When the Nordhems were hustling whiskey and women at McGuire`s, it was the only game in town. Butch`s doormen were instructed to keep a wary eye on the Maytag salesmen from Iowa and the conventioneers in heat. The saloon had a cadre of about 100 neighborhood regulars who did not want to be hassled.
And the place had a mystique all its own. On January 26, 1967, the day of Chicago`s monstrous 26-inch Big Snow, about 200 customers rushed to McGuire`s at about 3 p.m., when most offices had been closed, and mindlessly drank through the night, ignoring the drifts piling up outside. In a show of defiance, the jukebox kept blaring forth ”Lara`s Theme” from ”Doctor Zhivago,” and by closing time the Siberian landscape seemed perfectly natural. Of course, most customers were only steps away from their apartments. It is said that the city`s birth rate nine months later was unusually high. Characters abounded in the early days: ”J.C.,” who for effect used to go to a back phone and have himself loudly paged at the front door; ”J.T.,” who specialized in meeting a different woman every Friday night at 5 p.m. and persuading her to accompany him to Miami Beach for the weekend, courtesy of American Express (a practice that eventually bankrupted him); and ”J.W.,” a perennial graduate student who could always be sighted amid a circle of admiring women who alternated buying his drinks.
Still there was a certain conformity to the crowd that turned off some customers. One secretary finally left the place in disgust, exclaiming,
”Everyone here wears a three-piece suit, 16-pound black wingtip shoes, a hat and makes $10,000 a year. I can`t stand it.” She headed down the street to dance at The Store. But most women stayed.
Marge Klein, a publicist in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., was Butch`s secretary in the 1960s. She says: ”The regulars used to have what we called the
`McGuire`s Friday Night Map.` We`d rush to Butch`s at 4:30 and get a seat near the front window, drink through the cocktail hour, move on to the North Star Inn (now the Snuggery) for dinner, have a nightcap at the Pump Room and end the evening dancing at Maxim`s. The whole circuit was maybe a couple hundred steps. When McGuire`s became impossible on Friday nights, Butch opened up the basement as a `private party` for the regulars. It was his way of saying thanks.”
Upstairs the place was shaping up. Butch built a magnificent ladies`
room, featuring bright lights, wallpaper, original paintings, marble fixtures and Oriental carpeting, explaining, ”All the women I knew complained about the dirty restrooms in saloons.” The walls in the main bar were covered with original antiques and paintings, many reflecting Butch`s interest in sailing
(”It`s my favorite sport, but you cannot run a business from a sailboat”). Marge Klein recalls: ”One time Butch drove from Chicago to Maine, buying antiques along the way. Of course, he had to take his attorney
(now Chicago Municipal Court Judge Marty Hogan) and his doctor (Dr. William Hagstrom). Butch is an instant collector, and we bought tons of antiques and paintings. When the purchases arrived and Mary Jo and I began to uncrate things, we panicked. I sent out an SOS to the saloon: `Send over beer. We have to get back in the mood we were in when we bought all this stuff!` But Butch can walk through the saloon, look at a painting and tell you exactly when and where he bought it and at what price.”
It fell to Zachary More, who is trained in antiques, to make sense of the McGuire purchases. From 1971 to 1973, More ran an antique store in what is now the saloon`s ”antique room.” He recalls: ”One guy bought a harpoon–Butch is very big on nautical items–and after drinking through the night took it home with him to Winnetka. Thank God, his wife missed when she threw it at him. It would have been an intriguing dram-shop suit. Another night a customer carted a 100-pound bronze sculpture of a lady`s bust right out of the saloon. It had been sitting on top of the bar. It was an original by Frank Gallo and worth thousands. Butch still can`t believe it happened. The saloon has quite an art collection. In the early days Butch would cover the cracks in the walls with original paintings by artists LeRoy Neiman and Bill Olendorf, who were then young and struggling customers and friends. As for Butch, he`s a very complex, deep, contradictory guy. He`s a lot of laughs, but he`s always run this place like General Motors.”
