Hammond once had a more memorable and colorful name. State Line Slaughterhouse was its simple designation shortly after the Civil War when George Hammond’s business defined the marshy and loosely populated area of low-lying sand dunes, a place best seen from a passing train leaving or arriving in Chicago.
Then Standard Oil piped in during the 1890s and stamped Hammond, as well as the entire Lake Calumet region, with a futuristic face. The shoreline locale became an industrial metropolis and a working model of modern man’s ingenuity with the advent of the 20th Century. The slaughterhouses gave way to pig iron.
But these fires of enterprise have long since died out, and what remains to be seen in Hammond is no prettier now than your average slaughterhouse. The city has painfully regressed to its beginnings, unless you are partial to firecracker retail shops and an intrinsic smell of rot no lake breeze can dissuade.
There is a staunch survivor, however, a testament to stucco’s durability. Phil Smidt’s restaurant stands proudly as a lonely sentinel to a luminous past, still emitting an inviting glow swamped as it is in the shadows of the hulking soap factory across the street.
Neither time nor passing trends has changed Smidt’s two menu basics: perch and frog legs, both bathing in dishes of butter that provide fond remembrance of days when patrons were blissfully ignorant of cholesterol.
Perch comprises 50 percent of Smidt’s sales, while the frog legs add another 25 percent.
Smidt’s table companions have ranged from Kennedys to Cagneys, the Sinatras and the Hopes, and even the Prince of Wales, once upon a time when royalty wasn’t afraid of being cloaked in soot.
This celebrity-studded clientele is unmatched by today’s less famed diners.
When pressed for the latest and greatest to eat in one of Smidt’s seven dining rooms, the only names of recent vintage that Smidt’s staff could muster were former NFL coaches Hank Stram and Jerry Glanville. Celebrities must figure Hammond is once more a place best seen from a passing train.
“Bob Hope was here the last time he toured, say 10 years ago,” said Chris Probst, whose brother, Mike, in 1980 bought Smidt’s, not far from nearby Highland, Ind., where they were raised.
For a restaurant that has been in business 85 years, rebuilding at its present site after a gas-line explosion under the barroom killed four in 1945, a decade can seem like yesterday.
Mike freely admits he would never have chosen the location to build a new restaurant. But after Phil Smidt’s son, Pete, donated the restaurant to a local Catholic university in 1976, wearying of the business in his later years, Mike was finally convinced after four years of managing the business that opportunity outweighed the risk. With no Smidt heirs to carry on, the tradition fell to him.
“You know, our family is a big believer in tradition,” explained Chris, who helps Mike manage Smidt’s. “We do the same thing every Christmas. So, while it may sound corny, we’re proud to be carrying on this tradition. How many restaurants last 85 years?
“I remember once telling me he had been to Paris and was eating at Maxim’s when he heard people at the next table discussing Phil Smidt’s. Just recently, we had a woman come here to eat from California. She had gotten a postcard in the 1970s from a friend recommending Smidt’s, and this was her first time in the area since then.”
Probst doesn’t want to be known as the last owner of Smidt’s, but he acknowledges that the future of the business is uncertain.
“I’m more nervous today than when I bought it, and I was much deeper in debt then,” he said. “In the last 10 years you have seen a lot of business closings in this area and we don’t get the corporate business we did. They must have laid off 70,000 people from jobs in the last 10 to 15 years. You couldn’t pay anyone to open a restaurant at our location; they wouldn’t do it.
“And now this month, for the first time in June, perch can no longer be fished commercially in the Great Lakes. The supply is dwindling too fast. Zebra mussels, foreign to these lakes, have been introduced and they are clearing up the water, acting as a filter.
“Perch like to lay eggs in murky waters. But now, predators can see the eggs, are eating them and affecting the harvest. I really can’t sit back and say there’s no way this commercial fishing ban on perch won’t be extended in years to come. With the government, anything’s possible.
“The price of perch to me went up over $2 a pound last year. A dime raise in my costs is supposed to be reflected on the menu at 30 cents. But there’s no way I could raise my perch prices $6 last year and follow that ratio.
“If it ever comes to being unable to sell perch, I’ll close down. It’d be like McDonald’s staying open and not selling hamburgers. Just doesn’t make sense.
“If I knew in 1980 what I know today, maybe I wouldn’t have bought the place. But I had to seize the opportunity when it came along.”
Legend has it that Phil Smidt landed in Roby, Ind., at the turn of the century with his wife, Marie, because he got off his train from New Jersey to California to have his shoes fixed and the train left without him. He opened a 12-seat, 3-table hut in 1910 that also featured a 12-foot bar. Ten years later, business was so good he expanded to the location that survived until 1945.
Pete Smidt, whose wife, Irene, took over day-to-day control of the business, is said to have been sensitive during World War II to remarks about his German ancestry. So he threw himself into War Bond activities, having rallies to sell them in his banquet facilities and drawing James Cagney to one of these events.
The gas explosion that killed four and injured 15 50 years ago was, of course, a major story in the local papers. It gave the Hammond Times a chance to put Phil Smidt’s reputation into perspective.
“Coming to Phil Smidt’s to dine on a summer evening,” the paper opined, “one was never surprised to see there the mayor of Chicago, or New York for that matter, members of a big-league baseball team, a nationally known writer or a movie actor or actress. It was on a stretch of road that is the gateway to Chicago, as well as Chicago’s gateway to the eastern seaboard and Canada. Members of the royal houses of Europe, United States senators and cabinet members, generals and admirals, have over the years dined at Phil Smidt’s.”
None of them, however, had to pay the $2 toll charged to drive the Skyway from Chicago to Hammond. “You’d be surprised how many people stay away because of four bucks,” Mike Probst lamented.
His business, however, remains mostly long-distance. He estimates that on a summer weekend, 70 percent of the license plates in his parking lot are Illinois cars and 30 percent from Indiana.
As long as the perch keep running, and the frog legs jumping, the memory of past dinners and past glories will keep a lot of people coming back to Phil Smidt’s. Even if there’s nothing Probst can do about the $4 cover charge imposed on the Skyway.
