Tales of an Eastside Saloon

Prohibition amounted to a cruel farce in places like Oshkosh. Drinking was too much a part of the culture here for it to end with the introduction of a mere law. Yet Prohibition was the law. And like other unjust laws, it led to absurd outcomes. Things went uniquely cockeyed at the southeast corner of Boyd and Merritt.

701 Merritt Avenue.

Long before Prohibition, there had been a saloon at that corner. The first of them was run by a German immigrant named John Dresch. He and his wife Lizzie had come to Oshkosh in the late 1860s. They lived in a wood-framed house at the corner of Boyd and Merritt. Around 1882, Dresch converted his home into a grocery store and saloon.

The combination of beer joint and grocery was a popular one in Oshkosh in the 1880s. Especially on the east side in the old Fourth Ward. It was a typical Wisconsin arrangement. A small saloon in the shadow of a big German Catholic church.

The Dresch saloon lasted just a couple of years. John and Lizzie moved on and a bakery moved in. That didn't last either. In 1890 the bakery failed and the building was left vacant.

An 1888 insurance map showing the unfinished St. Mary’s Church with the
old church on the north side of the street.
The former Dresch saloon is shown here at 206 and 208.
Grocery/saloons were also at 177 and 203 (click the image to enlarge it). 

Around the corner on Boyd Street lived a cigar maker named August Klawun. He too was an immigrant from Germany. Klawun was 14 when he came to America. He went to Milwaukee where he started rolling cigars. He was 28 when he married Katherina Mohr in West Bend. The next year, the couple moved to Oshkosh and started having kids. Klawun got a job making cigars at Herman Derksen’s shop on Main Street.

The decorated window of Herman Derksen’s Cigar Shop on Main.

In 1891, Klawun quit the cigar business. He moved his family into the former bakery/grocery/saloon at Boyd and Merritt. Klawun was 33 when he swapped careers and began slinging beer. He had found his calling. And that didn't sit well with his neighbor.

St. Mary’s Church.

The big church next door to Klawun was getting bigger every day. By 1886 St. Mary's had outgrown its old church on the north side of Merritt Avenue and had laid the cornerstone for an imposing, gothic temple on the south side of the street. The ambitious man behind that ambitious project was Roman Scholter.

Reverend Roman Scholter.

Scholter had been bouncing around small-town Wisconsin churches before reaching Oshkosh in 1881. The ultra-conservative Reverend was not charmed by the Oshkosh habit of putting up a saloon on every damned corner. Especially those corners surrounding his new church.

Scholter had tried at least twice before to banish saloons on the corners adjacent to St. Mary's. Now here came Klawun. Scholter went to the city council and tried again. And he once again got snubbed. Klawun got his liquor license and proceeded to do a booming business.

Things went so well that in 1900 he tore down the old, wood-framed home and saloon that Dresch had opened and replaced it with the brick, Queen-Anne style building that stands there today. It was an altogether up-to-date kind of place. Klawun served fresh, lager beer made in Oshkosh at the Rahr Brewing Company, and the Oshkosh Brewing Company.

From the 1905 Oshkosh City Directory.

Klawun later joined with a group of other Oshkosh saloon keepers attempting to launch a brewery of their own. Their scheme was realized in the summer of 1913. Klawun's saloon was one of the first to serve beer from the Peoples Brewing Company.

The immigrant cigar maker had come a long way. In 1918, Klawun turned 60. His son Albert was now part of the business and was poised to take over when his father retired. That never came to pass. The 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution went into effect on January 17, 1920. Prohibition had come to Oshkosh. It was all over for Klawun. The business he had been building for almost 30 years had been made illegal.

Most saloon keepers in Oshkosh revolted. They took out "soft drink" permits and sold wildcat beer and bootleg booze on the sly. Klawun didn't go that route. He converted his saloon into a confectionery. His son Albert was in charge. They sold Bonita Bars and Log Cabin Rolls. That didn't cut it. In 1922, the Klawun family left their corner at Boyd and Merritt. That's when things went weird.

August 8, 1923.

In 1923 Mueller-Potter Drug Stores put its third Oshkosh location into Klawun's old stand. This was unusual. Drug stores in Oshkosh didn't slip in where saloons had slipped out.