During the 1960s and 1970s McGuire`s business acumen made him a wealthy man. He bought six brownstones on Dearborn Street, opened a second ”Butch McGuire`s USA” in suburban Mount Prospect (which prospered from 1969 to 1983, when he sold it), and bought (with Tom Gorsuch–the only partner he`s had other than Mary Jo) the huge building on Division in which his Chicago saloon is located. The complex bought by Gorsuch and McGuire takes up half the block on the north side of Division and includes Butch`s offices and warehouse and four saloons–Mother`s, SHE-Nannigan`s (both owned by Gorsuch), McGuire`s and Houlihan`s (a chain operation that pays rent to Gorsuch and McGuire). He furnished the family brownstone on North Dearborn Street with exquisite antiques, paintings and sculptures. He bought the limousine previously used by President Lyndon B. Johnson and hired a chauffeur to escort him and his pals around town (”This must have been the limo LBJ kept at his ranch,” Mary Jo says. ”It was in terrible shape, and we finally sold it after the brakes failed and we almost demolished a toll plaza”).
He flirted briefly with politics when Mayor Daley appointed him to the city`s Environmental Appeals Board, but withdrew when critics suggested that a saloonkeeper should not be involved in city government. He spent four years at the Chicago Board of Options Exchange when his pal, phenomenally successful trader Billy O`Connor, loaned him the money for a seat. ”I made a lot of money,” Butch says, ”but my mind wandered too much to do the concentrating. Also, as a dyslexic, I would often get the numbers backwards, and for a trader that can be fatal.”
He specialized in the grand gesture for friends. Mileste O`Connor, Billy`s wife, says, ”I`ve always wanted a mink coat, but my husband, a penurious Irishman, refused to buy me one. Well, one year I went into the hospital for a procedure, and when Uncle Butch heard about it, he had Chicago`s finest furrier rush its finest mink right to my bedside!” Butch sent his longtime porter, Mike Di Francisco, and his wife to Italy for their 50th wedding anniversary, explaining, ”He was born there and he hasn`t been back since 1913.” Butch even broke down and bought Mary Jo a large vacation home at Lake Delavan, Wis. (”Butch said he didn`t have the money,” Marge Klein recounts, ”but I was doing the books, and we always kept a little stashed away here and a little there in case something ever happened to Butch. Butch said she could buy the place if she came up with the down payment, and we found the down payment.”)
He has stayed remarkably free of criticism. When minority groups aggressively swept through the Near North area challenging admission procedures that they alleged excluded blacks, McGuire`s was not a major target. ”Our policy has always been to make sure the customer is old enough, sober enough and dressed properly,” he explains. ”We don`t discriminate on the basis of color and never have. We had one case when we turned away a black man dressed in an African robe. We turned him away because he was very intoxicated; if he hadn`t been drunk, he would have gotten in. They filed suit anyway, and it was dismissed. The lawsuit was harassment–pure and simple.”
McGuire`s manager, David Kramer, says: ”You have to have a lot of guts to work the door. If a man says, `I`m going to come back and blow your brains out,` well, you only have to be wrong once! Our worst mistake was when we let a man into the saloon who turned out to be deranged. He had a gun and he shot a woman at random, killing her. But he could have just as easily walked into the Jewel.”
The only other highly publicized incident–this one highly embarassing
–occurred at the Mount Prospect saloon. In 1977, in what newspapers referred to as ”the ill-fated St. Patrick`s Day landing,” eight Marine Corps officers in full-green uniforms from the nearby Glenview Naval Air Station
–including the highest-ranking Marine officer in the Midwest–and four of the officers` wives were refused admission for a lunch of corned beef and cabbage. The hapless assistant manager responsible had followed, perhaps fittingly in a way, a McGuire dictum to its illogical extreme: that of refusing admission to uniformed servicemen who appeared to be intoxicated or underage (neither of which applied in this case). The intent was to discourage rowdy weekend reservists, Butch says. ”I can`t believe it happened, but it did,” a chagrined McGuire was quoted as saying. After an investigation by the U.S. Attorney`s office, Butch wrote a personal letter of apology to the commanding officer of the group, and the restaurant`s liquor license was suspended for two days.
