Not so long ago, every neighborhood had a tavern specially equipped to mark the joys and sorrows of the human condition.
From the street side, such a place could be pretty nondescript. Sometimes it was differentiated from nearby bars only by a small notice hanging in a window (perhaps just below a neon sign plugging a brand of beer) saying ”Hall for Rent” or ”Prvt. Room Available.”
That simple announcement hardly captured the role this kind of tavern played in the life of a big-city blue-collar community. Behind or next to the barroom there would be another room, more or less equal in floor space, that stood empty most of the time. But on weekends, to the tinkling of shot glasses, the neighborhood`s history was chronicled there.
Parents celebrated their infants` christenings in that room. Years later, they would rent it again to commemorate a first communion or for a sweet-16 party. The neighborhood`s young people held wedding receptions in the hall, which ultimately might witness their silver anniversary parties too.
For neighbors with unhappy marriages, the tavern`s front room provided daily refuge. When their troubles were finally
over, barroom buddies would adjourn to the back room for the wake.
Alas, such places are virtually extinct. The city`s streets tempt fewer people to come out at night, and a corner tavern can`t be transplanted to a shopping mall. Besides, in an age of competitive consumerism, fewer brides will settle for a reception line that stretches back through stacks of beer cartons and winds around a barroom pool table.
Jackie Millspaugh wouldn`t have it any other way, though. Fortunately, her part of Chicago is still blessed with an old-style tavern with catering hall attached, where she and her bridegroom, George, recently celebrated after exchanging vows at St. Peter`s United Church of Christ on the Northwest Side. ”This place nicely meets the standards George and I set when we sat down to plan the wedding,” Jackie said, while greeting guests in the back room of Major Hall and Tap, 5660 W. Grand Ave. ”We wanted a place our friends knew how to get to and from which they could safely stagger home again.”
George Millspaugh added that their choice of a neighborhood hall over a downtown hotel also represented a kind of psychological insurance. Virtually 50 percent of marriages are doomed to fail, he observed. ”It seems like the fancier the wedding, the quicker the divorce.”
To judge by the bridal party, Major`s, as patrons know the place, easily meets Jackie`s criterion of familiarity. One of her bridesmaids was married in this very hall, whose 1950s powder-blue decor seems exempt from the passage of time. Another attendant was at her second wedding reception here. Jackie herself went to grade school with the owner, and for one of her oldest friends, Kris Teska, the wedding reception was also a sentimental journey.
Indeed, the 35-year-old Teska noted that she finds herself drawn to Major`s even between social events. She had taken time out from the reception and was sitting at a table in the barroom.
”I guess I come back here to pretend I`m a kid again,” Teska said.
”There`s something about the noise of neighborhood guys yelling about a baseball game on TV that I can`t get out of my system.”
To her ear, she added, those sounds just don`t ring true in a suburban cocktail lounge. Born and raised not far from here, Teska went to nearby Foreman High School and subsequently followed her parents out to Fox Lake. After 11 years, she finds herself with only two close friends in that town.
Except for having established herself in business, she would be sorely tempted to move back to Chicago. So she was delighted when Jackie Millspaugh phoned to ask if she would come early to help make final adjustments to the bridal gown and fuss over other last-minute details.
”I couldn`t get here as quick as Jackie wanted because I had to change a brake line, then clean the grease out from under my nails before I polished them,” Teska said. ”I drive a gravel truck. I own my own rig.”
Union regulars
Like Teska, many of Major`s patrons work with their hands. A few salesmen stop by in mid-afternoon to call their offices. The tavern is also a rendezvous for off-duty patrolmen and detectives from the 25th District police station, only a couple of blocks away. But the heart of Major`s clientele comes from a string of factories just across Grand Avenue whose workers drink at the bar and hold union meetings in the back room.
Their numbers were greater before either some of those manufacturing plants were shut down or their operations moved out of town. A nearby railroad switching yard is also a shadow of its former self. The tavern`s regulars fondly recall when their ranks included the likes of Box Car Joe and Fat John, freight handlers whose exploits, they say, were equally impressive on a loading dock or on a bar stool.
Once this neighborhood was solidly Polish. Now many of the bungalows and two-flats that line its side streets are owned by Mexican families, and the tavern has become something of a little United Nations. Some weekends, the back room will rock one night to a polka beat, as it did for Jackie and George Millspaugh`s guests. The next day, mariachi musicians might take over, as Spanish-speaking parents host a quinceanera, the traditional Latin American celebration marking a girl`s 15th birthday.
