Turning 40 Family Tavern Tour

    For a period of my life I tried to deny where I come from. When my son’s grandparents cared for him while his dad and I worked, I felt compelled to remind them, “Please don’t take the baby to the bar.” Now I realize their bar (was it Pretzel’s then or Fill Inn?) was where all of their friends were, and they wanted to show off their first grandson. As Alex got older they took him to supper clubs for dinner, let him spin on a barstool and drink a Shirley Temple with a cocktail straw. Typical Wisconsin kid stuff.

    For better or worse, mine is the last generation to grow up in the family tavern. Here’s what I learned along the way: Nobody likes a drunk. Darts. How to talk to just about anyone. Pinball. Some folks go the bar because they don’t want to go home. Pool. Hard drinking and smoking make you an old woman quickly.

    Turning forty years old is a milestone that I didn’t want to commemorate with black balloons and a cake in the shape of a male body part. Instead, Karen, my best friend since age six, suggested we visit some of the places of our youth. The idea for our “Turning 40 Tavern Tour” was conceived over bottles of Miller Lite around my kitchen table. As we wrote down our old spots we had a story or two about each, most often tales we’d never tell our mothers or our teenage children.

    Karen’s a former bartender and waitress, someone who knows both sides of the bar. Tavern connoisseur? More like what Badger Bars & Tavern Tales: An Illustrated History of Wisconsin Saloons calls your “Basic Badger Barfly.” In Chippewa Falls, we’d leave out “basic” and “badger.”

    The weeks surrounding my 40th birthday, Karen and I decide to visit bars that were once our “third place.” Our first stop is Glen Loch Saloon (“Bugeye’s” to locals), just past Irvine Park and near Glen Loch Dam. Tom “Bugeye” Stary and his gal Chris and her kids have run the place for over twenty-seven years. The first time I went there as an adult, feeling brave and thirsty after spending the afternoon swimming in the river above the dam, I offered my driver’s license to Bugeye even though I wasn’t of legal drinking age. He thought it was cool that we shared the same birthday, July 14th, and he told me to come back when I was twenty-one and he’d buy my a drink. A year later, I did.

    Karen and I are here today for something else Bugeye is known for: his pizza. It’s 6 o’clock on a Tuesday, and a few regulars sit at the bar. This is the place where my husband and I used to hang out, and I never felt right about coming back after our divorce. It’s been seven years, but the sights and smells are the same. A 30-something couple and their adolescent kids sit at a table next to ours, sipping Cokes after they order their pizza; the father and son play pool while they wait.

    I take some notes when Karen goes to the bathroom. “Whatcha writing?” she asks me. When I tell her—the pool table, dart board, and foosball may have been in the same place for at least two decades—she says, “Can I be Beth O’Leary?”

    “What?”

    “In your article, can I be ‘Beth O’Leary’? I always liked that name.”

    “Sure,” I say.