His name was Johnny Holly, but everyone knew him as “Ding Dong” and he tended bar at Wallace’s Tap on the corner of Adams and Laramie in the old West Side.  He was a short, square little man, with thick eyeglasses and a smile that never seemed to leave his face.  He made a big fuss and gave a loud welcome to everyone who came through the screen door, and he made you feel good. He talked to me like I was an adult, although I was only 15 or 16. I liked that.

“Ding Dong” got his name, I was told, from his first job, which was on the old streetcar system. Conductors accepted the five cent fare from riders and then placed the nickel in a slot on top of the fare box. When the conductor pulled on an attached rope handle, the nickel disappeared into the fare box and a bell went off. You guessed it…it went “ding dong.”  Conductors were widely assumed to augment their income by pocketing fares, and I guess Johnny was no exception. Late one night, according to a story my father loved to tell, a Chinese gentleman got on board and handed him his nickel fare. When Johnny pocketed the nickel, the man inquired “No dingy-dingy?” Johnny replied “No dingy-dingy after 12, Charlie.”  The man turned out to be an inspector for the streetcar line and Johnny both lost his job as well as earned his immortal nickname on the same night.

(Author’s note: I know that the story is politically incorrect in 2016, that the man is now Asian, not Chinese, and that “Charlie” was an ethnic slur. but political correctness hadn’t been invented yet. At least not on the West Side.)  

Like any good bartender, “Ding Dong” loved to tell stories, and the one that stuck with me was one he told often. He had been sent by the Army to Alaska during the war where their real enemy was boredom.  An officer had warned the men about their excessive drinking so he and his friends decided one night to drink only until the sun came up. You get it.

 

 

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They were called Taverns, Saloons, Bars, Joints, and Taps and they were the province of workingmen. Their neon signs advertised Schlitz, Old Style, Hamm’s, Drewerys, Meister Brau, Miller High Life, Budweiser, Pabst, or Blatz. “Lite” beer was a generation away. Beer route sales guys fought hard to get their beer on tap, and rewarded bar owners with free or greatly reduced beer signage for their windows. Wallace’s, a Budweiser joint, was owned by Mike Wallace; he and his family lived upstairs. It was typical of so many taverns back then, always dark, always cool and smelling like an exotic combination of draft beer, cigarette smoke and something you couldn’t quite put your finger on, but it was reassuring and in my mind I can still recall the “feel” of the place.

Men, and usually only men, sat on the stools at the long bar. They had their cash on the bar in front of them, something that is peculiarly Chicago. Go to another city and place a twenty on the bar and the confused bartender will assume you just want one drink and will then be leaving.

There were booths along one wall, and sometimes small kids would be found in them, sipping their Cokes and munching on bags of Lay’s potato chips while the Old Man had a few beers. It was their version of “watching the kids.” Ball games would be playing on the black and white televisions, later to be replaced with primitive color sets, the greens and reds bleeding into each other.

Women were, under some unspoken set of rules, allowed into Wallace’s. However, a woman would never walk in alone, lest she be thought   a “barfly” or, worse, a “floozy”. Their words, not mine. Sitting there with my dad, I once saw a pretty young woman, nicely dressed, walk into Wallace’s unescorted and Mike came out from behind the bar and asked her if she was lost. She turned around and walked out, leaving me to wonder what had just happened.

A woman needed to be accompanied by her man. In my mother’s case, it was usually after they attended parent-teacher conferences at Resurrection grade school, where all of us received our education from the Mercy nuns. I guess like most families we spanned the scale from marginally good to just marginal, but my mother and father would begin the healing process after five or six such conferences at Wallace’s. My dad’s friend Vinny would often bring his fiancée of some thirty years, Julie, to the bar, and that was OK, too. Thirty years and they never did get married.

While the language was usually rough, it was mostly confined to hells, bullshit, and goddamns. With ladies present, you could receive a not-so- gentle reminder from a bartender or husband to watch your mouth.   The F-bomb, thrown so often and easily by either gender today, would have been rare and contain much more explosive power back then.

Bars also shared a number of services and features that made them as predictable and as dependable as a McDonald’s menu or a Holiday Inn’s rooms. Men ordered draft beer and not long necks, mostly. If you were a regular, you could write a check for cash. Bartender’s held the stakes for wagers made on everything from horseraces to prize fights to disagreements on historical facts. Their back bars seldom changed, so if your picture hung there for some reason, or your trophy was on display, you were practically immortal. Throwing a punch in a bar could get you banned for life, the sole judge making the decision being the bar owner.  Juke boxes were common, but if the patrons at the bar weren’t in the mood for music, it was not uncommon for the owner or a surly patron to unplug it in mid-song. Package goods (bottled beer in quart bottles) were always available from the cooler, so you could keep the party going at home.

