PBS Wisconsin Documentaries

Bottoms Up: Wisconsin's Historic Bars and Breweries

Announcer: This program is brought to you by the combined resources of the Wisconsin Historical Society and PBS Wisconsin.

Narrator: Long before theme bars, before fern bars and teen bars, there were other kinds of bars, and before those bars there were more bars.

Jim Draeger: Wisconsin is a tavern state. It’s something that defines the culture.

Narrator: On this map, the red dots show areas with more taverns than grocery stores.

Jim Draeger: In order to have taverns, you have to have beer, and Wisconsin was a brewing state, too. A lot of the people who settled in Wisconsin came from beer-drinking cultures.

Narrator: Over time, most historic taverns disappeared or were remodeled to fit the times. But somehow, a few remain, and each one has a story to tell.

Bottoms Up, Wisconsin’s Historic Bars and Breweries was funded by the Wisconsin History Fund, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.

Narrator: Before the coming of the railroads, horse-drawn stagecoaches traveled Wisconsin’s early roads.

Mark Speltz: The bumpy, dusty roadways that connected all of the frontier towns. And spaced out along these routes were stagecoach inns, places where people could spend the night, get a warm meal, and enjoy a drink or game of cards in a taproom.

Narrator: At the midpoint on the Sheboygan and Fond du Lac line, weary travelers could rest at the Wade House. Now preserved as an historic site, the Wade House tells the story of a busy frontier tavern run by Sylvanus and Betsy Wade.

David Simmons: When Sylvanus arrived here with his wife Betsy and their nine children, he really had his sights set on building a town. One of the key elements in building a town was the construction of a tavern.

Betsy Urven: Folks that were coming in might go to the parlor to wait for a meal, waiting for next stage that’s going to pull out. Or gentlemen would go across to the taproom. Mr. Wade did serve gin, whiskey, and beer. You could also get a non-alcoholic drink. There was lemonade served here, as well. It wasn’t solely a place for the taking of drink. But it was also a place where passengers could get a meal and spend the night.

Betsy Urven: There are eight private bedrooms off of this main hallway. Each little room has a bed, a washstand with a pitcher and basin and a chamber pot, so you don’t have to get up in the middle of the night and go out to the outhouse. The tavern served not only itinerant traffic but also it was a place of gathering for the local population.

Betsy Urven: Men from town would come in, again to get a drink, maybe just to socialize, play checkers, kind of catch up on the local news. Mr. Wade did take newspapers from New York, other places. Walls would be covered with notices of maybe, local auctions.

David Simmons: Being the largest structure in town, it afforded space for public gatherings, elections or meetings. There may be theatrical performances and then also dances. Cotillions and balls, we know were held on the third floor of the Wade House.

Narrator: As railroads began to take the place of stagecoach lines, the stagecoach tavern soon gave way to the storefront saloon.

Jim Draeger: In the 19th century, a saloon didn’t really look much different than any other store on the street. It had the same kind of storefront. They were typically about 40 feet wide and about 100 feet deep, so they’re big, long, rectangular spaces on the interior.

Jim Draeger: And when you walked in the inside of a saloon, you were met by a set of saloon doors and a saloon screen. The saloon screens were architecturally elaborate. They had incorporated leaded glass, beveled glass, stained glass. They were beautiful, very architecturally wonderful features. And the intention of the saloon screen was to appease the objection of the temperance people that someone walking by could be exposed to these immoral acts of people drinking at the bar. The women and children, the innocent would see these activities and then they’d be swayed and led off the path of righteousness into this world of debauchery.

Jim Draeger: When you pass through the saloon doors, a back bar and front bar run along the long edge of the space, and that creates sort of a work space for the bartender, so he’s not having all of the customers mingling around where he’s working. It’s kind of a defensible space that creates a barrier between the customers and the booze, so he can keep an eye on his stock, and it kind of helps him to control the business of the bar as well.

Jim Draeger: You may find tables and chairs like you do in taverns today. But many of them didn’t have it. They were just standing. No bar stools, people stood at the rail. It was thought at the time that it was more healthful to drink your beer standing up or your booze standing up, than sitting down. Next to them on the floor, strategically placed were some big brass spittoons. A lot of people chewed tobacco back at that point, so the spittoons were a place where the excess of the tobacco went.

Jim Draeger: The 19th century tavern was almost exclusively men. It was very much a male space. The only exception to that was if you were in an area that had a high German population, you would have found a separate room called the Ladies Lounge that was for women, children, and families. We’re going to take a look at it here.

Jim Draeger: This space is separate from the tavern, it’s closed off by its own doorway. It has its own side entrance from the street, so women and families enter directly into this space, thereby shielding them from all of the un-virtuous activity that’s happening in the tavern. So if you go into a bar in Wisconsin and you see a separate back room with pool table in it and a side or a rear entrance, it was probably the ladies parlor.

Narrator: In New Glarus, Puempel’s Tavern, run by one family for 100 years, keeps the feel of an old storefront saloon.

Chuck Bigler: The bar was originally built by the Puempel family, Joe and Bertha, in 1893. They ran it until 1935, when their son Otto took over. He ran the bar for 58 years. He lived upstairs all that time, raised a family, retired, and then finally sold the tavern to us. So we’re the third owner and the first non-Puempel to own the tavern.