Regardless, throughout the `70s Butch McGuire continued to ride high. Since he could seldom get away to sail or ski, and since he found it impossible to build model ships after a drinking bout, he took up a new hobby –needlepointing–after watching Kathy Hagstrom do a few designs at the vacation home in Wisconsin. She says: ”Butch loved it, and he took great pride that his backs were as good as his fronts. He always complained if the rest of us would laugh and talk and break his concentration. We used to call him `Old Stitch & Bitch.` There are a few of Butch`s needlepoints in the saloon.”
Needlepointing aside, though, he was living as if there were no tomorrow. There almost wasn`t.
God created the Irish
to rule the world
but changed His mind
and created alcohol.
— Anonymous
”I thought I was bullet-proof,” Butch says. ”I ignored the warnings
–pain in the chest whenever I would run up and down stairs. I just quit running up and down stairs.”
He was known as a prodigious drinker, a man who could outlast the hardiest of his customers and pals. Butch says: ”I was the classic case of the guy for whom one drink is too many and 100 is not enough. What did I drink? Anything with a tax stamp! Some nights I would have a dozen different drinks in a dozen different places.”
Butch probably led the league in being thrown out of McGuire`s. Marge Klein says, ”Oh, I threw him out fairly often when he was drinking. He would ask, `Are you sure?` then head across the street to the Lodge.” David Kramer adds: ”Butch never drank during the day, but he`d make his drinking decision around 5 p.m. or so. If he were going home for the evening, he wouldn`t drink in the saloon. If he were going to hit the street, he would begin drinking with his friends around 5. If he drank too much, we would have to treat him like a customer, not the owner, and ask him to leave. He never fought it too much because, let`s face it, we usually had pretty good reason to cut him off. (Butch responds: ”I always deserved it, I always left willingly. I really got into trouble when I started buying rounds for the house.”)
”He`d usually meet Mary Jo and the off-duty employees for dinner at the North Star Inn, and then, after Mary Jo went home, the real drinking would begin,” Kramer continues. ”On some nights we`d end up closing the Lodge or O`Leary`s at 4 a.m. and heading out to Cicero or back to Butch`s home to drink some more. We`d talk about everything under the sun, including how to improve the business, but it was the kind of lifestyle that you knew couldn`t go on forever.”
Butch recalls, ”We`d drink until the restaurants would open for breakfast and we could wolf down steak and eggs, gobs of butter and grease, all washed down with 20 cups of coffee.” Kramer says, ”We`d help Butch home to make sure he wasn`t robbed.” One of Butch`s tenants at his brownstone was John Miller, a longtime friend and a big man. He was often called upon to help the 300-pound-plus McGuire up the stairs to his bedroom. ”I would lie there,” Butch says, ”wide awake from the coffee and listen to my heart go
`thump! thump! thump! Of course, I was back at work by noon.”
Five years ago, while attending a Loyola University basketball game, McGuire again felt the stabbing pains while walking up and down the stands.
”I shrugged it off,” he said, ”and Mary Jo and I went with friends to the Golden Ox for dinner. I felt terrible and told the group, `I better go home.` At home I walked up the stairs and the pain was intense. I sat down and felt better. So I tried walking up the stairs again, and the pain was worse. I called the doctor, who told me to get to the emergency room. The first heart attack struck while I was in the taxi. I had two more, the worst one after I had been in intensive care for days.”
McGuire spent 90 days in the Northwestern Memorial Hospital coronary-care unit, surviving operations for a quadruple bypass, a ventricular aneurysm, and an ileo-cardiac resection. He remembers calling Mary Jo the morning after checking into the hospital to report his whereabouts. She was indignant:
”Don`t kid me!” she said. ”Where are you?” Butch replied, ”I guess you`d better come down and see for yourself.” Mary Jo recalls, ”That`s right, I really didn`t believe him at first. He`d been out all night so many times before. But we all were very, very scared.”
McGuire heard a priest administer his last rites, but his luck held.
”People ask me if I got bored sitting around a coronary-care ward for three months,” he says. ”Well, I never even thought about getting bored. I was happy just to be there. I had no idea how bad things had been until some of the nurses who helped take care of me and who come into the saloon for breakfast after a night shift told me.”
