Interlopers who move to Wisconsin are often amazed at the number of taverns. When I travel anywhere, to Minnesota or China, I’m struck by the lack of them. I recently spent 35 days in southern China, the first week looking for a bar. We finally found Ryan’s Place, run by a 300-pound goatee-wearing Canadian who modeled his business after that other famous expatriate bar, Rick’s Place. Ryan’s no Humphrey Bogart and Zhuhai no Casablanca. Still, a couple of travelers from Eau Claire settled in at the bar, and Matilda—a Mongolian barmaid—served us frosty glasses of Tiger Beer, complained about her boss, and asked my advice on how she should turn down drunken American men. Just like at home.

    In his book The Great Good Place (1989), sociologist Ray Oldenburg wrote about the necessity of having a “third place.” Oldenburg’s subtitle “Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts and How They Get You Through the Day” describes exactly what I was missing when I taught in China. Besides home (No. 1 place) and work (No. 2), your third place is an “anchor” to community life. Oldenburg says a third place must be inexpensive and highly accessible or close to home or work, involve regulars who also congregate there, and be welcoming and comfortable. Though important, food and drink aren’t essential, but you must meet both new and old friends at your third place.

Looking back, I see that my third place has always been a bar. I’m a child of the 1970s and 80s who grew up going to family taverns and supper clubs with my parents and siblings. I get nostalgic over the scent of Pine-Sol mixed with cigarette smoke and perfume, a jukebox playing “Good Hearted Woman” or “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.”

    Today if parents took their kids to a bar that didn’t serve food, Social Services would show up. But back then, in a small town like Chippewa Falls, it was perfectly acceptable for many parents – especially German-American ones like mine – to include their children in tavern life. We’d take a Sunday afternoon drive and stop at a bar on the way home. Children ate Slim Jims and drank ice cold Orange Crush, played pinball or air hockey with the other kids. Parents shared a pitcher of Leinie’s and slipped their kids money for the jukebox if they promised to play Patsy Cline and Hank Williams.
 

The supper clubs of my youth still bring soothing thoughts: dark-paneled walls, tin beer signs (Leinenkugel’s and Hamm’s “from the Land of Sky Blue Waters” and none of them lit up); relish trays of celery, carrots, radishes, and a communal dip; bread basket with white rolls and crackers in plastic and pats of butter; fried fish on Friday nights and prime rib on Saturdays; waitresses in polyester dresses who greeted each table with “how are youse guys?” Besides the specials, other menu options were a rack of BBQ ribs as long as your arm, half or quarter fried chicken, frog legs, or slabs of steak—all served with a baked potato the size of your head. At the bar before dinner Dad might have a brandy old-fashioned and Mom a Mogen David mixed with Sprite (never called a “wine spritzer”). Afterward we’d go back to the bar for Pink Squirrels or Grasshoppers, made with real Wisconsin ice cream and minimal alcohol, and the kids would beg for a sip.

Since the colonial period, taverns have influenced the growth of American towns. For nearly a century they offered the only other social outlet besides church. Wisconsin still has more bars per capita than any other state, a tradition that began with the hundreds of German breweries that appeared in small towns in the mid-to-late-1800s. These became what one historian calls “nerve centers” where townsfolk gathered for weddings and wakes or simply weekly parties. Finding a watering hole is part of our heritage, since almost 43% of the state’s current population descends from German roots. Germans call the comfort found in a family tavern “gemütlichkeit.” Its closest English translation is “coziness,” a warmth projected in many Wisconsin tavern names: Laff-A-Lot Dance Hall, Happy Jack’s, Jolly Farmer Bar, The Welcome Matt. These are “clubs” in the VFW not the New York City sense of the word. Even the most recent Eau Claire/Chippewa Falls area phonebook lists “taverns,” not “bars” or “clubs.”

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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.

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    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.

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    We choose not to revisit some places on our list. Perhaps it’s better to simply remember our afternoons at Leinie’s Lodge—neither a bar nor our past third place—where we’d stop by to drink a complimentary beer and to sign the guestbook as international visitors. Did I really think anyone would believe I was Patti Von See from Austria? Oh yeah.

And we scratch off Schrek’s Place in Tilden. This used to be the Villa (technically Mary’s Country Villa) back when Karen and I thought we were the original wedding crashers. Every Saturday night, June through August, was a wedding dance offering free beer and pop for guests, and we did our best to look like we belonged. If a bartender asked where our parents were, we’d point vaguely at the dance floor and say, “Out there.” Every Saturday night Karen and I danced and sweated and danced some more.

The building still advertises FOOD stenciled on its roof in enormous black letters you can’t miss from Highway 53. And across the road, another roof stencil reads MOTEL. Last year when I was at the Villa for my niece’s wedding (the first time here as an invited guest) I thought I might run into a ghost of my former wedding crasher self on this same worn dance floor where I first slow danced with a man. His name was Joe Something, and he was wearing suspenders but no shirt, his huge pecs built from throwing hay bales. Or maybe that ghost of teenaged me is sneaking cigarettes—in the women’s room with its same leaky faucet and mildewed caulk—behind stalls so tiny that the suicide doors can only open out. I used to patron the Villa as an anonymous guest, a girl blending into the crowd. A bar can never be considered your third place if nobody knows your name.

Bouvier. His name was Joe Bouvier.

The summer I turned twenty-one, I went to the tavern for its possibility. No one knew what would happen over the course of the evening, who would walk in and change your life. At twenty-two, I married a bartender from my favorite bar, expecting we’d raise a house full of children—a basketball team at least—and go on a weekly date to the tavern like our parents did.

    This summer I’m a forty-year-old college teacher who gets tipsy on two light beers and is bothered by second-hand smoke, someone who’s crabby if she doesn’t exercise every day. In other words, I’ve become the kind of woman I used to make fun of: a lightweight.

    Now I go to my current third place, The Joynt, perhaps because of its predictability. Friday or Saturday, early evening, I expect to take a stool near the owner, Bill Nolte, and his longtime sweetheart, Kathleen Nelson. Each time, I’m glad to see them to talk about books or movies or travels or people—what I’ve always wanted to talk about in a tavern.

Sociologist Oldenburg says that a third place is important not only to help you establish a sense of place and a connection to your community, but also for maintaining civility, civic engagement, even democracy. Pretty heady stuff for a tavern.

Tonight at the Joynt something happens out of the ordinary. It’s a bar, after all, and there’s always an element of nobody knows, again and again. A guy in flip-flops and bad teeth walks up the sidewalk with a lawn mower and starts it right outside the open door. He lets it run long enough for the bar to fill with exhaust then shuts off the motor and walks towards us. He asks for Bill.

“No Bill here,” someone says.

Bill says, “Why do you want him?”

The guy says to sell him a lawn mower.

“No grass to mow,” Kathleen says. True enough, they live above the bar.

This could only happen in a Wisconsin tavern: some goofy guy trying to sell a lawn mower inside the bar on Saturday night.

As we watch the guy push his mower down the street, Bill says, “You know, no one looks smart in flip-flops.”