There were drug stores in Oshkosh that used Prohibition as an opportunity to traffic in booze disguised as medicine. But that appears not to have been the case at the Mueller-Potter store on Merritt. Instead, they sold jazz records, cheap cameras, trusses, paints, pills, powders... all kinds of shit. The lack of liquor may explain why the Mueller-Potter store on Merritt was closed a couple of years after it opened. The guy who moved in next wouldn't make that mistake. He wasted no time getting the place boozed-up again.

From a 1927 ad showing the pre-1957 address for the building at what is now 701 Merritt.

Sylvester Charles Stack was born in Menasha in 1887. He'd been working odd jobs in Appleton before he wandered down to Oshkosh around 1911. His path was set after he landed a job as a clerk at the Weeden Drug Store on Main Street.

Stack worked his way into the pharmacy at Weeden and then into a job down the street as an assistant pharmacist at the Coe Drug store. While working at Coe, he took the pharmacist's exam. Stack hadn't been through pharmacy school. Instead, he was going on experience. He eked out a passing score on his exam and in 1916 became a registered pharmacist. That certificate became a cash cow when Prohibition hit.

From Stack's 1916 Pharmacist Exam.

Stack left Coe and went solo. In 1926, he took over the former saloon at the corner of Boyd and Merritt. He began doling out patent medicines. The only thing they cured was sobriety. The Beef, Iron, and Wine tonic on Stack's shelf was 16% alcohol. He sold pints of it for a buck.

Better yet, Stack was also licensed to sell whiskey. It was legal during Prohibition for a pharmacist to sell “medicinal liquors” so long as they had the proper permit. Stack had such a permit. It allowed him to bring up Kentucky whiskey from the Frankfort Distillery in Louisville. He sold it to folks who had talked their doctors into writing them a prescription for liquor.

It wasn't cheap. A pint of stock whiskey from Stack went for about $50 in today's money. Druggists of his ilk were referred to as bootleggers for the rich. Yet, he didn't lack customers. During a single month in 1930 Stack filled more than 30 prescriptions for "medicinal" whiskey. He was on his way to accumulating a small fortune.

Stack's whiskey permit.

Stack closed up his shop in the old saloon on Merritt in 1935. Prohibition had ended. The price of Beef, Iron, and Wine tonic had dropped by 25%. Stack moved his business to Main Street and changed his approach. He got a Class A liquor license and filled his shelves with booze. And now you didn't need a prescription to buy it from him.

The former home of Stack’s Drugs & Liquor in the Webster Building at what is now 501 N. Main.

Klawun's old saloon sat vacant for a few years before it became a bar again. It was reopened in 1940 as Pep's Tavern by longtime Oshkosh barman Clarence "Pep" Steinhilber. After Steinhilber sold the saloon in 1950 he went to work as a bartender at Trail's End; just up the street on Merritt. He stayed there for more than 40 years. The late Oshkosh historian Larry Spanbauer once told me that Pep was the guy who came up with the sauce for the Trail's End Chili Dog.

The bar at Boyd and Merritt has changed hands nine times since Pep Steinhilber moved out of there.

The Church and the tavern, then named The Office (red dot on roof), in 1958. 

1977, when it was the Sports Club Tavern.

These days, it's called Boot's Saloon, which opened in 2015. This is the first time since August Kluwan was there that the bar has had the word saloon attached to it.

John Dresch, who had the first saloon on that corner, died in 1908. His funeral was held at St. Mary's Church. The service was officiated by Rev. Roman Scholter, who wanted none of those saloons in his neighborhood.

Roman Scholter died in 1914. He left all his worldly possessions to his live-in housekeeper, Amalia Wehling, with whom he had adopted and raised six children.

Sylvester Stack died in Oshkosh in 1955. He was selling booze on Main Street right up to the end. After his death, the Northwestern ran an article mentioning that Stack had left an unusually large estate.

Prohibition was repealed in 1933. That was too late for August Klawun. By then, he was already four years in the ground. Klawun had been betrayed by his adopted country. He didn't live to see the correction of that cruel mistake.

Klawun's headstone in Riverside Cemetery.