Chuck Bigler: We bought it, basically, so that it would stay the same. We didn’t want somebody to buy it and make wholesale changes to it that would ruin the atmosphere of it. So we bought it as a hobby. I still work full-time outside of here. That way, we don’t have to do the things that you might have to do to generate income such as jukeboxes, video games, pool tables.

Chuck Bigler: This has become the gathering place for the card games. We have a lot of class reunions. Things that require more of a quiet atmosphere where people can actually visit, play cards, talk. Usually every Monday, Wednesday and Fridays they’ll be there, we play Jass.

Man: Well, I got four nils.

Man: Oh my God in heaven!

Chuck Bigler: Jass is a Swiss card game that I don’t understand how to play.

Man: There they are. There they are.

Man: You deal me these faceless cards, gee whiz!

[indistinct talking]

Man: Oh, oh, missed one.

Man: I got to get out.

Man: Trouble in the house.

Chuck Bigler: Somebody will throw cards on the table and holler, “Schterk!”

Man: Schterk!

Chuck Bigler: It must mean something, but I don’t have any idea what it is.

Pfund: All my folks and all their neighbors played it. We were in a Swiss neighborhood. Every time they’d get together they had to play a game of Jass. I’m still playing.

Man: Mine’s ace.

Pfund: Ace? Sure, I figured that was over here. Goll’ darn it!

Chuck Bigler: The paintings were done in 1913. They were painted by Albert Struman, who was staying upstairs. Back in the early 1900s, this was a boarding house. Albert Struman needed something to help pay his 60-cents-a-day room and board. He asked if he could paint murals on the wall. He painted them off the postcards that were chosen by the Puempel family. We have the Andreas Hofer story of Austria being taken away by Napoleon.

Man: I’m going to take that.

Man: How ’bout that one?

Man: How ’bout this one? How ’bout that one?

Chuck Bigler: We put a thumbtack through the dollar bill and we fold it around a 50-cent piece. We let the customers throw it and we donate it to charity. We donated $1,556 off the back half last year.

Man: Holy cats, you’re mixin’ drinks?

Man: It seems to be more like home or family here. It’s just like the old neighborhood bar.

Chuck Bigler: If I was looking at it from a visitor’s standpoint, I guess it’s just a cool place to visit if I didn’t have to work there.

Narrator: Many small breweries once dotted the countryside, fueling a growing number of saloons. And from its earliest days, Wisconsin was on its way to becoming a tavern state.

Jim Draeger: To be a tavern state, you have to have access to beer. Which means you have to have good clean water, you have to have agricultural lands to grow all of the ingredients that are used to make beer, and you need to have people who will drink it. And Wisconsin had the perfect blend of all of that. There were all of the Germans, and Irish, and Eastern Europeans who came to Wisconsin from a culture that was a drinking culture.

Narrator: Soon, hundreds of breweries hauled barrels of perishable beer to local saloons.

Jim Draeger: Early breweries were very, very local places. The brewery was really focused on a neighborhood or a small town. Beer didn’t keep well. The earlier beers that were brewed in Wisconsin, the ales, porters, and stouts didn’t last very long. They had to be drank fresh.

Narrator: In Milwaukee, German immigrants preferred the taste of lager beer. Brewed with cooler temperatures, lagers fermented in caves cooled by ice. Lager beer gave brewers an additional benefit. It stayed fresh longer.

Jim Draeger: It had a longer shelf life, so it was more shippable. So you could brew lager beer and put it on a train car and ship it out of the city limits and ship it somewhere else.

Narrator: An expanding market meant that the lager brewers in MilwaukeeSchlitz, Blatz, Miller, and Best, which would become Pabstbegan to grow larger.

Man: Fire?

Man: Nothing much, over on DeKoven Street. They’ll probably blame it on a cow.

Man: A cow?

Man: Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.

Jim Draeger: The Chicago fire was probably the best thing that ever happened to Milwaukee brewers, because when Chicago burned, it all of the breweries in Chicago, too. As people came in to rebuild Chicago, that required a lot of beer. Milwaukee brewers expanded quickly to try to get a toehold in that market.

Man: Yes, sir, nothing like a good, long drink of cool beer.

Man: Quit jokin’.

Man: Hey! That is beer! Where’d you get it?

Man: They’re shippin’ it in from Milwaukee.

Jim Draeger: That’s why Pabst, and Miller, and Schlitz, and Blatz, that’s really why they became national beers.

Narrator: At the time, almost all beer was sold in neighborhood saloons, which played an important role in Wisconsin’s rapidly developing communities.

Jim Draeger: Many people in the 19th century lived in very modest houses or in tenement buildings that didn’t really have any social space. The tavern served as sort of an extended living room. Saloons in neighborhoods were always community centers, a place where you could go and relax outside of your cramped quarters after a long working day. If you were out of work, it was a place where you could ask about a job. They were a great source of news. That was the communication network of many neighborhoods. So you’d go into a tavern to look for a place to live.

Jim Draeger: Somebody’s on hard times and needs some help. The barkeeper would help rally the neighborhood and raise money for causes like that. They were also political places. The tavern owners themselves had a lot of sway in politics because they had their ear to the ground. They knew what the people were talking about. They knew what the issues were.

