Friends at bar recall Freddy Piercey

Freddy Piercey wasn't one to have or want a lot of things.

He wore a red bandanna most days, and jeans with the cuffs rolled up. He had no car. Didn't really want one.

He could walk everywhere, even if that meant hoofing it from his home in Northport to Huntington.

Somewhere along the way, he'd been married and had kids, but he didn't talk much about them from his regular corner barstool by the window of Gunther's Tap Room in Northport.

What he did have, though, in abundance, were friends. Nearly 60 of them filled the bar Saturday to remember him and raise a glass, nearly two months after his body was found in Northport Harbor on Dec. 24.

He'd been reported missing more than two weeks earlier after leaving the bar.

Piercey, who was 68, had been a memorable fixture for four decades in a place with a sign over the bar, "Hangovers Installed & Serviced."

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He was more notable than even Jack Kerouac, who the 77-year-old owner, Peter Gunther, said used to be a regular in the early 1960s.

As two local musicians played classic rock and country, including the Johnny Cash songs Piercey used to play in the jukebox, Damon McMullen, 57, and Billy Forster, 39, were asked what Piercey would have been doing at that moment.

"He would have picked out the prettiest woman here and asked her to dance," McMullen said.

He'd slap his hands and his knees to the beat of song, Forster said.

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"And he'd have a big smile," he added.

"He was his own person," McMullen said. He once had a regular job at an airplane parts company that used to be down the street from the bar.

But at some point he stopped working, picking up odd jobs and fishing in nearby Scudder Beach.

If there was wood that needed to be split, he'd be there, said Matt Rossback, 42. "He had your back," said Rossback, an electrician.

He had seen him at the bar the night he disappeared.

He'd hugged Freddy and said, "See you tomorrow."