The Great American Saloon Series
Northway, Martin E.
"The Great American Saloon Series" The Woodlawn Tap You can often see him at the far end of the bar as you walk into the tavern from the east entrance. Sometimes he is standing there by the refrigerator thrusting an icy six-pack of...
...Conversation ranges from the more normal and mundane topics, like sports, to philosophy and metaphysics...
...It is the unusually intellectual clientele that provides the drama for which the rather unimpressive physical facilities are only the backdrop...
...It is a noisy bar...
...Some years later a sympathetic patron donated a small monument that stands as a silent warning to the occasional untutored custurner who might ask for a Bud: in a prominent place behind the bar there is a wooden figure of a hand, its fist clenched and the middle finger fully extended, hanging over a Budweiser sign...
...The University Room is the best-looking and the best-kept of the four rooms that constitute Jimmy's refuge for disgruntled intellectuals and beer-hall philosophers...
...Behind the same beer aresteins from the fraternities that existed in the University's athletic heyday: now most of those fraternities are dead...
...I submit it as a Great American Saloon...
...Jimmy himself never got past high school...
...The blue-collar and shirt-sleeve crowd (which overwhelms the place during the summer, packing in to see the Cubs' games on the color TV) gives way sometime during the late afternoon to a group that includes a few middling University administrators, and finally blends in the early evening hours into a predominantly University crowd...
...This is not to say that the clientele is homogeneous, composed exclusively of budding writers, frustrated theologians, or nuclear physicists...
...Soon we were engaged in animated and slightly inebriated conversation, beginning with a discussion of conservative journalism (I used to work for an underground conservative news-paper, Chicago Rap) but ending, of course, with baseball...
...Better known as J immy' s. At sixty-two, his hair is whiter, but his face still wears that pleasant, semi-tough, mildly amused expression that I first observed when, as a rollicking fraternity man, I was introduced to the society of Jimmy's almost eight years ago...
...For us, Jimmy's has been a touchstone of personal experiences, an essential fragment that has helped make lives more complete...
...It is open on busy nights (which means most nights) and is always open on Sundays...
...Jimmy used to like to brag that all his bartenders were Ph.D.'s, though he has occasionally relaxed his academic standards, realizing that it does not take a university degree to make a humanist, or even a good surly bartender...
...But, like many other Hyde Parkers, I have many fond memories of the place: of Lutheran School of Theology students singing rousing German songs in the front room, of my own nervous experiences there before turning twenty-one, and of one particularly uproarious time my fraternity brothers and I had coming back from my birthday party there on a cold December night...
...History dies hard here...
...Every bar has its story about why it doesn't serve X Whiskey or Y Beer...
...Anybody is likely to come in to Jimmy's, and one University administrator does so often that some people think he lives there...
...But there he stands—or sits—elbow-to-elbow with intellects from the top chop—at least when they are sober...
...As the story goes, Jimmy threw out the Budweiser salesman in 1946 when the latter refused to give the more-or-less-standard discount on beer sold in quantity...
...As you pass through the door at the far end of the bar, which is marked with a sign "University IDs only" that is fastidiously ignored by everybody, you enter another room and, if you keep going, you enter the so-called University Room...
...Jimmy enjoys the swirl of dialogue that engulfs him, and he basks in the reflective glory of the pie-in-the-sky dialectics which often ensue...
...If you're lucky and the musicians show up, you can hear good bluegrass music there at around four o'clock on Sunday afternoons...
...And it's not very pretty—certainly it lacks the manufactured color of Berghoff s and the oyster bars up on the North Side...
...The Tap hasn't changed much during that time, either...
...There are books on the shelf behind the bar (honest) and University memorabilia on the walls...
...Jimmy's has had many important visitors, and part of its charm is that they come in so unpredictably...
...Some people don't like Jimmy's...
...immy has never served Budweiser...
...Most distinguished visitors to Hyde Park make it a point to stop by the Woodlawn Tap...
...Sometimes he is standing there by the refrigerator thrusting an icy six-pack of Schlitz malt liquor into a brown bag for a carry-out customer...
...It is a fact that good bars are usually the reflections of their owners, and Jimmy Wilson is the owner of that celebrated Hyde Park institution, the Wood-lawn Tap...
...It was Mike Royko, the acid-penned columnist for the Chicago Daily News who wrote the bestselling book Boss, and he was decked out in, of all things, a Daily News softball jersey...
...Mixed in are representatives of practically every ethnic and occupational persuasion...
...Good-naturedly he clenches that ever-present cigar in his teeth as he makes small-talk with one of the University of Chicago administrators who ornament the place during the early evening hours...
...Apparently it was born, as was the great university in whose shadow it rose, full-size, with all its traditions, customs, and accoutrements—including resident administrators—fully intact...
...One Sunday afternoon during the summer last year, when my wife and I were leaving after a little imbibing, we met a tall man seated at the end of the table by the main door...
Vol. 8 • March 1975 • No. 6
