Lemberger’s Tavern and the End of the Old Sixth Ward

John Lemberger took over the oldest tavern in the old Sixth Ward in 1935. The place had been there for 60 years. The bar had laid the foundation for the bloody reputation of the ward that grew up around it. But in 1935, the unruly past was put to bed.

John Lemberger, on the left dressed in white, 1935. Northeast corner of Sixth & Ohio.

John Lemberger had the Southside in his blood. His parents, Johann and Eleanor, migrated from Bohemia in 1889. They arrived in America on the same day: April 1, 1889. They were married in Oshkosh 28 days later.

The Lembergers settled into a house near 11th and Ohio, when the original Sixth Ward extended south all the way down to 18th. The neighborhood was filled with people like them, Bohemian and Bavarian immigrants. In Oshkosh, they were called Highholders.

Teen-aged John Lemberger on the right. His father, Johann, stands next to him. On the left is John Kloiber, John’s brother-in-law.

John Lemberger was born in 1902, the sixth of the family's seven children. He led a textbook Southside childhood. John grew up speaking German and quit school after the eighth grade. He got his first taste of the saloon life from a brother. Adolph Lemberger was 10 years older than young John. His saloon at the corner of 9th and Knapp was owned by the Miller Brewing Company.

Adolph Lemberger behind the bar of his saloon at the northwest corner of 9th and Knapp.

With Prohibition looming, Adolph ditched his bar and jumped into frog farming. He started in Oshkosh and then launched a frog farm near Brandon, in Fond du Lac County. Young John followed him there.

Frogs and more. Adolph (left) and John with rabbits at the frog farm near Brandon.

Just up the road, in Metomen, was a farm run by a Hungarian immigrant named Joe Nickolaus. He had a daughter named Theresa. They called her Peggy. John Lemberger jumped the ethnic fence. He and Peggy were married in 1924.

John & Peggy (Theresa) Lemberger.

The Great Depression crippled commercial frog farming. John set out to find work in Minnesota. But by the summer of 1932, he and Peggy were back in Oshkosh. They had a son now. And like many, they struggled to get by. John was helping his nephew Bill, son of Adolph, build a frog farm on South Park Avenue when he caught a break.

Lemberger’s Tavern
The former speakeasy at Sixth and Ohio had gone legal with the end of Prohibition in 1933. The name changed from The Cardinal to The Rialto and was run by a lifelong Oshkosher named Earl "Sam" Sommerfeld.

The Rialto at the northeast corner of Sixth and Ohio, 1935. John Lemberger leans against the front of the building.

Sam Sommerfeld ran the bar, but the property was owned by George Utecht. Utecht had his own tavern up the street at what is now 413 Ohio. Sommerfeld wanted out of his lease. John Lemberger wanted to give it a shot. So in June 1935, Sam walked out, and John and Peggy walked in.

John and Peggy in front of their tavern.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the lingering pinch of the Great Depression, Oshkosh taverns endured the economic ruin better than most local businesses. Each Thursday and Saturday, the Daily Northwestern was thick with tavern ads promising affordable diversions from the difficult times.

A 1935 sampling of Oshkosh tavern advertising in the Daily Northwestern.

One tavern, though, was consistantly missing from the listings: Lemberger’s. John Lemberger cultivated his clientele in a more personal way. The same way John Lueck had when he opened the first saloon in that building in 1875.

The Lemberger Tavern acted as the locus for the social life of the neighborhood assembled around it. There was more than a tavern there. The back quarter of the building was occupied by a German-speaking, singing barber named Steve Young. Haircuts for a quarter.

An Oshkosh Centennial couple standing next to Steve Young’s barber pole at what is now 518 Ohio Street.

The building’s east wing housed a grocery store run by a Swede named Lenas Larson. He was brought into the fold by his Highholder wife, Agnes Kellerman.

The storefront of Larson’s grocery store is visible to the right of the two young men.

Kellerman, Kloiber, Matsche, Sippl, Demler, Drexler… Well-worn Highholder names. Families that had been in the Old Sixth Ward for a couple of generations. Most of the men worked in the mills, just as their fathers had. Over the years, they cross-pollinated to the extent that many were now related. An intricate web. You had to watch your mouth in the Sixth Ward. You might be talking about somebody’s cousin.

