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From the Bar
When my dad opened this bar on June 16, 1961, nobody had a name for what he was building yet. Within a few years, everybody did. The Sun-Times called it the nation's first singles bar, and that's what Butch McGuire's has been ever since.
But here's the part people forget when they hear "singles bar." It wasn't built around the guys. It was built around making sure the women who walked through that door felt welcome, safe, and taken care of.
In the early '60s, women didn't really go out to bars together, and they definitely didn't go alone. That was starting to change. Young women were moving to the city, taking jobs downtown, renting apartments in Sandburg Village and the buildings around Division Street. Plenty of them were stewardesses, including the one my dad would end up marrying.
Dad saw it before most people did. He told a Chicago Tribune columnist in the bar's first decade that he wanted a place where young working women could go for a beer and not be bothered. He even sent drivers to pick up the stewardesses at Sandburg Village and bring them over.
From day one, there was one rule at Butch's that didn't bend. If a woman came in, she got a seat at the bar. Every man sitting there was expected to get up and give her his stool. And if a guy didn't? The doorman would walk him out.
It sounds simple now. Back then it set the tone for everything. Women knew that at Butch McGuire's somebody was looking out for them. The bar had a reputation for protecting women from the kind of harassment that kept them out of most taverns, and that reputation is a big reason the place filled up the way it did.
Dad didn't stop at the customer side of the bar. Butch McGuire's was among the first in Chicago to put women behind it, hiring female bartenders and, later, female managers when that just wasn't done. If you want women to feel at home in a bar, it helps when they're running it.
And honestly, a woman ran this one all along. My mom, Mary Jo, a former American Airlines stewardess, married Dad in 1963 and kept the books, paid the vendors and the staff on time, and kept him in line. He said it himself plenty of times: the secret to his success was Mary Jo.
Dad used to joke that he couldn't understand it. He opened a singles bar, and his customers kept marrying each other. By 1991 he told the Sun-Times they'd stopped counting at 6,500 marriages. Today we believe the number is north of 20,000, and we still meet couples every week who tell us their story started at this bar.
None of that happens without the rule about the barstool. People came back because they felt good here, and they felt good here because Dad made sure of it.
The doorman doesn't have to enforce it anymore, but the spirit never left. If you work at Butch's and a customer walks in, you give up your seat. And most of the guys at the bar still stand up for a woman without being asked.
This week we're celebrating 65 years on Division Street, and on Thursday, October 15, we're throwing a special 65th Anniversary Edition of Singles Night. Come see the commemorative newspaper, share your own Butch's story, and be part of the tradition that started it all.
The stools are still here.
— Bobby McGuire
