Many Beloiters will recall the C-Haus glory days of faculty bartenders and collegiality, 25-cent tap beers, and thunderously loud bands playing in a basement no larger than most family rooms. More recent graduates will remember the campus pub as the scene of poetry slams, Wednesday night import specials, and more loud music, only of a different variety. More health-conscious alumni say their C-Haus memories are few, after steering clear of the place and the cloud of cigarette smoke that hugged its interior for 35 years.

Photo by: Jeff Woods

Since it began serving beer in 1972 in the cellar of a defunct sorority house at the corner of College and Clary, the Coughy Haus, or C-Haus for short, has been a beloved, yet peculiar fixture on Beloit’s campus, the subject of struggles over management and finances, the birthplace of long-lived romances and of one-night stands, and the place generations of alumni have gone to let the good times roll when maybe they should have been doing something else.

As one alumnus put it recently, “It’s just a great campus bar.”

This year, as it observes its 35th anniversary as a pub, the C-Haus is in the throes of dramatic change. A city of Beloit smoking ordinance that went into effect in July has made it smoke-free. It remains to be seen whether clearing the air will add to or detract from the appeal of the C-Haus.

Photos by: Jeff Woods

Student-created murals represent a longstanding tradition at the C-Haus, even since its earlier incarnation as the Mock Turtle. In 1971, Chick Foxgrover’74 painted two abstract works in red, orange, and yellow that surrounded the basement fireplace mantel. They were later painted over with a dragon and unicorn (above) by Steve Glosecki’74.

With or without smoke, the C-Haus wears the imprint of decades of Beloiters: It’s just a little easier to see them now, without the notorious fog. The building is overflowing with evidence of past good times, even after undergoing numerous renovations and improvements over the years. Remarkably, the C-Haus still contains its original, wooden bar, stage, and barn board paneling, built during the 1973-74 winter break by Steven Welch’73, Coleman Hoyt’74, and a group of close friends. Two murals have also survived nearly 34 years; they were painted by the late Stephen Glosecki’74, a renowned professor of medieval literature, whose recent passing awakened many Beloit memories, including those centering around the C-Haus.

To sit in the C-Haus basement today is to commune with their spirits and the spirits of countless other Beloiters who found fun and camaraderie within those subterranean walls. The time-warped jukebox upstairs, with its music by Creedence Clearwater Revival, Fleetwood Mac, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash, occasionally starts playing on its own, according to current C-Haus manager Joe Cardillo’06. Even the bar, with its “Kilroy was here” carvings, makes the passage of time impossible to ignore.

Of Mock Turtles and Founders

A student-run operation has had a foothold in the basement of the building at Clary and College streets since 1971, when it opened as an authentic coffee house. Its earliest and pre-bar incarnation began when Don Ouellette’74 hatched the idea for a java-sipping, chess-playing kind of campus gathering place. “To the amazement of his friends, he actually got permission and, even more important, a location from the College,” says classmate and co-founder Anne Kostick’74.

With friends Chick Foxgrover’74 and Paula Torres’74, Ouellette and Kostick cleaned the basement and scouted used furniture stores for chairs and tables. They painted murals on the walls and chess boards on the tables, held poetry readings, showed old movies, booked musical acts, and named the place the Mock Turtle Coffee House.

Beloit College Archives

In its earlier days, C-Haus clientele included many faculty and staff, as well as students. The College presidents of the time often served as bartenders, including Martha Peterson, shown here in 1976 with then-Provost Zeddie Bowen.

“It was a beatnik/hippie sort of ideal of a coffee house; more intellectual, as an idea anyway,” Foxgrover says.

During the Beloit Plan era of year-round school, the four Mock Turtle founders left campus for their respective field terms at the end of the fall semester in 1971. While they were gone, the drinking age changed from 21 to 18, opening a Beloit event called “Senior Drink” to a broader group. Senior Drink had initially involved upper-class students, faculty, and staff, gathering on Friday afternoons for beer and fellowship. The event often took place in the student-run coffee house on Fridays. Even though Senior Drink was discontinued by the College not long after the drinking age changed, the expansion of that event set the stage for a regular, full-time campus pub.

A Round Table article from the fall of 1972 refers to the Mock Turtle as “Rick’s,” but it was known by that name only briefly. Rick’s served Hamms, Schlitz, and Pabst beer on tap and started becoming a popular hangout on campus. The name “Caughy Haus” and later “Coughy Haus” surfaces in 1973. Its exact meaning may never be fully known. On the one hand, it’s an obvious reference to the persistent cigarette smoke that pervaded both the Mock Turtle Coffee House and later the Coughy Haus, but old Round Table articles suggest the name may have been an inside joke about a faculty member. None of the alumni interviewed for this article could corroborate the exact origin of the name.

