Wisconsin Folklore

39 Wisconsin Tavern Amusements

39 Wisconsin Tavern Amusements James P. Leary Throughout the state's history, Wisconsin taverns have sustained the legacy of Old World inns, of cultural institutions sharing status with, and often numerically exceeding, churches. In 1944, journalist Fred Holmes described Wisconsin German taverns in a way that characterized many more of the state's ethnic, rural, small-town, and urban-working-c1ass watering holes: "... the tavern is a community club house. After church, the whole family, before returning to the farm, is likely to enter to drink beer, while sitting around a table talking with friends and neighbors. These taverns are different in atmosphere from the crowded bar familiar to other communities. They have the attributes of family sociability rather than commercial activity" (Old World Wisconsin: Around Europe in the Badger State [Eau Claire, Wisc.: E. M. Hale, 1944], 71). Four decades later, I found much the same features evident but endangered while conducting research for the essay that follows. At the close of the twentieth century, the prospects for the family-run tavern, the erstwhile "communityclub house," have worsened. On May 11, 1997, iournalist Susan Lampert Smith wrote a special report, "Decline of the Wisconsin Tavern," for the Wisconsin State Journal. Citing a marked drop in "ma and po country taverns," Smith found those still in business beleaguered. Among them Junior Sprecher, proprietor of a "quintessential Wisconsin tavern," in the central Sauk County hamlet of Leland: "Sprecher's has pickled eggs on the back bar, Rshing licenses for sale, a friendly pup named Lucy and, behind the bar, Junior Sprecher himself. This 70-year-old charmer in red suspenders comes from the Swiss immigrants who settled this area, the son of a family that has been doing business in this building since 1901. He also knows he's an endangered species, becoming less common than his trophy wild turkey tom that struts in a glass case on the far wall." Sports bars and chain restaurants with liquor licenses may proliferate, but for Junior Sprecher, "Country taverns are a thing of the past." ModiRed from an unpublished paper presented to the Society for North American Cultures Survey, Lexington, Kentucky, October 1983. If you're moving to Wisconsin, And your wife is on the wagon, I think it's only fair to warn her They've got a bar on every corner. So begins "Up in Wisconsin," an only partly tongue-in-cheek praise song by Peter and Lou Berryman, natives of Wisconsin's Fox River Valley (Berryman 1980). HOlne of Berghoff, Blatz, Gartenbrau, Heileman, Hibernia, Huber, Leinenkugel, Miller, Pabst, Schlitz, Sprecher, Point, and Walters breweries, a national leader in beer and 377 Part Four. Beliefs and Customs brandy consumption, Wisconsin has bars not only on main street thoroughfares, but also in quiet neighborhoods and alongside rural crossroads (Vogeler 1986: 9~15). Indeed, Wisconsin trails only Nevada as the state with the most per capita taverns, and the latter's numbers are swollen by the influx of nightlife-seeking tourists, while the former's patrons are mostly local. My beginnings as a participant/observer in Wisconsin tavern life came at age fifteen when, having let my beard grow for a few days, I "got served" at Broome's Club 48, Walt's V & M Bar, and Vanderhyde's Tavern. My observations are based on these and subsequent experiences, and as well as on interviews conducted from 1978-1983 with tavernkeepers and their patrons in Barron and Portage Counties. Situated in northwestern and central Wisconsin, respectively, these counties were settled by non-native peoples in the nineteenth century. WASP capitalists from New England typically financed the region's logging, milling, and railroad industries , but the first generation of workers, farmers, and barroom entrepreneurs were chiefly former peasants and often Catholics or free-thinkers of various ethnicities: "Bohemian" or Czech, German, French, Irish, and Italian in Barron County (Axtell 1980); Polish and German in Portage County. The proliferation of "foreign" taverns did not please well-to-do Yankees. They attacked the "German Sunday"-practiced with equal enthusiasm by Slavic peoples-wherein whole families spent Sunday afternoons in beer halls enjoying food, music, dancing, cards, conversation, and, of course, beer (Conzen 1976: 15658 ). Indeed, as early as the 1870s, Yankee politicians and churchmen, sometimes aligned with pietistic Norwegians, attempted to close beer halls altogether on Sundays (Paul 1979: 302-7; Rippley 1985: 51-52). Albert Sanford's temperanceminded complaints about Portage County Poles, for example, noted that women frequented taverns "as freely as men in the country...