Saturday, March 5, 1994
Today is last call for the 602 Club
They'll toast good times, friends
By Ron Seely
Wisconsin State JournalThere are bars. And there are taverns.
Bars have dartboards and CD jukeboxes and, woe of woes, hanging plants.
Taverns? Well, taverns have beat-up tile floors and shadowy corners and tables in the back for card games and ratty screen doors that are thrown open on summer days.
The 602 Club is definitely a tavern. Since 1951 it has been a fine and quiet place for a cigarette and a long, contemplative stare into the depths of a beer glass. It is, the regulars will tell you, one of the last good places.
And, wouldn't you know it, it's closing.
The 602 Club, after the last tapper is drawn tonight, will be no more. It is going the way of all the other lost good things, going the way of drive-in movie theaters and cheap cigars.
It has been sold and there are already sad whisperings among those who still lean on the bar rail that dartboards and plants are likely to soon grace the interior of this place where, for many years, there wasn't even a jukebox.
Tonight, though, the regulars will gather one last time. They will tell the stories and they will toast all the bartenders and all the lost friends and all the Saturday nights and all the many quiet winter afternoons when there was just the low and aimless chatter at the bar and the soft slap of cards from the tables in the back.
Mostly, they will remember Dudley Howe, the man who created what would become a home and a haven for them all. It was Howe who bought the joint at 602 University Ave. in 1951, changed the name from "The House of Sparkling Glasses" to the "602 Club" and proceeded to turn himself into a local legend.
Howe died in 1992 at the age of 82, preceding the death of his tavern by less than two years. He is still sorely missed by all of those who love the 602. Nobody got him down better than John Tuschen, the 602's resident poet (only a tavern like this could have a resident poet). In a poem called "Here's Why," written last year, Tuschen described Howe as "Owner of the ole saloon, ancient altar boy, guardian of the softball cooler, and mystic behind the dirty glasses." And he called him an "angel with baggy pants and wrinkled, and warped wings that would open wide - real wide. - with room enough for everybody."
The character of Howe and the character of the 602 are nearly inseparable. Howe, his daughter Jerilyn recalled, was "a very benevolent man" who would extend a helping hand to anybody who needed it. Jerilyn and others remember him pulling out a big stack of IOUs now and then and they remember him staring at them and smiling and then quietly putting them back beneath the bar where they would stay forever. Today, long months after his death, the crowd at the 602 is testament to his encompassing vision of the bar as a place where anybody - poets and bricklayers, professors and itinerant musicians, lawyers and taxi drivers - could come and feel welcome.
So strong was Howe's character -and his vision of the 602 that its interior remains little changed from ,the very early days. There is the same green and wooden backbar, simple and functional, with shelves that hold an assortment of dust-covered, fancy liqueur bottles (a good indication of the down-to-earth drinking tastes of the 602 crowd). There are the same curved coat hooks on the opposite wall, the same yellowing tin ceiling, the same kitchen tables in the back attended by the same kitchen chairs with red upholstery held together by duct tape.
And there are the regulars. All the regulars.
By mid-afternoon Friday, with the front door open to the mild March day and the light coming in bright through the big front windows, the wake had begun. In the back, below the giant and tattered print of the Tetons, the devotees of booth 6 had convened for their final Friday session. There were a couple of literary types, a public relations man, a poet. They know booth 6 well; for 15 years they have laid claim to it every Friday afternoon to sling insults, lament all that is bad with the world, complain about their jobs, plan fishing trips that sometimes would happen and sometimes would not.
Friday, the regulars in booth 6 mourned the 602.
John Folstad remembered how in the late 1960s he became one of the many college students Howe helped through school with a bartending job. And he remembered how, when his father died and he had no money to get home for the funeral, Howe wrote him a check for $500, just like that.
They remembered other things, like the hard-boiled eggs that were a staple behind the bar (they were boiled by Howe's wife, Muriel). They remembered the jukebox that Howe had removed after a fellow named Stanley Huber played "North to Alaska" over and over again for an entire evening.
They remembered Mitch Rohr, a bartender almost as legendary as Howe himself who could toss out troublemakers with a flare that bordered on genius. There was the time, one of the booth 6 regulars recalled, when Mitch asked a particularly rowdy customer to leave and the patron refused.
"The hell with you!" the customer said. "I'm going to California!"
"Out the door and to the right," Mitch calmly replied.
"Out the door and to the right!"
All afternoon the stories continued. The tavern grew crowded. The back door was opened to let in cool air. The late winter light outside flared briefly into sunset and afterward, in the dusk, the fluorescent lights in the window blinked on. Somebody climbed up onto the bar and raised a toast to Dudley Howe. And the regulars in booth 6 wondered where they will go.
"There are going to be a lot of lost souls wandering the streets of Madison," one of them said. "Closing up this place'll be like kicking over an ant hill."
...have another schooner?