Yet the daily rhythms of Major`s tavern remain unchanged. Bar stools are at a premium in the late afternoon, when quitting whistles blow at local factories. Then those patrons go home to dinner and the tavern quiets down until just before midnight, when shifts change at the police station. Tuesdays and Thursdays in summer, the softball teams that Major`s sponsors come to second-guess umpires` decisions and mime highlights of games just completed on a nearby diamond.
There is also a larger cycle to life at Major`s, reports Matt Kuman. A machinist by day, he has been observing the tavern since an uncle took him there when he was 5. Major`s is known as a family place whose pool table often keeps young children entertained while their elders socialize at the bar.
”There is a kind of boomerang effect at work in here,” said the 38-year-old Kuman. ”You meet someone at the bar and marry her in the back room. When you get divorced, you ricochet out to the bar and the whole thing starts all over again.”
The Bruno era
For three decades, Bruno Zaucha presided over Major`s, which was built around 1911, according to local old-timers. Seven days a week, Zaucha opened his doors at 10 a.m. and closed at 2 o`clock the next morning, having taken a few hours off for dinner while a part-time bartender or Zaucha`s wife, Julia, watched the place. Then a few years ago, their son Albert cajoled and hectored them into retiring.
”Dad`s heart was still behind the bar,” says Albert Zaucha, 29. ”But I could see that the old man`s knees were going.”
The elder Zauchas moved to Arizona, but they annually return to Chicago, where they spend most of the summer.
”You can take a big-city boy out of a tavern, but the other way around is a lot harder,” said Bruno, who was watching the front bar while Albert was busy supervising the wedding reception in the hall.
From 1959, when he bought the place, until turning it over to his son, Bruno explained, the tavern was his and his wife`s whole world. Once a week, he indulged in an afternoon of golf or an evening at a bowling alley. His wife got Thursday evenings off for bingo. The only time they took a holiday was on an election day, when Illinois law says bars must close.
”For us, a family vacation was a train ride to Milwaukee or maybe Hammond,” Bruno Zaucha recalled.
For him and his wife, Bruno continued, Major`s was a case of love at first sight. Before buying it, he had been clerking long hours at a liquor store and they were looking for a tavern with living quarters attached so work wouldn`t keep him away from his family. When Bruno and Julia saw there were four bedrooms in the apartment piggybacked above Major`s, that clinched the deal.
”Usually only three or four of our kids had to share a room,” explained Bruno, who, with his wife, raised four boys and four girls above Major`s.
While growing up on the Southwest Side, Julia Zaucha had helped an aunt who ran a catering service. So when the Zauchas bought Major`s, Julia took charge of the kitchen, establishing a unvarying menu. At Mexican coming-out parties and Italian weddings alike, Major`s waiters (neighborhood teenagers whose office is announced by their clip-on bow ties) set each table with platters of Polish sausage and sauerkraut, roast beef, mashed potatoes and roast chicken.
Bruno`s particular domain was the front bar, where he played both confessor and counselor to the neighborhood. That function, he noted, could not be easily suspended, even when he would have rather joined his family upstairs. Every holiday season, he would vow to close early on Christmas Eve so he could help Julia and the kids trim their tree.
”But how could I shoo neighborhood bachelors out of the bar who probably had nowhere else to celebrate?” Bruno recalled. ”One was sure to say, `Hey, Bruno, how about turning on the TV so we can watch midnight mass?` ”
Keeping it in the family
Now such responsibilities belong to Albert Zaucha. Before returning home to take over the tavern, he was a salesman for MCI. Although, like the other kids, he had helped out in the bar since he was big enough to work a broom, Albert hadn`t thought he would be working behind a bar as an adult.
”But I could see that if one of us kids didn`t take it over, my parents would go on working until they died behind this bar,” Albert said. ”You just don`t sell to some stranger a business that`s been in the family for 40 years. And you can`t close up a place where some of the regulars have been coming around for just as long.”
Still, some of Major`s patrons sense that their kind of tavern may soon become history. Mat Kuman notes that the unchanging look of the place can play tricks with the mind.
”You have to recall that while they haven`t changed a thing in here since 1950, the calendar says this is 1991,” Kuman said. ”Life is different now.”
Indeed, the slums that eat at the heart of a big city are beginning to draw close to the area around Major`s. Other neighborhoods are being revitalized. But even there a bar like this one would be anachronistic, Kuman notes. Yuppies demand trendier environments. So he is happy to have, for a little while longer, a refuge from the bewildering rush of history.
”I guess that`s why we come here,” Kuman said. ”To get far, far from the madding crowd.”