Some bars would cash your whole paycheck, the better to keep you drinking there. My wife likes to tell the story of Hanna Higgins, whose iron worker husband was paid every Friday in cash. Each week she would allow him his hour or two in the bar, then head out, broom in hand, to chase the old man home before he drank away the rent and grocery money. As a teenager, I would be sometimes allowed to accompany my dad and drink Coke while he drank his Budweiser. My father also favored a Sister Lakes bar known as Ade’s Glass Tap, a place where time stood still. I swear the memorabilia I saw on the back bar at age twelve was still there when I was fifty-two.

As a young man, it was my father in law, Marty Hawkins, who introduced me to the bar scenes around Division Street and North Avenue. Marty would go to the bar each night at precisely 10 p.m. and leave about 11:30 p.m. Saturdays he stayed a bit longer. He had his rules. He only drank Buds in a short beer glass and smoked only when he drank. His smoking style was right out of a British movie, where you pinch the cigarette between forefinger and thumb and raise it to your lips with the remaining fingers splayed out.  A devout Catholic, he still went to the bars in Lent, but drank only 7-UP. His family quietly prayed for the coming of Easter.

He favored three of four local bars, including a hole-in-the-wall joint known as Joe Pouch’s. Joe had owned bars his entire career and made enough money that he didn’t really need the business. He installed a buzzer entry system on the front door and Joe and only Joe decided if you were worthy enough to gain entry. It was as close to a private club as I’ve ever seen. There were no more than eighteen to twenty five people he allowed in. Frustrated would-be patrons would pound on the door, clearly seeing the drinkers inside, Joe would wave them off, snarling at them to go away. It was great street theater.

O’Neill’s was another regular stop. Frank O’Neill was a short tempered, baldheaded Irishman who was purported to be an IRA gun money guy. As it turned out, the Feds really had been following him for years. O’Neill’s featured a pipe organ on a revolving stand at the bar’s center, and it was definitely more elegant than most joints around the neighborhood.  A woman would feel a lot better about being at Frank’s place than most of the bars on North or Division. And I never saw Frank offer a free  beer to a living soul.

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The bar scene today is very different. Describe someplace today as a saloon and someone will ask you where you parked your horse. Pubs, Brewpubs, Clubs, some noisy, some glitzy, some straight, some gay, have largely replaced the workingman’s pub. You can still find them in many neighborhoods, but somehow they don’t seem the same, or maybe I just aged out of the scene. In a lot of cases, they have become “Sports Bars”, with more T.V. sets than you can count, in case you didn’t want to miss the hockey game between Bulgaria and  Senegal. The unspoken rules of gender in a bar are long gone. The need to cash a check at the bar has been replaced by the ATM. Disagreements on historical facts? Google.  Sponsoring softball teams, ladies nights, Super bowl parties, bachelor and bachelorette parties and any other gimmick you can think of to pack them in is the ticket to success for bar owners.  And they are loud places or I’m just too old, not sure which.

I think sometimes of those hundreds of bars around Chicago, serving my immigrant grandfathers, my first generation father and father-in-law, and then guys like me. These men were short on formal education, and they worked the trades, put out the fires, kept law and order, drove the trucks, manned the offices, and set the stage for the next generation to get college degrees and become the managers and bosses. Simple men for whom family was everything, and who needed a place now and again to get away and talk with other men. When I recall those old joints, I see my dad in his white tee shirt and dark pants (shorts were for sissies, I was informed) sitting in Wallace’s blowing cigarette smoke and shooting the breeze, asking Vinnie when he was going to marry Julie, while watching the White Sox on T.V. A contented man on a warm summer’s day.

I also see Marty Hawkins standing, not sitting, reading his evening paper, cigarette in the ashtray and short beer in front of him. He is friends with most of those in the bar, but they respect his desire for solitude and give him his space. He talks now and then and when he does they listen, because they know him to be an educated man and not a loudmouth.  And he takes a quiet pride in having his sons and son-in-law sometimes tag along with him, something most other men envied.

In my memories, it was always summer and the beer tasted cold and crisp and you were in a place where men felt good about being in each other’s company . I know it wasn’t always that way, but I love my defective memory. It brings me comfort.

 

 

 

 

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