Friday, March 4, 1994
By Jonathan D. Silver
The Capital TimesThe rules at Dudley Howe's 602 were simple and always enforced.
No pitchers.
No live music.
No jukebox.
No fights.
No cigarette machines.
Overhead light for the card table off at 9 p.m. sharp.
Hungry patrons could always find a bowl of hard-boiled eggs selling for 25 cents each behind the bar. Paintings by poor art students who sold them for much-needed cash lined the walls. In the back, regulars dealt hands of cribbage, euchre, poker and other card games.
And throughout the smoky watering hole at University Avenue and Frances Street known as "the Six," from the crowded front entrance, down the long, narrow bar with the patina-green countertop, past the coat hooks and pictures on the shelf above it to the ancient tables and booths in the back, friends and strangers met, argued, drank, smoked, wagered and made merry.
Two years ago when Howe died, much of the bar's soul died, too, regulars say.
And early Saturday morning, when the 602 Club beer taps finally stop flowing and its nearly-50-year reign as a haven for local Bohemians ends, that soul will be laid to rest.
Since Howe took over in 1951, the bar was a crossroads for the range of Madison's humanity from the blathering and besotted to the soberly philosophical, from the working class to the suit-and-tie crowd. For some it was more like an English pub than anything else, a living room rather than a room in which to do some living.
"This place was an oasis for cool for many, many generations," says local blues guitarist Paul Black, who started coming to the bar in 1965 and played for its softball team. "The average Joe is afraid of this place 'cause the clientele isn't your typical thing. It's a place where lawyers and city prosecutors can sit down with poets and artists."
'This place was an oasis for cool for many, many generations.' -- Paul Black
As he enters the tavern, Black is met by a chorus shouting his name. His long, dark hair hangs from beneath a black beret and his jeans are tucked into hightop sneakers. People want to know why his right hand is bandaged (he says he burned it). They ask about his gigs.The guitarist strolls past a row of seats, along the green floors. Over the bar is a sign that says Welcome to the 602 Club with a portrait of Dudley Howe on one side.
A television drones at each end of the place. Rock music on the radio plays. A wooden canopy extends from behind the bar. On it hang Mardi Gras masks and a broken ashtray with a hole in the middle from where a cherry bomb once exploded. An orange sign touts the hard-boiled eggs for sale. There are pictures on the wall of Howe, and one of a former bartender with an unearthly halo around his head.
Black is looking for the pictures that used to be on the shelf above the line of coat hooks. Bartender James Tate says he has some, as does the bar's current owner, Howe's daughter Jerilyn.
"We had pictures of Dudley here, pictures of me and Fat Richard and Luther Allison - musicians," Black says. "There's a lot of history here."
History and personalities. People talk about how Dylan came in, maybe Warhol and Pollock, too. Rumors have circulated that the bombing of Sterling Hall during the Vietnam War era was planned there. Tales are told of old-timers who had been away for years dropping by out of the blue, and how a legendary barman and former boxer named Mitch Rohr, now dead, would remember their names as if he just met them the day before.
"Schooners, no pitchers" On a recent night, poets, business owners, bartenders, musicians, marketing researchers, former law enforcement officers and teachers huddle in one corner, eager to reminisce about the old times.
It didn't matter to these people that Dudley Howe had filled his 602 Club with reflections of his own idiosyncracies. Instead of repelling customers, the rules and regulations drew them, forming a common bond. They allowed for a myth to sprout up, one that will likely be carried on and blown bigger and bigger down the years in get-togethers at other bars around town.
The cast of characters seems as endless and colorful as their names and the stories they tell. Cookie. Mild Bill. Catfish. Little Cathy.
There is Rob Patterson, a 46-year-old sculptor who says he bartended at the club as a college student on the G.I. Bill.
"I been here my whole life," says the former Vietnam War combat medic. "I'm gonna miss it a helluva lot."
Patterson is sitting on a seat he proudly remembers re-upholstering. Even though it's warm in the bar, he's wearing an aqua-colored watch cap. A beer stands in front of him and a cigarette, is perpetually clutched between his fingers.
"Check the ceiling out," Patterson says. It is a mustard-yellow ceiling like one that might be found in an old movie theater, with a fancy raised pattern winding over its square panels.
"That's 40 years of nicotine up there," Patterson boasts, holding his cigarette so the smoke curls straight up. "That's nicotine gold. We all call it that."
There is one white panel on the whole ceiling, down toward the end of the bar. When the ceiling was to be repainted a few years ago, it was washed first. The ceiling turned white in that spot and started dissolving, Patterson says, so the painting was called off.
Drinking alongside Patterson is Michael McDonnell, a regular for 20 years. He says he is a harmonica player and a marketing researcher for Ameritech. His long hair is gathered in a ponytail. He wears glasses, a beard, a mustache and a ring with a big green stone on his right hand.
"Once Dudley was gone, it was really a different place. I mean, the soul of it was gone," McDonell says, fidgeting with a pipe. McDonnell recalls how Mitch the bartender would usher people out that were too rowdy, too obnoxious, too this or too that.
"'Out the door and to the left,'" to where the Red Shed bar stands, McDonnell says, gesticulating.
"This place is a really unique place in this town. I don't see how it's gonna be replaced," McDonnell says.
"Impossible," weighs in Bill Steigerwaidt, a poet and former law enforcement officer in Mt. Horeb who commutes from La Crosse.
"The energy is just gonna dissipate," McDonnell says.
Steigerwaldt, a bespectacled bear of a man who goes by the moniker "Mild Bill," sits near the front door, surrounded by 602-philes. "I'm one of the many people that got their bachelor's here and their master's, too," he says. "I first walked through this front door here when I was released from the Air Force in 1968."
Steigerwaldt seems to know everyone's name, but warns that the 602 Club should not be mentioned in the same breath as another famous bar where everyone knows your name.
"Don't relate this to Cheers," he says. "This is not drunken mail carriers slobbering on television."
A sense of confusion has descended on the 602 crowd since they heard that Jerilyn Howe was selling the business. They are sentimental, articulate and proud. And they are a little bit lost. Where, they ask, will they find another home quite like this one?
"I miss all the politics, the towels under the doors to keep out the tear gas, the art shows," says bartender Cookie Martin Smith as she shakes up a margarita for herself. "We're not too happy, but there's nothing we can do about it."
The 602 is a place where bartenders are befuddled by requests for receipts, scribbling them on shreds of cigarette cartons. It's where the graffiti in the men's room says, "Sports bars suck." It's a destination that means enough to a woman named Linda that she travels here from Rockford, every Friday. It's a place where down-on-their-luck clients once could get a loan.
"We used to call it the Banco de Dudley," McDonnell says.
"The Banco de Dudley," repeats Steigerwaldt. "We shut it off because some people were ripping him off."
People have always looked out for each other at the 602 Club, regulars say. And they have mingled well, as is readily apparent from the ribbing that goes on between Steigerwaldt, the former cop, and McDonnell, the ponytailed harp player.
"How would a guy like you and a guy like me cross paths?" Steigerwaldt asks at one point.
Until recently, the answer would have been clear to Steigerwaldt. Now, he's not sure at all."Where the hell are we gonna go?"
Dudley...