Narrator: All over the city of Milwaukee, saloons sprang up to meet the needs of its many immigrant groups. In the Brady Street neighborhood, Wolski’s tavern opened over a hundred years ago to serve the local community.

Bernard Bondar: This was a Polish neighborhood, and it kind of evolved around St. Hedwig’s church, which is up on Brady and Humbolt. A lot of Polish flats, mostly frame houses. There were quite a few tanneries around here on the river. A lot of people worked at those tanneries, so, a working class neighborhood.

Bernard Bondar: Our great-grandfather started this bar in 1908 and he was Bernard Wolski, so I guess I was named after him.

Bernard Bondar: I’d say a shot-and-a-beer-bar. We do make fancy cocktails, Cosmos, Moscow Mules. Twenty bar stools, five tables. We offer pool tables. We’ve had English darts from the day we opened.

Bernard Bondar: The building, to our knowledge, was moved here. It was on Brady Street. We thought it was a dry goods store. They moved the building here with horses and logs. My great-grandfather had 14 children. They all lived on this property.

Bernard Bondar: About this street, Pulaski Street, it’s shaped like a hockey stick. Now, this was a creek that did feed the river. We have the tavern on this side, and across was the butcher. Then there was a bakery directly across. And there was a dry goods store. This street was just like its own little community. There was actually a bar on each end of the street.

Dennis Bondar: It was run by my three great-uncles, which were his sons, for about 67 years.

Bernard Bondar: My brother Mike and I took the bar over from our third cousin, and then my other brother Dennis came in five years later.

Dennis Bondar: When I first started working here I knew that I would be a part-owner of a 100-year-old, fourth-generation business. That’s really what kept me going. How many people can say that? I’ll tell you, I would not want to do this business all by myself. It can be the best job in the world and five minutes later, it’s the worst.

Dennis Bondar: The longevity in this bar is because it’s been run by three brothers other than six years. There’s nothing like the trust you have with your brothers.

Dennis Bondar: So many people that come to this bar are just so attached to it. It is truly a community house.

Bernard Bondar: Because of the bumper sticker, it’s kind of a destination spot. A lot of tourists come in here. We’ve been them giving out, I’d say, 35 years, at closing, to anybody that wants one. After all these years, it’s amazing the stories I hear from people who have seen them wherever, from Africa to the Great White North, to Alaska, Ireland. The stories are incredible.

Bernard Bondar: When people go on holidays, we’ll give them extra stickersEurope or Russia, Antarctica, Afghanistan. We’re really proud of that. It’s kind of neat. It’s of a Milwaukee calling card of something.

Man: Rock on, Wolski’s!

Narrator: As Wisconsin brewers began to produce ever larger quantities of beer, they soon faced a big problem as the price per barrel began to plummet.

Jim Draeger: They’re trying to get their beer into the taverns. The tavern owner is basically buying his beer based on price. Who can give me the best price on a barrel of beer. The response of the brewers was to become the tavern owners themselves. If they owned the tavern, then they could dictate the price of beer. This was very popular, and all of the breweries began to buy up and open taverns. At its peak, it’s estimated about 85% of all taverns during this period become tied houses. They’re called tied houses because they were economically tied to the brewery through ownership.

Narrator: In Fall Creek, just outside of Eau Claire, the Walter Brewing Company built a tied house now called Big Jim’s Sports Bar.

Jim Gagnon: Some of these old wrestling posters I’ve got, with like, Nord the Barbarian. Then you’ve got Billy Robinson over here.

Narrator: Today, the walls showcase highlights from the athletic career of owner Jim Gagnon.

Jim Gagnon: I played football at the University at River Falls as well as my brother Paul. I actually went out to the Seattle Seahawks and signed a professional contract in 1977 to play for the Seahawks. I injured my knee after about a year there. I decided to get into power lifting to strengthen my body. I won the Wisconsin State Badger Open in 1986. I set a couple records. One in power lifting, which is 815-pound squat. Verne Gagne called me up and wanted me to get into professional wrestling. I guess the highlight of my career would be going to Germany in 1987 for the World Cup Tournaments. I got to meet Andre the Giant, 7’6″, 550-pound giant. It was quite an experience to be with him.

Jim Gagnon: On nights we weren’t wrestling, we would going out on the town and partying a little bit. In 1998, I owned the All American Wrestling. We wrestled in a five state area. That was a lot of fun. I had a good time with it. Eventually, I decided to move on.

Jim Gagnon: I was selling my league to a person from Augusta. As I was driving through town, I saw this bar for sale here on the corner. I got out of my car and walked over. I looked through the window and saw this old bar in the back. I thought, this is a neat place, I’d like to be in the business. So I called the guy the next day and I bought the tavern that day.

Jim Gagnon: The story gets pretty good, because as I’m at the bar the first day cleaning it up, and getting ready to open up, this older lady comes in and she says, “Are you related to the Walter brewing family?” And I said, “Yeah. My grandfather used to own the brewery here in Eau Claire.” And she goes, “Didn’t you have an uncle named John Walters?” I said, well, “Yeah I’ve got an uncle and I have a great-great uncle named John Walters, too.” She says to me, “Hey, they bought the land and built the bar here.”

Jim Gagnon: I go, “Really?” I was just amazed at the fact that I’d stumbled into this place by accident and my great-great uncle actually started it up. You know, there were dirt roads here. I mean, basically there was nothing from here to Eau Claire, which is approximately eight to nine miles away. They used to deliver the beer on horses. It must have been quite a scene to see, you know?

