I have mixed feelings about saving the Wonder Bar, a saloon and restaurant I’d occasionally visit from the time it was owned by the late Dick Whelan to when it closed in the spring of 2021, yet another victim of COVID.
Whelan’s Wonder Bar was the place where the big-time Badger boosters hung out and plotted UW Athletic Department fundraisers — Butch Strickler, Jerry Hill and, of course, the director himself, “Crazylegs” Hirsch. It became their home after Rhode’s Steak House on West Main Street closed in the 1980s. That’s where Butch’s soon-to-be-famous baloney bash was concocted and began a 31-year run raising money for UW athletics.
But it’s the Wonder Bar’s history as a roadhouse, before Whelan, that continues to stir controversy over its future. Whelan himself delighted in telling stories about its original owner, Ed Touhy, the brother of notorious Chicago gangster and bootlegger, Roger “The Terrible” Touhy. Roger supposedly bankrolled the building in 1929, a uniquely designed prohibition-era roadhouse…