He`s vowed never to talk like a reformed drinker, but Butch does offer his theory about heart disease. ”Based upon what I have seen in my cardiac-rehab group at Northwestern,” he says, ”heart disease is strictly a male disease whose victims are about 80 percent Jewish, 15 percent Irish and 5 percent other. I`ll give you the reason:
”The Rolex watch.
”Everybody in my cardiac-rehab class wears a Rolex, and they`re still very competitive–they want to do the most pushups, to win at volleyball, to run the farthest.
”Me? I`m down to 240 pounds and I feel so good that I`ve stopped going back to rehab and begun to let my weight creep back up. I think that I have more important things to do than exercise and watch my weight, but obviously I`m wrong.”
McGuire is serious about not drinking (”It`s a good idea to quit in your 20s, not your 50s”), but he fell off the wagon during his 25th-anniversary festivities. ”He was just so touched that so many friends came back,” Mary Jo recalls. ”But he`s back on hot tea and he`s as much fun as ever. He used to feel funny about going out to dinner with people who were drinking, but now he blends right in.”
Mileste O`Connor adds, ”When the doctors told Butch he could drink no more than one ounce of alcohol a day, about one beer, he asked, `Well, can I save them up and have seven on Friday?` When the doctors said, `No!` he figured, `To hell with it; if I can`t drink the way I want, I may as well not drink at all.` ”
May the road rise to meet you; may the wind be always at your back; may the sun shine warm upon your face, the rains fall soft upon your heels. Until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of his hand.”
— Irish prayer on a needlepoint
pillow in Butch`s living room.
What he`s been about, Butch explains, is trying to transplant the tradition of the Irish love of family, fellowship and fun to his saloon, to create the same spirit he found in the South Side saloons where his father took him as a child. He has been to Ireland many times and says: ”I love the Irish pubs. They`re not much to look at, but they`re the center of Irish life. And the owners are smart–their drinks have only half our alcohol content, and during the week the pubs close at 11 p.m. If the drinks were stronger and the place stayed open later, the Irish would never show up for work. I was in a pub one night about 9 p.m., and suddenly the place just filled up–men and women and children and grandparents and aunts and uncles, all carrying on with each other. It was wonderful. I wish we had more of this in America.
”But kids today have their own lives and don`t want to be bothered with their relatives. I`ve kept track and I believe that each of my three children spent only about 10 hours with Mary Jo and me all summer. They`ve probably spent more time in the past few years going to concerts by the `Grateful Dead` than they have with us. I don`t understand it, but that`s the way life is today. All the kids have worked in the saloon, but I doubt that they`ll want to get in the business.”
His children have all left Chicago. Lauretta, a graduate of Holy Cross College, Worchester, Mass., is working for the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in Cleveland as a legal advocate for juveniles; she plans to go to law school next year. Robert Jr. is a senior at Fort Lewis College, a military school in Durango, Colo. (”He`s majoring in skiing”). Terrance is a freshman at Johnson and Wales College, Providence, R.I., pursuing both a college degree and a program in culinary sciences to become a chef.
Looking back, Butch says, ”I`m proud that I`ve been able to run a good neighborhood saloon without resorting to superloud music with a disc jockey or to giving away free food or two-for-one drinks or handing out brochures on the street. Hell, for 20 years we never even had a sign on the place. I think that our regulars recall McGuire`s as a time in their lives when they were younger and had less responsibility and fewer problems and were able to enjoy good times and to meet the people they would marry and to become involved in a small way in the neighborhood and politics and charity. It was an alternative to staying home and watching TV. Today they`ve all grown up and progressed and become successful, and many live on Lake Shore Drive or the North Shore and are among the most influential and wealthy people in the city. But they still cherish those friendships and good times. At least, I hope they do; I know that Mary Jo and I certainly do. And we want this pattern to continue with the new generation.”
Looking ahead, he adds: ”I`ll probably die in this saloon, but I`m still looking at other possibilities. Our Mount Prospect saloon was successful–it did its biggest business in the summer, while the Division place did its biggest business in the winter, so it was a good fit–but I decided to sell it when they raised the drinking age to 21. A lot of our suburban customers were younger. Also, it`s hard to find good managers in that part of the world, and after my heart attack the doctors had told me to slow down. I think that the concept of `Butch McGuire`s USA` saloons is a good vehicle for a hotel chain, and I might consider selling the business and going to work as a consultant. And I`d love to open a saloon in a big tourist city, like San Francisco or Hong Kong.