Narrator: In Jefferson, the saloon on this busy corner was rebuilt by brewer Rudolph Heger to serve as a tied house for the Heger Brewery. Now known as the Landmark Saloon, the pride and craftsmanship are still on display with Rudolf Heger’s initials carved right into the back bar.

Jim Draeger: It was built by the brewery as a showplace for their own beer. So it’s much more ornate and elaborate than your typical neighborhood corner tavern. It has this beautiful stained glass window here with leaded glass around the outside. In the center, there’s a medallion with a crest of the Rudolf Heger Brewery. You can see the R and the H and hop leaves in the center of the field.

Jim Draeger: It has a magnificent, very large scale back bar built out of quarter-sawn oak. A magnificent front bar with foot rails, marble baseboards, wainscoting on the walls. The ceiling is copper. It’s just a showplace of a tavern. Breweries could spend a lot more money on a tavern than a normal tavern owner could, so taverns got a lot more elaborate as a result of the tied house movement.

Narrator: In Burlington, B.J. Wentker competed with the tied houses by building an elegant saloon, now preserved as a restaurant that still bears his name.

Jim Draeger: B.J. Wentker’s is an upscale saloon for the period. It has a lot of features that are pretty embellished. It has a encaustic tile floor that’s richly patterned with medallions set in the floor. It has subway tile wainscoting on the walls, a decorative tin ceiling, and a very rich oak back bar and bar front.

Jim Draeger: The bar fixtures were produced by the Brunswick Company, which was the largest maker of back bars. Brunswick got its start making pool tables, and they realized they could sell a lot more pool tables if they sold it with all of the furnishings for a tavern. This bar has an incredible complement of all of the original bar fixtures and furnishings. It has the typical front bar and back bar that we see in many Wisconsin taverns, but it also has kept its liquor cabinets, cigar humidor, the ice box.

Jim Draeger: What we see right here, set apart from the bar, is a short lunch counter, where every day B.J. Wentker set out a buffet of free food at lunch time: pickled eggs, pickled pork hocks, sausage. The temperance movement agitated for bars to start serving food because they thought if people had full stomachs they wouldn’t drink as much. But ironically it backfired for the temperance movement, because bars filled up at lunch time with a lot of working class people for which this was the biggest meal of the day, and you could get it for the price of a glass of beer.

Narrator: The power of the big brewers and their tied houses promoted a drinking lifestyle in an already alcohol-drenched culture. The reputation of saloons became tainted due to excesses, what was called a “devil’s trinity” of drunkenness, prostitution, and gambling.

Jim Draeger: There was a constant tension between the forces of moderation and the forces of “the good life.”

Narrator: Since frontier days, temperance groups fought against the sale of alcohol, motivated by the costs imposed by drinkers on the rest of society. Former Janesville resident Frances Willard led the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in its campaign against the damaging effects of drinking on families.

Man: I’m so lonesome for you…

Narrator: The sentiments of temperance advocates were spelled out in “Ten Nights in a Bar-Room,” a novel turned into a highly popular play and film.

Man: Don’t call me a thief!

Man: You’re a thief! You’re a thief!

[anguished yell]

Narrator: The tireless efforts of prohibition groups resulted in Wisconsin ratifying the 18th Amendment, banning the sale of alcohol.

Jim Draeger: Prohibition was an unmitigated disaster for tavern owners and for brewers. With the stroke of a pen, they took away the fifth largest industrial business in the city of Milwaukee.

Narrator: Over nine and a half thousand Wisconsin saloons closed or became soda fountains, or pharmacies. But in some areas, saloons continued to operate despite enforcement of the law.

Narrator: In Hurley, spectacular raids slowed but never stopped the sale of alcohol from the many bars lining the main street, that had changed from saloons to “soda fountains.” Prohibition had little effect on Hurley. Hurley was never dry.

Brian Tarro: Hurley always has had a lot of bars. It was a place where the miners came at first with no wives.

Ted Erspamer: When I was a young man, it was quite a lumbering town, so we had a lot of lumberjacks.

Brian Tarro: These were underground mines. The tunnels needed to be shored up with timbers. The mining companies contracted with many loggers to supply the mines with this type of lumber. Of course, then the bars opened up and the girls came, and the dance halls, and so on, that sort of stuff. You can see the old movie, “Come and Get It,” which was Edna Ferber’s novel about Hurley and the logging industry.

Ted Erspamer: A block away from us, you were in Ironwood, Michigan. They always had strict laws on booze, liquor. Most of the people that lived around the range that wanted to go drinking came to Hurley, Wisconsin, because it was a more wide-open town. At the peak, we had around 88 bars.

Mark Speltz: The tavern Dawn’s Never Inn opened in 1925. That’d be five years into prohibition. It opened as Santini’s hotel. The Santini family installed one of the most beautiful back bars in Wisconsin. It’s still intact today, built by Brunswick, mahogany, triple arches.

Brian Tarro: The back bar is Art Nouveau style. You can see the curlicues with the flowers, the plant leaves, and the carved heads of the winds.

Ted Erspamer: Dr. Gresham bought this place and his wife Dawn was a little bit teed off and she said, “You’ll never see me in that.” So he said okay, and he named the place “Dawn’s Never Inn.”

