When someone walks into the 100-plus-year-old Wilton State Bank building that's now the Sportsmen's Bar & Grill, the bank vault is still there, the tin ceiling is still there, and the man who has been around almost as long as the building is still there - working, behind the bar.

Sofat Krush, 95, of Wilton, is a bartender there three hours a day, five days a week. He's also the janitor from about 11 p.m. until he's done, six days a week.

Krush, who's a few inches taller than the bar, and peers over it looking a bespectacled George Burns without the cigar, doesn't do anything fancy. Don't ask him for a pina colada as he stands underneath two old stuffed black bears whose paws are reaching out ready if necessary to turn your face into a bloody Mary.

Krush will do a rum and Coke, if you want, but he specializes mainly on putting a beer in front of you, or a shot of something, or a long line of bull-only.

"He can make conversation with anyone," said bar owner Carl Arnold, Krush's grandson-in-law. Or not.

While he gets your drink, you can try some conversation. What year was he born? "1492," he says. When was he married? "1492" First time he gave a kindly stranger a bad time? "1492."

Or you can look around at the scenery, the walls of trophies, the deer, the moose antlers, and then there's that mounted trophy that appears to be just a mound of fur until you get close and see there's a tail in the middle. A moose's behind.

The story, as told by Carl Arnold, is that he shot a moose cow with his once-in-a-lifetime moose tag the state awards. Since cows don't have antlers, he decided to stuff the other end.

Regular customer Jim Bob Anderson, 52, of Regan, who shared that he was the guy arrested a couple of years ago for driving a snowmobile in the nude, calls Krush "The General." Krush is 5 foot 4 and wirey, but even the rowdy drunk customer doesn't mess with him, Anderson said.

"He's run people out of here," Anderson said.

Krush, after bartending from about 2 to 5 p.m., gets relief. Candy Ehli, 44, comes in to make the ribeyes and sirloin steaks the bar is known for, and to take over bartending for the man she thinks of as her second grandpa, she said.

He gets in his pickup and drives a couple of blocks home, eats, relaxes, sometimes naps, and then comes back at 11 p.m. to the bar - which was his son's for about 20 years and now is his granddaughter's and grandson-in-law's. He mops floors, takes out trash, gets it ready for the next day.

"Nobody can believe it when I tell them," said Ladine Zwarych, 56, of Bismarck, the youngest of his three children, about her 95-year-old dad's ongoing non-retirement.

"His entertainment is working," she said about her dad who retired at 60 from the railroad. "He doesn't know what it's like to have a social life."

And it keeps his mind off off Anne Krush, his wife, who died three years ago.

"He still misses her a lot," Zwarych said.

She said she doesn't think he has a friend left his age; no one anymore that understands what the bad old days were like.

"It was hell then (in the Depression), and it's hell now," Krush said, in between his lighter comments.

Zwarych said her dad still gardens and cans. But if her dad, raised in Wilton during the Depression, had a main hobby, it would be the time he has spent over the years trying to save a nickel.

He's known for doing meticulous research before heading to Bismarck's grocery stores. He knows which store has the lowest price for all of the products he's intending to buy and so a grocery trip can involve a couple of grocery stores.

"Ask him the price of anything in the grocery store, he'll know it," Zwarych said.

Krush, who still lives in the house he raised his family in, will take his trash out, dump the trash out of the plastic trash bag into the trash can, and then take the plastic bag back in to reuse it.

At the bar, he walks in and turns off.

Everything he doesn't think needs to be on - the television, too many lights on the bar, in the restaurant, and they get turned off or dimmed. He knows what the grandchildren's electric bill runs.

Krush also saves rain water to mop the floors with, and he will get fish chipped glasses out of the trash and put them back into use. So Candy Ehli and others make sure when they discover a chipped glass they break it so it's really unusable and he won't be tempted to salvage it.

Lodee Arnold, 37, his granddaughter, who owns the bar with her husband, Carl Arnold, said Krush doesn't think kids today know how hard it was during the Depression.

"It just amazes him that people are as careless as they are with things and how we throw things out so easily."

She said he also thinks people should do things themselves instead of paying for them.

When the Arnolds have trouble at the bar, a leaking basement, a broken ice machine and so on, the first person her husband calls is Krush for a consultation.

"He really can find a way to fix problems," she said. "He can make something work … make it operational."

Krush, who still has a sharp-tack mind and walks at "100 miles an hour," Zwarych said. But he can't cook steaks anymore because of arthritis in his hands, can't feel the tips of his fingers anymore.

He has had sizzling fingers when he accidentally rested them on a hot stove while he chatted away not realizing what was happening, so family members have insisted that he's relegated to just bartending and light janitorial.

Well, kind of.

"He's very ornery," Ehli said. "You don't tell him what to do."

He still climbs up on ladders. Not supposed to. Carries out heavy trash, bottles, even with his bad shoulder. Not supposed to.

He fell about four months ago. Kept it to himself for quite a while until he realized his "hurt insides," as he described it, weren't getting better, Lodee Arnold said. They took him into the doctor where he was told he had a couple of broken ribs. But even so, if he missed work while recuperating, it was a day or two, at most, Arnold said.

"I love that old man. … He brings joy," said Candy Ehli. "I'm amazed at that man."

Sometimes Krush stops talking to Ehli when he's mad at her. Why?

"It could be most anything," she said and laughed.

She took trash out once that he thought was too heavy for her. That got her the silent treatment. He'll also go mute for a while for various other things - if she fills the ice bucket too full, has too many lights on.

He's 95, but many people including Ehli, who doesn't like to talk about the day that he won't be around anymore, hope there are a lot more years ahead.

Maybe he should try for "1492."

(Reach reporter Virginia Grantier at 250-8254 or virginia.grantier@bismarcktribune.com.)