”The Chicago market is glutted. If my mother were to loan me the money today for a Chicago saloon, it would take $500,000 to $1 million, and she would be well advised to invest her money elsewhere. But, sure, I`d do it all over again. It can still be done in Chicago, if you can find an offbeat location with rent less than $1,000 a month and if you`re willing to work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, to give your customers what they want.”
Butch`s mother, Mrs. Jeannette McGuire, never worried much about her investment. ”I`d give Butch my last penny,” she says. ”Butch said to me:
`Mother, sit down. I need to talk to you about something you may find shocking. I want to buy a tavern.` Well, I was surprised, but I told him:
`Butch, I know that your father always said yes to everything you wanted to do and I know he would have said yes to this.` And he`s repaid me many, many times.”
Skitch Rosenthal, a New York marketing executive who met her husband, Bill Rosenthal, an advertising executive, at a Santa Claus Anonymous party, says, ”McGuire`s was the apex of networking before the term was coined.” Her husband adds: ”The saloon was much more than a singles bar. There were probably as many successful business deals struck in McGuire`s as sexual deals.” Butch says: ”If we`re selling sex, it`s a soft sell. I don`t have my employees in tight-fitting clothes with everything on display. That may sell for a while but not for long. You create a friendly environment, and the sex will take care of itself. It`s best that the obvious be left alone.”
He worries about the future of Chicago. ”The next four years will be the most critical in Chicago`s history. The city has to find a way to reverse the pattern of the past few years. Taxes have been going up, and services down, and business is leaving the city. In this neighborhood alone property values are probably down 30 percent. The unions don`t care about either their members or business–and that`s a devastating combination. I think Mayor Washington has been doing the best he can under the circumstances, but things have to improve.”
He`s still optimistically making plans for the future. ”We may install our own brewery in the basement to make Butch McGuire`s Beer. I`m thinking of installing a dining room at the back of the bar with permanent seating so that we can keep people in the saloon and capture the late-night crowd. I may put a skylight over the main barroom.”
McGuire`s today has an eclectic look in both furnishings and customers. The `60s and `70s crowd, ages 21-35, was polite and professional; today`s crowd, 21-60, is polite and professional. For all 25 years many of the customers have merely sipped the beer; the real drinking often comes after you`ve met your mate and made the move to the suburbs. The young people are belly-up at the bar with the middle-aged and successful and the older and wealthy crowd. David Kramer says, ”They coexist: the lady from the `60s who expects to be seated and the Yuppie lady who wouldn`t think of accepting a seat or a light. We used to avoid conventioneers like the plague; now we seek out their business. You might see a young woman just starting out in life talking to one of Butch`s pals like Billy O`Connor, who`s enormously wealthy. But a lot of our new customers don`t even know there`s a Butch McGuire. Or they`ll come up to me and say, `Thank you for a great time, Mr. McGuire.` ”
So give it a try sometime, say, a Friday night. Butch should be just inside the front door, meeting and greeting, standing across from his favorite ship model, of the ”Emerald Whaler,” the schooner that, legend tells us, rescued Irish prisoners from Australia. The paintings of nudes, amid those of wide-eyed waifs by Margaret Keane, will include some Neiman originals and, at the back, there`s a knockout painting by Frank Gallo of a life-sized nude sprawled across a divan. Okay, it only looks life-sized, but close enough, as the sound of your favorite oldie rises from the jukebox to make you seriously consider paying $18 for a glass of wine. For the most part, though, you, as well as Butch, will have your eyes on the people there, some friends, some acquaintances, some–though perhaps only for a while–strangers. There is much more, and as in any singles bar, much will be what you make of it.
If you want to be sure of getting in and seeing Butch McGuire, come early. About 7 p.m. or so he runs out of steam, and he will be out the door before the doorman turns up the music. He will walk west on Division, turn north at Dearborn and walk away from his creation, the ”Street of Dreams,”
to his brownstone. He and Mary Jo will probably have a few close friends over for dinner. Now he can afford to go home early. For Butch McGuire, the dreams have come true.