Dawn Gresham: He wanted to save the beautiful back bar. He thought it would’ve been sent to California in pieces and there goes the history, which I agreed to. Eight months later, if the bar, which is 10 feet high, could’ve fit in our home, I don’t think we’d be having this conversation today. [laughs] I don’t, no.

Brian Tarro: The main street is Silver St., and it’s four blocks long and it slopes toward the river. This building is in a section called the “lower block.” Lower in every sense of the word, lower morality, etc. They had girls upstairs and they had gambling downstairs. Upstairs it was a hotel, by the hour.

Dawn Gresham: Down the hall is 13 rooms that were used for salesmen. That’s what I was told. Each room has a little buzzer on the door for, I’m not sure what. And one bathroom for all of them.

Brian Tarro: This particular bar’s draw was that it was a gambling place. If you go downstairs, you see that there is a hole in the wall looking out at the poker players to see that nobody was cheating. The money was kept in the back, and the big money went through the opening in the wall. This bar is perhaps the last one that remains fairly authentic to what it originally was. There’s still a lot of places on the main street, but they’ve been remodeled and names changed. Some have burned down, and some have been redone. So that this is perhaps the most representative example of what we had in Hurley in the old days.

Narrator: During prohibition, early tourists made their way up to northern Wisconsin where taverns were built to serve them in a rustic style.

Mark Speltz: The rustic northwoods style of architecture is really based on a long-standing nostalgia and an interest in frontier cabins and logging camps and the lure of the northwoods.

Narrator: Outside St. Germain, Sisters Saloon preserves the rustic look of an old resort restaurant and bar.

Mark Speltz: Sisters Saloon got its start in the 1920s as more and more tourists headed north. They used this northwoods rustic architecture to attract people. Inside, the walls had the color of a crackling fire. The bar, the cabinets behind, were created by a craftsman who peeled little twigs, split them in half, and arranged them in a really unique and original design.

Cherie Anderson: It’s one of the places that people like to stop because it’s very northwoodsy. The newer places are fun too, I mean fancier, but this is a typical northwoods place here that people like to come and look at. It’s a log structure, not easy to heat, but it’s nice to look at.

Cherie Anderson: It was always called Peacock Lodge. I’m told the original owner of the place worked in the southern part of the state for a meat packing company called Peacock Hams, and that’s why he named it Peacock Lodge. In the ’70s, my boyfriend’s parents used to own the tavern here, and the restaurant. I used to ride my horse down to visit with the boyfriend back in the ’70s.

Cherie Anderson: Then my sister had moved back home here. We heard that the previous owner was thinking about selling, so we came and talked to them, and the rest is history. I’m on a lake called Fawn Lake. It runs into Big St. Germain Lake and also Lake Content. So I get a lot of lake traffic, the fishermen and the boaters, and skiers come up to come and have lunch or dinner or something with us.

Cherie Anderson: I have people from years ago that still have to stop and see the place that honeymooned here, maybe back in the ’40s or ’50s. They’ll take a ride up north to come see the old place again where they used to stay, because this was all a big resort at one time.

Cherie Anderson: There was a lot of logging going on in the ’20s up here. I don’t know where the original builder happened to be from. He built several other restaurants in this area, too, in St Germain back in the ’30s. Behind the bar, it had to be all done by hand. I don’t know if they had to split the logs, but they’re smaller and it must have taken a lot of work. I’m sure it took him a lot of work. I took woodworking in school and I couldn’t do that. [laughs]

Narrator: In 1933, the disaster of prohibition ended for brewers and taverns, setting off celebrations across the state as beer and bars came back. It had been a long haul for breweries large and small, which did what they could to survive. Schlitz made candy bars, Pabst made malted milk.

Narrator: One of 73 brewers to survive prohibition, the Potosi Brewery first opened in 1852. After prohibition, it grew to serve a regional area before closing its doors in 1972.

Herb Page: Potosi was one of many little breweries in Wisconsin that fought a good battle for a long time and then finally went by the wayside.

Narrator: The Potosi Foundation recently brought the building back to life. Housing a brew pub and restaurant, the old Potosi Brewery houses the National Brewery Museum, telling the story of Wisconsin brewing through artifacts of the industry.

Gary Bowden: The idea of the museum is that our members can exhibit their collections.

Herb Page: I was intrigued, you know, with artwork on the labels and so forth, and with the history of breweries. So I started collecting beer bottles. Some of them started collecting cans, some of them with bottles.

Herb Page: But gradually, other people recognized the artistic aspect of these things and they started collecting. Before you know it, it had become a nation-wide obsession. We have a cross section of things from the larger breweries in Milwaukee to very obscure, little breweries in the small towns.

Herb Page: It was a competitive business and they had to advertise. A lot of this stuff was before radio and television. Some of it had very great artistic merit. This is, of course, one of the things that attracted the collectors to these items, because they’re colorful, they have local color, they have historical background and impact.

Gary Bowden: Up above here, there are two wooden cases from Semrad and Pusgh Brewery, in Highland, Wisconsin, which is a little town north of Platteville. The brewery went out of business in 1942. The case is an illustration of some of the breweriana that Semrad and Pusgh put out during the years. A 1904 calendar that shows the bottling house and it shows the brewery. An old promo piece from there is a nice reverse-on-glass piece illustrating one of their prime brands, which was called Old Regulator.