This was John and Peggy Lemberger’s tribe. Most of the folks around them were barely getting by. Especially the mill workers, who saw their wages and then their jobs cut. The Lembergers helped out with money and other favors when they could afford to. And increasingly they could.

The annual harvest display at Lemberger’s. “It was all about family, neighbors, and hunting.” Especially during the Great Depression, when deer hunting went from sport to necessity as a way to help feed a family.

John and Mary Matsche with John Lemberger (on the right).

The Lembergers were doing well enough by 1940 to buy the property from George Utecht. They got it on a land contract for $6,000 (about $135,000 in today’s money). They made it their home in 1942. John and Peggy and their son, John, moved from their apartment on Ohio Street into the apartment above the tavern.

John Lemberger relaxing in his living room over the tavern.

When the Lembergers moved in, Lenas Larson moved his grocery out. The Lembergers changed the space into a dining room. But more like the dining room in a home than a restaurant. Everybody called it the side room. It was casual, homey.

A gathering in the side room.

Sundays after church, the side room would host the older guys from the neighborhood. They’d sit around, play cards and chew the fat. One by one, they’d get the phone call from home telling them dinner was ready. John would call out from the bar, and the guy would get up and go.

 John & Peggy behind their bar, 1953.

Next to the side room was a small kitchen. Peggy was an excellent cook. There was no menu. You ate whatever she was making that day. Chili. Frog legs. Roast beef. Smoked chubs. One time, after a hunting trip went awry, they ended up with a whole hog. So they had a pig roast.

Peggy Lemberger, 1944.

John’s father, Johann, was one of the older guys who came by. He was a widower living on 11th. Old Man Lemmy, they called him. His main bar was Utecht’s. But he’d stop in at his son’s place for a beer on his way home.

Old Man Lemmy crossing Ohio Street on his way to Lemberger’s.

In the early 1900s, Lemberger’s Tavern had been owned by the Oshkosh Brewing Company. Back then, the only beer served there came from OBC. Prohibition ended that. When John Lemberger stepped in, he turned it into a Peoples Beer tavern.

John Lemberger pouring Peoples Beer.

Across Sixth Avenue was a tavern called the Argonne where Chief Oshkosh was the main beer. Each tavern was garnished with a flashing sign declaring its allegiance.

The corner bars at Sixth and Ohio. Lemberger’s on the left with its Peoples sign, and the brick Argonne with its Chief Oshkosh sign.

On weekends, the place would fill with neighbors. A lot of cousins and second cousins. No TVs. Just talk and shouts of laughter. A blue haze of cigarette smoke. Scenes like this had been playing out on that corner for more than 75 years.

Nothing lasts. John and Peggy grew older. The daily grind grew to be too much. Twenty-five years of it was enough. On March 2, 1960, they signed away their liquor license and left the bar. John was 58, Peggy was 56.

John and Peggy dancing away in silver shoes.

The tavern remained open for another three years. But without John and Peggy, it wasn’t the same. It was called the Dutchman's Place, at first, and then Widmer’s Bar after that.

1961 / 1962.

In 1963, the liquor license lapsed and that was the end. After 88 years, there was no longer a bar at the northeast corner of 6th and Ohio. The closing of the first saloon in the Old Sixth Ward presaged the break-up of the ward itself.

The End of the Old Sixth Ward
The deep history of this tavern was forgotten years before it closed. The Bloody Sixth Ward rose up so furiously that its early days were left in the dust. It didn’t help that the published histories of Oshkosh favored the north side of the city. The past grew dimmer, yet, when the Sixth Ward dissolved.

The old ward system in Oshkosh was baked into the city’s 1853 charter. It established a mayor-alderman form of government. Each ward was represented by a single alderman. In 1957, Oshkosh converted to a council-manager system. The old wards were made redundant. Ward numbers still appeared on property-tax bills and deeds, but the wards no longer carried political weight, or fostered the neighborhood bonding that came with it.

The final undoing began in 1965 when the city announced a reapportionment plan to split the old wards into voting districts. “Oshkosh Wards would be virtually consigned to limbo,” The Daily Northwestern reported. The Bloody Sixth Ward was dissolved, scattered into the new voting districts.

