Turning 40 Family Tavern Tour

    Our next two stops happen the following week with a carful of friends. After our pre-tour dinner of grilled bratwurst we get to TipTop around eight o’clock on a Saturday night, just in time to see a wedding party come in. The bridesmaids and groomsmen stagger past in a sort of reverse receiving line now that tuxedo jackets are off, bow ties are lost, and fancy updos are all but down. I’m reminded of another reason I’ve always loved bars—the people watching.

    TipTop is one of the few “neighborhood” bars left in Chippewa Falls, just down the street from Notre Dame church and surrounded by hundred-year old houses. Except for the lighted beer signs in the windows, a stranger might think this is just another house on the block. Inside the front door is a poster from the health department with a Lyme’s disease warning and pictures of various ticks.

    Our driver orders a non-alcoholic beer and the much-tattooed bartender tells me she “has to make a call to find one.” I tell her not to worry and order a Diet Coke.

    We watch as a bridesmaid’s crinoline layers stick to her barstool as she gets up, and she drags the stool with her. We laugh and laugh.

    “What else do you have hiding under there?” I tease her.

    She hikes up her strapless gown and tells me, “The last time I was here there was a reward sign for the return of a stolen barstool.”

    I’m guessing it wasn’t stolen by a bridesmaid in a hoop skirt.

    Our next stop is Loopy’s Grill and Saloon on business Highway 29 just outside of Chippewa Falls. This was the Yellow Rose in the late 1980s and run by a family with two teenage daughters who sometimes bartended in the afternoons. Karen—aka Beth O’Leary—and I stopped weekly to play the jukebox (“Paradise by the Dashboard Light” may still be the only song I can sing beginning to end) and talk with the heavy-set sisters who always had a story or two. They couldn’t have been more than fifteen and sixteen then, but they’d seen enough in their bar that they seemed much older to us.

    Tonight there’s a class reunion going on out back near the sand volleyball courts, and folks with peel-off name tags are milling around a bonfire. Others are inside doing karaoke songs popular in the mid-90s.

    This place has come a long way since I used to belt out Meatloaf tunes at the top of my lungs. The last time I was here, maybe eighteen years ago, the bar was full of bandana-wearing bikers. Now, besides a “fine dining” menu and flat-screen satellite TVs on every wall, Loopy’s offers outdoor deck seating, as well as tube, kayak, and canoe rentals for the Chippewa River.

    “What class is here?” I ask a woman beside me. We’re both watching a chubby guy in a fuzzy green cowboy hat sing a Backstreet Boys song.

    “Class of ’99,” she says. “It’s a ten-year reunion.”

    “Really?” I say. I’m guessing she didn’t get As in math.

    Most of the class reunion crowd is dressed in shorts and T-shirts, though we can’t miss a woman in a mini-skirt and stiletto heels whose shoes get caught in the planks of the deck. As we pull out of the parking lot I notice two vanity plates, REDE 4 ME and PEACHS, which confirm this is no longer the roughneck bar I once knew.