Herb Page: Then we have some items such as John Graf’s Milwaukee Weiss Beer, for instance. Weiss beer was the pre-soft drink beverage for women and children.

Gary Bowden: There’s a Million’s sign that would’ve hung outside a tavern, double sided. You can see Marshfield Brewery, which of course has been closed for years. There’s corner signs that hung outside of a tavern.

Herb Page: Well, for us that manage the operation, it’s a real pleasure to do that, because when we’re here it’s an environment, you know, among the things that we love. We hope that many other people can enjoy the same experience.

Narrator: When bars came back after prohibition, they operated under a stricter set of rules that banned using the word “saloon” in a bar’s name.

Jim Draeger: There’s a strong idea that they didn’t want to go back to the lawless saloons of the past.

Narrator: A new addition, bar stools, gave a seat to a new clientelewomenwho first began frequenting the prohibition bars called speakeasies.

Jim Draeger: When the speakeasies come about, all bets are off. Everything is changed, because no longer are there any rules whatsoever. The women could come into the speakeasies and commune with the men in a way that they never could in the saloons of the past. It attracts young women, flappers, who cast off those Victorian trappings of their parents.

Jim Draeger: There’s a cocktail culture that develops in the speakeasies because they need something to mask the taste of that rotten bathtub gin. [coughs and sputters] So sweet cocktails become of vogue and women start drinking cocktails.

Narrator: Many of the new bars sported a different look from the old saloons of the past.

Jim Draeger: After prohibition, it’s a blank slate. The designers of taverns are free to do whatever they want. They take their inspiration from movie sets of the period, the Busby Berkeley musicals with all of these dancers. They can’t have anything that’s very intricate, so they have these very simple bold, sweeping patterns that looked good on film, but it also made for kind of striking sets inside of the taverns.

Jim Draeger: They start introducing curves into the design, lots of geometric shapes, circles and long bands of lines.

Narrator: A rare survivor of the era, the Casino Bar in La Crosse reflects some of the design changes in bars.

Jim Draeger: The curving booths that we have in here, the very streamlined corners on the bar and the back bar. The strong chevron zigzag pattern on the canopy over the top of the bar, the real bold contrast of materials and colors. They’re slick, and clean, and smooth, and bold. They don’t have any of that very opulent ornament that saloon architecture had.

Jim Draeger: The Casino is a classic cocktail bar. It’s meant to appeal to kind of that smart set of people. Serving more upscale liquor. It’s not just a shot and a beer. They’re serving mixed drinks and cocktails. They have to accommodate a couple’s trade that never existed before. So offering booths where couples could get together with other couples and be able to talk over the top of a table was an innovation to try to capture that couple’s trade.

Jim Draeger: The Casino had a lot of fun with the idea of Jazz Age naughtiness, being kind of speakeasy-like in the legal era of liquor. The Casino also reflects this irreverence in the marketing of the Casino, too. Their tag line for the tavern has been since it opened in ’33, “Lousy Service.” So they’re setting this expectation that when you come here, it’s not a typical kind of upscale bar. It’s a little naughty, odd, and a little eccentric.

Narrator: Bryant’s, Milwaukee’s first cocktail lounge, shows little sign of the old neighborhood bar it used to be before remodeling by owner Bryant Sharp.

John Dye: There was an old stove and it was very tavern-like.

Shirley Lafferty: He got tired of the neighborhood crowd coming in and ordering a beer and sitting there telling their problems, as the story goes. So he closed the place up and completely remodeled it into a cocktail lounge and played nothing but classical music.

John Dye: It was a pretty drastic change for the times.

Shirley Lafferty: He would ask what you wanted, and then he would tell you, “You don’t want a beer, you don’t want a shot. You want one of our drinks.” That’s how the cocktail thing began. The Pink Squirrel, the Banshee, and the Bluetail Fly was originated by him, which are all ice cream drinks.

John Dye: The most famous drink he invented was the Pink Squirrel.

Woman: The Pink Squirrel! Oh my gosh! That’s my dinner!

Narrator: When Bryant Sharp passed away, Pat Malmberg carried on the vision, still used today, of offering hundreds of cocktails.

Man: I can just make you something…

Narrator: With no menu, in a dimly lit atmosphere.

Shirley Lafferty: A lot of people would come in and make the remark, “When are you going to pay your electric bill?” or “Turn up the lights,” and this is it. We have over 400 unique drinks that were invented either by Bryant or Pat, or one of the bartenders.

Shirley Lafferty: Jimmy was here over 36 years, Dennis was here 36 years. It was almost like a family. I just never left. I just stayed.

John Dye: This is a list of about 250 of our recipes. The way we get people to figure out what they really want is to ask them a series of questions. Do you want something sweet, sour, bitter?

Narrator: In 1971, a devastating fire swept through and destroyed much of the bar.

Shirley Lafferty: Oh, the downstairs was completely gutted. The upstairs was smoke damaged. Within three months, Pat had the whole place re-opened.

John Dye: The cash registers are plated in gold, the McIntosh is plated in gold. It’s a one piece, three-tiered bar, which you don’t see anywhere. It was custom built for the place. The vibe and the wallpaper and the sound system, it’s amazing. He did it all in three months, which was really incredible.

[laughter]

John Dye: It’s a bar. It’s definitely a bar. It’s a drinking establishment, but it’s also almost a museum. There’s so much history and so much tradition here. It’s just wonderful. Sometimes I feel like a curator more than a bar owner. Good bars have good days.

Narrator: As Wisconsin suburbanized after World War II, the big brewers stepped up their marketing efforts, sponsoring sports teams and getting into the new television market to build national brands. The big brewers also began to move away from taverns by aiming at the home market, and selling beer in bottles and disposable cans.

Jim Draeger: Once there were beer cans, it meant that beer became a commodity that began to be sold in grocery stores and in other places. Taverns started losing a lot of that off-site sales that was such a big part of their market.

Jim Draeger: The brewers also promoted sales of bottles and cans because they realized that getting people to drink at home would be part of the way to safeguard the breweries from prohibition happening again. Bring it into the household where family morals can help moderate some of these ill effects of drinking that were un-moderated within the taverns.

Jim Draeger: You see a lot of imagery of the housewife serving her husband a glass of beer, of the husband and wife both sitting down together having a beer in the living room.

Narrator: In the suburbs, zoning laws meant that bars were no longer located in neighborhoods but instead along a commercial strips, where they competed for attention.

Jim Draeger: As people become more mobile, how do you attract somebody to your tavern? Try to come up with something novel. Try to come up with something that the other tavern doesn’t have. Lots of them hooked onto dramatic or popular themes of the time and found ways to set themselves apart.

Narrator: In Rochester, outside Waterford, the DMZ Bunker serves as a VFW post that acquired decommissioned military equipment through a government program.

Jeffrey Hartzheim: That’s an M60A3 tank. It has a 105mm barrel on it. It weighs about 106,000 pounds. It was heavily used in Vietnam, and after.

Jeffrey Hartzheim: I’ve always wanted to do something with a military motif. I’ve kind of been military most of my life. This is an A-7 Corsair. It flew about 90,000 missions, jets of that style, in Vietnam. I talked to a couple friends, an Army and a Marine veteran, and we decided, yeah, we’re going to do this.

Jeffrey Hartzheim: This is a T-33 Trainer, they called it. It’s a two seater. That’s how they trained the pilots to fly. This was our first jet used in Korea. The Cobra attack helicopter is Vietnam era.

Jeffrey Hartzheim: When somebody passes away, their son or daughter-in-law, somebody, will bring in”My grandpa had this in the basement.” They’ll bring it in and we hang up what we can, you know, it’s a mix right now. There’s a lot of World War II, a lot of Vietnam, some Korea. We’re just starting to get into Iraq. A lot of nice things. We just hang up everything we get our hands on. There’s no method to it. If we have room, we put it there.

Woman: Welcome to International Exports. If you know the password, quietly whisper it in my ear. If you don’t have the password, we can’t let you in. Incorrect verb. So do you think you know? I’ll give you a try. You can’t get in, but we never turn away anybody. You need to pass an undercover mission to gain entry.

[all clucking and laughing]

Woman: When you’re on the run, you really need a safe house.

Man: Control told us to set this one up in Milwaukee. The spies had to have a place to stop for a little R&R. That’s how it all started. It’s been going since 1966. How fun is this?

Oh Oh 7: This is kind of a museum now. We have pictures here from the old Soviet Union. In fact, we have an oil painting of the godfather of the KGB, Felix Dzerzhinsky. We have a whole CIA collection from the Cold War. We have a cell door from the Stasi Interrogation Prison in East Berlin.

Woman: Agent, I have pulled you aside because we have reason to believe you are a double agent.

Oh Oh 7: As long as there’s two countries, there will always be espionage.

Eliza: When you come to the Safe House you have diplomatic immunity. So everybody can, you know, relax, have some wonderful food and enjoy themselves. What’s whispered at the Safe House, stays at the Safe House.

Woman: By the way, you can’t show this to anybody!

Man: Yeah, don’t show this to anyone! It’s a secret place, you know.

Narrator: Another bar with no sign outside, The Joynt, in Eau Claire enters its fifth decade without an obvious theme. But the walls tell the story of a time when The Joynt served as a small and unlikely venue for legends of jazz, blues, and folk music.

Bar Owner: I was sitting over in this other corner, which we now call the Blue Room, although it’s not blue anymore. There used to be a Point beer sign in here that was blue. So anyway, we were over there and Ahmad Jamal came up on my jukebox and I said, let’s get this guy. So, Ahmad Jamal came here. It was terrific. I didn’t have any PA, or anything. We rented a piano. Right in the middle of it, it occurred to meI gave the tickets away. It was a really nice thing to do.

Bar Owner: I thought, if we could just do this. We’d sell, maybe six, eight or ten times a year at the most, call them “The Joynt Break Even Concerts.” That was a hell of an idea, only we never broke even, never! So for whatever, from ’74 to ’91, I spent about every dime this place took in on music.

Bar Owner: Over that course of time, we had everybody here. Jazz, and Blues, and Folk music. Dizzy Gillespie played here. Charles Mingus played here. Woody Herman’s band played here, and Stan Kenton. McCoy Tyner, Bill Dixon, and Herb Ellis. It was like church in here, no noise. We didn’t even ring the cash registers out.

Bar Owner: Dave Van Ronk, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee were here. Ramblin’ Jack Elliot was here, Gary Burton was here with Pat Metheny. And the Blues guys, Son Seals and John Lee Hooker. Then, “Hey, your phone’s off the hook.” I said, “Lady, please, it’s going to be off the hook for about another hour and a half.” “There’s no point in taking your phone off the hook.” And I got Charlie Bird or a great guitarist or somebody playing here, I say, “Lady, come on.”

Bar Owner: That’s Phil Woods, and that’s Gerry Mulligan. There’s no money in doing music, especially if you do something that’s really good. People said, “Well, why don’t you get this guy?” I said, “I don’t like that guy.” I said, “Well, I don’t think he’s any good.” “Well, you might make some money.” I said, “Oh, great, I know what I’ll do, I’ll start having some shows that I don’t like the players.” That doesn’t make any sense!

Bar Owner: When the Mercer Ellington Orchestra was here, they played Lambeau Field the next night. Here’s Eddy Harris, right here. There’s Jack Elliot. That’s Mimi Faria. There’s Dizzy. Bill Evans was here two nights. There’s Mingus, right there.

Bar Owner: And Odetta, Freddie Hubbard, Ernie Watts, Bobby Hutcherson, Fat Joe Lewis, Dave Holland…and Sam Rivers, and I could go on and on. I think we did a 167 shows, or something. I spent all the money this place made. The Joynt didn’t have a penny in the bank. I thought, there are no old folks homes for club owners. Let’s put some money in the bank. So I stopped in ’94. It was a very expensive hobby, and worth every penny of it. It’s sad, but it’s okay.

Narrator: Since prohibition, the brewing industry consolidated, with the biggest breweries, the most successful, able to brew on a large scale, and create memorable ads.

Man: It tastes great.

[yelling in foreign language]

Man: All right. It’s less filling.

Jim Draeger: About 70 brewers survive prohibition. By the late 1950s, there are about 37 Wisconsin brewers left. By 1975, there are eight of them.

Narrator: Four were giants of the industry. Pabst, Miller, Schlitz and Heileman all ranked in the top ten nationally. But the fortunes of some of the smaller breweries were about to change. In Chicago, syndicated columnist Mike Royko, who harshly criticized the national beers, arranged for a blind taste test. In a surprising result, the top three American beersPoint Special, Walter’s Old Timer’s, and Huber Premiumcame from Wisconsin’s smallest brewers.

Mark Speltz: Royko’s article provided a shot in the arm and a lot of free publicity for small Wisconsin breweries just when they needed it.

Narrator: In 1978, Newsweek magazine declared Leinenkugel’s the best local beer in America. That same year, President Jimmy Carter signed a bill that loosened restrictions on the home brewing, unleashing a wave of innovation.

Jim Draeger: People start experimenting in their basements, their garages, and their kitchens with all sorts of different ingredients and different mixes. They’d go back to the old recipes of the past.

Narrator: When Deb Carey started New Glarus Brewing with her husband Dan, she became the first woman in the U.S. to found a brewery.

Deb Carey: We were really tired of the corporate life and just desperate to come back to my home state and raise our very young daughters.

Dan Carey: Deb took a map of Wisconsin and with a compass drew a 30 mile radius around Madison. So I rented a car and I drove and around, which is kind of crazy, and stumbled upon New Glarus. There was a warehouse here that was empty. The guy who owned the warehouse came on as our first investor and traded me stock for occupation of the building.

Narrator: One of the pioneers of what are called “craft breweries,” New Glarus created dozens of varieties over the years. Most popular is Spotted Cow, brewed from a recipe steeped in Wisconsin history.

Dan Carey: We’re big fans of Old World Wisconsin. We love to go out and walk around. It’s basically a working museum, an outdoor museum. We went out to the German Village and there was a crock covered with cheesecloth and beer fermenting. I thought, I wonder what that beer would’ve been like. I imagined how the beer would be made. It would be made with local barley, imported hops. It would be made with an ale yeast. It would be made with local corn. And it would be unfiltered. That’s how we came up with the design for the beer.

Narrator: Craft beers created a new market niche for small brewers, and scores of breweries and brew pubs once again dot the state, producing hundreds of distinctive beers.

Narrator: While many small brewers have flourished, Wisconsin taverns haven’t fared as well. From World War II to the ’70s, the number of bars went down by half and have continued a steady decline since then.

Jim Draeger: Mom and Pop owned bars have really declined. There’s a lot of turnover and a lot of change in taverns. Part of that is attributable to changes in attitudes related to drinking and driving. It’s more expensive to have a license to open a tavern today. As a result of that, it’s not an easy startup business.

Narrator: But the number of Wisconsin bars remains one of the highest in the country, and taverns continue to play a role in community life.

Jim Draeger: It’s much more part of the social fabric than it is in other places. Couples, children, extended families all come to taverns. It’s always been that way. It’s that everybody’s living room kind of function that the tavern has that really is why taverns are still around today. Because they serve the same purpose that they did a 100 years ago, or even a 150 years ago. People in other states drink in their homes. They drink in other gathering places. In Wisconsin, people get together in taverns. That’s why Wisconsin is a tavern state.

Bottoms Up, Wisconsin’s Historic Bars and Breweries was funded by the Wisconsin History Fund, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.