The territory of the original Sixth Ward of 1871 split into what are now voting wards 11, 18, 19, 20 and 21.

It took an Old Sixth Warder to remind people of a culture that had been discarded by fiat. Clarence “Inky” Jungwirth didn’t come with an agenda. He simply wanted to tell the story of the place where he was raised. Inky was born in 1919 and grew up on the Southside, hearing stories about the rough and rowdy ways of the Old Sixth Ward.

Clarence “Inky” Jungwirth

Inky made his living working at Oshkosh Truck. But his avocation was history, especially the fleeting history of the Southside streets where he spent his boyhood. In 1991, at the age of 72, Inky self-published his first book, A History of the “Bloody Sixth Ward” In the City of Oshkosh.

This wasn’t like the Oshkosh histories written from a Northside perspective. Inky made that absolutely clear at the start. “This book is written in the Sixth Ward Dialect and does not always meet the rules of English Language,” he wrote in his opening notes.

A History of the “Bloody Sixth Ward” was an immediate success. The book sold almost 2,000 copies in its first six months and established Inky as the Historian Laureate of the Southside. Inky put the Bloody Sixth Ward back on the map.

The Frogs
After closing their tavern, John and Peggy went on living in the apartment above the bar. But John’s world was expanding. At 59, he revisited a pursuit of his youth: frogs. Lemberger took a job with his nephew Bill, son of Adolph, whose biological supply company sold frogs and other leaping and crawling creatures. John Lemberger hunted them in the southern U.S. and Mexico.

Life after the tavern. John Lemberger flanked by friends.

John’s grandson, also named John, was often his travelling companion. “I remember going to Louisiana with him once looking for locusts,” John recalls. “In Wisconsin, we would drive all the way up as far north as Wittenberg and buy frogs from the farm kids.”

Three generations of John Lemberger. On the right is John Lemberger. His son, John, is on the left. His grandson, John, is between them.

John Lemberger died after a brief illness in 1965. “That was a really hard period for me,” his grandson John recalls. “We fished and hunted together, and we would go on those frog routes, and I’d spend the whole day with him. He was my best friend. They had the funeral at Poklasny, when it was still on Ohio. I heard that Mr. Poklasny said it was the biggest funeral he had ever seen.”

Peggy stayed on in the apartment above the old bar. After the tavern license expired, she ran an ice cream parlor for a year or so in the side room. She also devoted time to charity work helping disabled children. Peggy died in 1971. John and Peggy Lemberger are buried in Calvary Catholic Cemetery in Oshkosh.

Calvary Catholic Cemetery, Oshkosh.

The former home of the Lemberger Tavern now contains a salon, and a boutique selling mystical gems.

Sixth and Ohio today.

You would never guess that this modest building had such a formative role in the rising of the Old Sixth Ward. This was the Sixth Ward’s first saloon and where the spirit of that place was kindled into something unique.

Inky gets the last word…

The people of the Sixth Ward typified the spirit of the German word "Gemutlichkeit" which means cordiality and reputation for friendliness. There is another German word for this attitude which is "Gemeinschaft'' which means a spontaneously arising organic social relationship characterized by strong reciprocal bonds of sentiment and kinship with a common tradition. This is what the 6th Ward was all about.

             – Clarence "Inky" Jungwirth

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A word of thanks…

John Lemberger’s grandson, John, contacted me last November and asked if I had any information about the Lemberger Tavern. I told him I did and that I planned to write about it sometime in the future. He suggested I get going on it. I’m grateful for that! This third installment would not have amounted to much without his help. John was the main source for most of the photos and Lemberger family history that appears here. Thanks John!

Contact me at OshkoshBeer@gmail.com to receive an email notification when I publish a new post. Your email address will never be shared or sold.

This is the third in a three-part series of posts about the saloons, speakeasies, and taverns at the northeast corner of 6th and Ohio and their significance to the old Sixth Ward of Oshkosh.

Here are links to the three posts in this series.

