All-Star and member of two of the three Pacers ABA Championship team. One sports magazine called Neto “the Broadway Joe Namath of the ABA” and “the smoothest shooting big man in the ABA.” Neto owned a lion, an ocelot, and just about every hip sports car ever invented. (As a rookie, Neto successfully negotiated a Chevy Corvette as part of his signing bonus and the Indiana Pacers negotiator agreed, not knowing what it was.) Neto’s bar, located at the corner of Keystone Avenue and 38th Street in the Meadows shopping plaza, was just as eccentric, with strobe lighting and go-go girls at various times. An ad of the period described Neto’s Lounge as, and I quote, “Indiana’s Newest Swinginist nightspot for the ‘racy’ crowd.”
Like Neto himself, the Neto’s nightclub was the hottest game in town. Neto’s seemed to be sponsoring race cars all over the state and Bob once had a car dealership in Knightstown. The Neto’s in the Meadows nightclub was located just a short drive from the State Fairgrounds Coliseum, where the ABA Pacers played from 1967 to 1974. It was not unusual to drive past the bar near the shopping center on a weekend night after a game and see cars parked out front that would make classic car show award committees drool today: Roger Brown’s pink Cadillac El Dorado, Jimmy Rayl’s 427 Cobra, Freddie Lewis’ Electric green Cadillac and of course, Neto’s orange Porsche 911 Targa. When these guys turned the key of their hot rods, their cars would rattle the windows and doors of every Meadows business the same way they rattled backboards on the basketball court.
Most of the players from both teams would stop by Neto’s in the Meadows after the game. Always packed, it was the only place in the city where fans could rub elbows with stars and future Hall of Famers. Longtime Pacers trainer Dave Craig described Neto’s bar in the Terry Pluto book Loose Balls this way: “Neto’s bar was a perfect extension of Slick’s rule that everybody get together for at least one drink after a game. Now we all had a place to go. When the team was winning, the fans would line up around the block to get in, but Neto would make a big show of letting the Pacers’ people go right to the front of the line and up to the bar.”
In the same book, Neto himself described it as, “The bar was definitely a den of inequity. It sort of a psychedelic place modeled after Joe Namath’s Bar in New York City. Some fans would leave our games at the half and walk the four blocks to get in line so they could get a good place at the bar. The building held about 300 people. We had a dance floor, a live band and a big basketball over the bar. We had a lot of red, white and blue basketballs and pictures of the players, race car drivers and other celebrities. It was really a nice little nightclub. For a few years about every girl in town came there, and that brought in a lot of guys.”
By way of full disclosure, I must state that Bob Netolicky has been a close friend of mine for 20 years and I can attest that Bob has shared with me stories about the goings on inside of Neto’s that would make a sailor blush. I’m sworn to secrecy and I ain’t namin-names, but suffice it to say, whatever reputation Neto’s has earned as the swinginest place in town is well earned. The Neto’s crowd was not only confined to basketball players. On any given night, you might run into Hollywood stars like James Garner, Paul Newman, Bill Cosby or Mission Impossible’s Peter Lupus.
Yes, Neto’s in the Meadows was the rockinest place in Indianapolis for the late 1960s/early 1970s. But over a decade before, the Meadows was home to a place that could put Neto’s to shame if the determiner is based on Hollywood star power. What would you say if I told you that from 1954 to 1966, the Avondale-Meadows area played host to Oscar winners, Emmy Winners and Tony Award winners as regularly as the ABA Pacers player hosted Colonels, Squires, Spurs, and stars a decade later?
Next week: Part II- The Avondale Playhouse
Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. His newest book is “Bumps in the Night. Stories from the Weekly View.” Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook