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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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. |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.”
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| 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.
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| Calvary Catholic Cemetery, Oshkosh. |
The former home of the Lemberger Tavern now contains a salon, and a boutique selling mystical gems.
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| 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
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 3: Lemberger’s Tavern and the End of the Old Sixth Ward (Coming Sunday, April 26)
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