Part 1: Birth of the Bloody 6th Ward

Part 2: Hell’s Corner

Part 3: Lemberger’s Tavern and the End of the Old Sixth Ward (Coming Sunday, April 26)

The Return of Witzke's

Two years ago, Witzke’s looked like another Oshkosh landmark destined for demolition. And then the Morth family came along.

The abandoned property at the corner of 17th and Oregon was purchased at sheriff's sale by Chris and Linda Morth in April 2024. Since then, they and their son Brett have been restoring the historic tavern to its former glory. They’re almost done. Witzke’s will reopen this coming weekend. It’s the most significant revitalization of a commercial property in Oshkosh in years.

Chris Morth (left) and his son Brett Morth

Witzke’s Bar had a 146 year history when it closed in 2019. The building was left for dead. The neglect had been piling up for a decade before Chris and Linda Morth got their first look at it. “The place was destroyed,” says Chris Morth. “It was even worse than we thought it would be. There was so much damage and rot. Floor to ceiling. But my wife was like, ‘We gotta do this.’”

April 2024, inside Witzke’s.

The repair couldn’t begin until the building had been purged of its internal damage. “We went to city hall to get the permit, and they thought I was going to tear the whole thing down,” Chris says. “I guess there had been so many rumors about it being demolished that everyone just assumed it was going to happen.”

What did happen was a wall-to-wall rebuild. “We took it right down to the studs,” Chris says. “We put in a new floor and part of the roof and had electrical and plumbing and gas lines replaced. The whole thing.”

Yet for all the repair, the remodeled Witzke’s retains its historical visage. “The tin ceiling was a tough one,” Chris says. ”My wife and I kind of went around and around on that. It wasn’t cheap, but we thought it was important, so we went ahead and did it.”

The barroom has a clean, contemporary feel that complements the vintage bar and backbar. Those pieces are as historically significant as the building itself. They were produced by the Robert Brand and Sons Company of Oshkosh and were probably installed in 1901 by the Oshkosh Brewing Company. At that time, the brewery owned the property and was engaged in a remodeling comparable in scope to the current work of the Morth family.

March 2026.

The history is extensive, but Witzke’s is not a museum. Brett Morth is running the bar and kitchen. “We want this to be a place where anyone can walk in and feel comfortable,” he says. “We’ll have table seating and we’re serving pizzas, and wings, smash burgers, that kind of thing. Families are welcome to come in with their kids. We want that neighborhood tavern, sports-bar feel.”

Brett worked in the bar and restaurant industry before leaving the area for a corporate job that had him travelling much of the year. The Witzke's project has been a chance for the family to reunite. “We moved back in July of ‘24. It’s been a lot of work, but it’s great being back. Now it’s coming together. We can’t wait for people to come in and see what we’ve done."

To keep up to date with Witzke's, check out their Facebook page.

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I covered Witzke's earlier history in a series of three posts published in 2023.

Part 1: The Garden Where Witzke's Grew

Part 2: Witzke’s Wild Years

Part 3: The Unmaking of Witzke’s

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Rahr Bock is Back!

I’ve been waiting 120 years to re-post this ad…

An adulterated ad from 1906 for Rahr’s Bock.

Rahr’s Bock Beer returns to Oshkosh this Saturday (April 4) at the Bare Bones Brewery taproom. The special release is part of the Bare Bones Heritage series of historic Oshkosh beers.

The Heritage Series Rahr Bock can label.

The Rahr’s began making bock beer in Oshkosh in the latter half of the 1800s. And they kept at it longer than any other Oshkosh brewery. In a 2011 conversation with Chuck Rahr, the last Rahr brewmaster, he told me that their bock recipe had undergone little change since Prohibition. The Bare Bones Heritage Series version was brewed from a recipe used at the brewery in the late 1940s.

Chuck Rahr

The beer begins pouring at noon and will be available at the Bare Bones taproom on draught and in a commemorative can. A free souvenir postcard, with some brewery history on the back, will also be available, while supplies last. 

The front side of the souvenir postcard is a reproduction of a Rahr Bock poster that appeared in Oshkosh saloons.

It all starts at noon this Saturday at Bare Bones. Hope to see you there!

Hell’s Corner

The old Sixth Ward was a muddy backwater when John Lueck opened the first saloon there in 1875. The backwater became a bustling borough. Lueck’s bar was a catalyst for the transformation. 

Looking towards the northeast corner of 6th and Ohio, and the saloon John Lueck built in 1875.

When the Sixth Ward was created in 1871, it was the least populated ward in Oshkosh. By 1891, it was the city’s second most populous and the most Germanic in composition. More than 40 percent of the residents were foreign-born. German was the ward’s native tongue.

The influx was so rapid that the original Sixth Ward had to be split in 1893. Everything below 9th Street went into the new Thirteenth Ward.

The new boundries of the old Sixth Ward after the 1893 division.

The Lueck saloon passed into the hands of a new man in 1892. His name was John Sippl. He embodied the Sixth Ward. Sippl was born in Bohemia in 1850. He was 34 when he left for Oshkosh with his wife and two children. Sippl got a job driving a beer wagon for Lorenz Kuenzl, a fellow Bohemian. Kuenzl ran the Gambrinus Brewery on Harney Avenue.

Gambrinus Brewery beer rolls. This photo was taken around the time Sippl worked there.

John Lueck’s saloon was probably on Sippl's route. He leased the saloon when Lueck retired. It looked like a good fit: a fellow Highholder holding forth at a bar that was foundational for the Sixth Ward. But what looked good in theory got whacked by reality.

The Sixth Ward was growing saturated with saloons. There were now more than 20 bars within a few blocks of Sippl’s place. The one that did him in was built just across the street.

The Pabst Exchange at the southeast corner of Sixth and Ohio. The building still stands.

Pabst Brewing Company discreetly purchased the lot at the southeast corner of 6th and Ohio in December 1896. The brewery’s plan for the property leaked in March 1897. The Daily Northwestern, which possessed a loathing for the Sippl saloon that had incubated during the days of Lueck, sent up a dreamy cheer for the new Pabst place. “The structure will be of brick and its design will be that of an old, German castle.”

It was better than that. It was named the Pabst Exchange, and it was spacious, and modern, and had no equal on the Southside. The barroom was three times the size of Sippl’s. With a club room and bowling alleys to boot. Upstairs was a dancehall. The boxing matches held there were just about the only feature in keeping with the ethos of the Bloody Sixth Ward.

A week after Pabst announced its plans, John Sippl transferred his liquor license to a saloon on Ceape. He’d been run off by the largest brewery in America.

The ornate downstairs bar at the Pabst Exchange. Photo courtesy of Marjorie Douglas.

Hell’s Corner
After Sippl jumped ship, the oldest saloon in the Sixth Ward sputtered. A couple of failed proprietors passed through before the course was corrected. The new direction, however, had nothing to do with being correct.

In the fall of 1898, a Highholder named Clyde Pollack took over. Pollack was nine when he came to Oshkosh from Bohemia in 1881. He grew up a few doors down from the Lueck saloon. He was the right age to take part in the underage drinking sessions the saloon was known for in the 1880s. He was also the right age to be part of the child-labor workforce at the McMillen lumber mill.

The McMillen Lumber mill as it appeared when Clyde Pollack worked there. The mill was located between the Fox River and High Avenue (south of New York).

Pollack’s life sentence at the mill was commuted by the Woodworkers’ Strike of 1898. He was 26 when he began his new career by leasing the old saloon. Probably not the best career choice for a guy like Pollack. He was an unstable boozer with an appetite for mayhem.

A headline following one of Clyde Pollack’s 1890's misadventures.

The saloon gave Pollack space to explore his lewd side. His bar had nothing to offer that the Pabst Exchange didn’t do better. So he offered something the Pabst Exchange didn’t.

Pollack was arrested on January 18, 1900, and accused of “keeping a disorderly house.” A sanitized charge often levelled at brothels and saloons engaged in sex trafficking. Pollack pleaded not guilty and abscond to San Francisco.

Into the breach stepped Anton Mondl. He made Pollack look like a puppy. Mondl is one of the most grossly degenerate saloonkeepers in the underworld history of Oshkosh. He migrated from Bohemia in 1881 and adopted the Bloody Sixth Ward as his new homeland. Mondl bounced around working at lumber mills before he took to the bar at 6th and Ohio in early 1900. He was 40 then. Mondl moved with his wife and two kids into the apartment above the saloon.

The air-conditioning unit in the second-floor window faces into what was once the Mondl family’s apartment above the bar.

The first of Mondl’s arrests occurred in February 1902. He was caught stabling a team of sex workers at the saloon. Among them was a young hustler named Ira Pritty. Mondl was fined, but undeterred. The following January, he was collared for pimping out his 14-year-old daughter. Luckily for Wilhemina Lueck, she had given Mondl the boot just before that charge was leveled. 

Wilhemina had inherited the saloon after her husband died in 1895. She’d been leasing the place out ever since. After ejecting Mondl, she sold the property to a respectable Highholder named John Tomaschko.

The Sixth Ward Beer Baron
Respectable wasn’t cutting it in the Bloody Sixth Ward of the early 1900s. Under Tomaschko’s ownership, the saloon cycled through four proprietors in three years. None could make a go of it in the shadow of the Pabst Exchange. And then a guy came along with an idea. An excellent idea. Something legal, even.

Franz Johann Esslinger

Frank Esslinger was born in Bohemia in 1853. He left for the Sixth Ward when he was 37. Esslinger was working the Southside lumber mills when he hooked up with the Oshkosh Brewing Company (OBC) in the summer of 1906.

OBC was formed in 1894 upon the merger of the city’s three largest breweries. The goal was to drive “foreign” competition out of town. By foreign, OBC meant any brewery that didn’t make its beer in Oshkosh, especially those from Milwaukee. And Pabst in particular.

The Sixth Ward was one of the largest beer markets in the city. Its concentration of saloons and German-speaking, lager-beer drinkers was unrivaled. OBC considered the Sixth Ward its home turf and the Pabst Exchange an insult. In the ensuing years, OBC went about making tied houses out of every saloon in the vicinity of the Pabst Exchange. The only beer sold in these tied-house saloons was beer made by Oshkosh Brewing Company. Pabst was about to be choked out.

OBC tied up Joseph Nigl’s saloon at the northwest corner of 9th and Ohio. The brewery then built a companion tied house across the street, at the northeast corner of 9th and Ohio.

 Former Oshkosh Brewing Company tied houses at 9th and Ohio. The building on the left was home to the Joseph Nigl saloon. The building on the right (substantially modified over the years) was the saloon run by his cousin Al Nigl.

Directly behind the Pabst Exchange, OBC tied up Joe Steckbauer’s saloon at the northeast corner of 7th and Ohio. One block north, Wenzel Miller ran a saloon kitty corner from the Pabst Exchange, at the northwest corner of 6th and Ohio. OBC tied that one, too.

The orange door at the corner of 7th and Ohio was the entrance into Joe Steckbauer’s saloon, an OBC tied house. The backside of the former Pabst Exchange is visible at the left of the frame.

Wenzl Miller’s saloon, with Wenzl Miller behind the bar. In the upper right hand corner of the photo, a lithograph from the Oshkosh Brewing Company is visible. It’s identical to the OBC litho shown three photos above.

Frank Esslinger cinched the noose. On July 5, 1906, Esslinger purchased the saloon at the northeast corner of 6th and Ohio. He then immediately sold the property to OBC. The squeeze began. You couldn’t reach the Pabst Exchange without passing a saloon selling Oshkosh Brewing Company beer.

Esslinger ran the saloon, but most of the operating expenses fell to OBC. For Esslinger, it meant that the money landing on the bar was all his after he paid his beer and liquor bills. The old saloon was back in the pink.

In 1914, OBC won its war against Pabst. The Milwaukee brewery conceded, vacating the Pabst Exchange and then selling the property to OBC. The Oshkosh Brewing Company flaunted its victory. The Pabst Exchange was renamed the Kaiserhof (the Emperor's Court). A name fit for a king.

Frank Esslinger moved on, but the arrangement with OBC survived. Until it came undone in an eruption of puritanism that hit the Bloody Sixth Ward like a bomb. The crater it made was called Prohibition.

The Wild Cat
The saloon was run by John Demler when Prohibition began in 1920. Like every proprietor since Lueck, Demler was a Highholder. He was three when he and his family migrated to America in 1892. He took to the Sixth Ward’s saloon life as a young man. Demler learned the trade at Al Nigl's saloon at the northeast corner of 9th and Ohio. In 1917, he left Nigl’s to take over the OBC tied house at the northeast corner of 6th and Ohio.

Demler showed a respect for the law that was rare in the Bloody Sixth Ward. When the dry law arrived, the neighboring saloons stocked up on bootleg beer and liquor and kept running. Not Demler. He quit the bar and got a job at a lumber mill. But he had this friend…

Frank “Butch” Youngwirth, his wife, Hattie, and their children, circa 1918.

Frank “Butch” Youngwirth was a Highholder and had known Demler since boyhood. Demler held the lease on the property and continued living upstairs, while Butch took over the vacated barroom. The place was back in business by the fall of 1921. A couple of months later, Butch got busted there for selling booze and beating a guy up. Butch wiggled his way out of the liquor charge and redoubled his efforts.

Butch Youngwirth wasn’t just another speakeasy operator. His speakeasy was more like his launch pad. His true ambition lay in bootlegging. He’d been working as a roofer, struggling to support his family, when Prohibition began. There had to be a better way. Illegal liquor was it. Once he had the speakeasy going, Butch branched out. He set up a wildcat brewery, just down the street on 6th Avenue, and began making beer. Selling the stuff was the easiest job in the Sixth Ward. And among the most lucrative.

Butch behind his bar, circa 1925. Despite the dry law, there was no shortage of beer.

The money poured in. "I remember Butch made $38,000 one year and $40,000 the next," a former Oshkosh bootlegger named Cyril recalled (last name omitted by request). "That was a lot of money in those days. I remember him and his buddies driving around in their Buicks every Monday to make their collections at the saloons. They’d go over to his place, sit in a booth and put the money in a big pile in front of them. Then they'd start counting it."

Butch set up several more wildcat breweries, always keeping one in reserve in case raids closed the others. "He’d pay the guy who owned the land to keep the brewery there, and also to take the rap if they got caught," Cyril said. "If they got sent to the House of Corrections in Milwaukee, Butch would pay him well for the time he spent there. I think about a hundred bucks a week."

The backside of Butch’s speakeasy, 1924.

By the close of 1926, Butch had outgrown his speakeasy. The brewing business was too profitable to bother with anything else. In the wake of Butch’s success, John Demler reconsidered his respect for the law. He tried going back behind the bar. It wasn’t as easy as it looked. Demler’s license application was summarily rejected, likely due to the notoriety the place had obtained during Butch’s tenure.

Nonintoxicating
The 50-year-old saloon at 6th and Ohio languished as the dry years dragged on. The Oshkosh Brewing Company still owned the property, but wanted out. The brewery found a buyer in 1927. George Utecht was running a speakeasy a block away at what is now 413 Ohio Street. The Utechts had been there since 1892. They were an essential part of the Sixth Ward’s unique culture.

The former Utecht saloon at 413 Ohio. Now Anjie's Bar.

George Utecht leased the building at 6th and Ohio to Earl Sommerfeld. He converted it into an ice cream parlor. It was a flop. The business was sometimes viable, but mostly not. Sometimes open. Often not.

The place didn’t come alive again until the spring of 1933. In April, low alcohol beer – up to 4% ABV – was reclassified as nonintoxicating and, therefore, no-longer regulated under the dry law. Sommerfeld immediately grabbed a beer license and re-lit the drinking lamp. The saloon rose from the dead once again. Its best years were coming…

Earl Sommerfeld’s Rialto Tavern at 6th and Ohio. Leaning against the window is the future owner, John Lemberger.

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This is the second in a three-part series of posts about the saloons, speakeasies, and taverns at the northeast corner of 6th and Ohio and their significance to the old Sixth Ward of Oshkosh.

Here are links to the three posts in this series.

Part 1: Birth of the Bloody 6th Ward

Part 2: Hell’s Corner

Part 3: Lemberger’s Tavern and the End of the Old Sixth Ward (Coming Sunday, April 26)

You can contact me at OshkoshBeer@gmail.com to receive an email notification when I publish a new post. Your email address will never be shared or sold.

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