By the time Kostick and Foxgrover—who later married—returned to campus, the early campus pub was hopping. They took their turns as managers through field terms during the winter and spring of 1973, upgrading the sound system and booking more Chicago blues bands. “I grew strong wrangling kegs of beer in and out of the cooler,” Kostick says.

Hoyt and Welch convinced John “Mo” Carroll, then assistant director of student services, to allow them to convert the place into a permanent pub—an independent enterprise run by students. They started renovating the space during winter break of 1973-74, putting their own mark on it.

“I’m not sure they ever forgave us for what became of their three-decade precursor to Starbucks,” Bob Burton’74 says of the Mock Turtle founders. Burton was one of the students who labored on the conversion of the coffee house to a permanent pub. “It was an Animal House moment,” he reflects.

Photos by: Jeff Woods

The C-Haus bar dates from 1974. A closeup shows that generations of students have left their mark on the place since then.

Hoyt was the first to manage the newly remodeled C-Haus pub, with its barn wood bar, 25-cent draft beer, and Lay’s potato chip products, which formed the core of his diet for the year.

“With 30 employees, all of whom were friends trying to skim and drink for free, it was management 101, for sure,” Hoyt recalls. “The bar really hit its stride after we got the ‘personnel systems’ ironed out and started to get some notoriety, and then absolutely roared all summer.”

A string of student managers followed Hoyt year after year, some good and some not so effective in managing the difficult balancing act of running a pub on a college campus. Though sometimes a struggle, the management of the C-Haus has provided a series of field experiences for generations of Beloit students and now recent graduates. The true independence of its management, however, did not last long. Despite student grumbling, by 1975 managers were reporting to the College’s Office of Student Activities. Today, BelCon, Beloit’s student government, provides funding for the manager’s position, which is held by a recent Beloit graduate and supervised by the College’s in-house Food Services department.

Closing soon?

While musical tastes may have evolved from folk to hip hop and beer tastes from Bud to Blue Moon, the C-Haus has maintained a strangely constant element over the decades: the feeling that it’s about to go over a precipice, to cease to exist as we know it. “That air of the C-Haus being in a vulnerable position was pretty standard while I was at Beloit,” says Ken Rumble’96, who worked the C-Haus sound system in 1992, and later played in bands there and bartended during his time at Beloit.

Photo by: Jeff Woods

In 1982, C-Haus manager Rich Kobylka’82 worked with a studio art class, which designed and painted a mural on the walls and ceiling leading to the basement. It’s gone now, but a different mural (bottom) appears in the stairwell today. The first floor is literally covered with graffiti-like murals, poetry, Jack Kerouac quotations, and colorful and strange paintings of assorted and inexplicable subjects from various eras.

The reasons stem from a change in the drinking age that winnowed the clientele down, finances with more downs than ups, and occasional incidences of students behaving badly.

The same force that brought the C-Haus into existence—a change in the drinking age—was also nearly its undoing, when the drinking age returned to 21. Nearly everyone was allowed inside to drink during the bar’s heyday, but by the time the legal age switched to 21 by the summer of 1986, three-fourths of Beloit students could no longer legally imbibe in the pub.

A February 1987 campus meeting provocatively billed as “The Future of the C-Haus” drew more than 100 people on campus. The idea of turning the C-Haus into a private club for students over 21 was briefly considered, then dismissed. Ultimately, it was considered too divisive to implement. Other suggestions included opening the C-Haus only for special occasions or turning it into a coffee or juice bar. Sans alcohol, proponents maintained that it could still be a place to hang out and listen to live music. At one of several public meetings on the subject, one student went on record as saying the C-Haus needed an image change, away from “a dark, slimy hole.”

With the opening of the fall semester in 1988, the C-Haus charted record attendance, giving credence to claims that the pub was still viable. Apparently in response to rumors that it would close anyway in 1989, an angry mob of students marched in protest onto then-President Roger Hull’s front lawn in the wee hours of the morning.

More red than black in the C-Haus books has been an ongoing threat to the pub’s existence. Over the years, a series of students or recent graduates has managed the C-Haus, with mixed results. The ebb and flow of C-Haus popularity has always seemed somewhat outside the control of many managers. And over time, investments in sound systems, smoke-eating ventilation systems, maintenance, and other costs of doing business have eroded the pub’s income.

By 1992, the C-Haus had an accumulated debt of $12,000, according to the Round Table, and by the fall of 1993, it had to close early several times in one week, after dwindling sales. On one Thursday night that year, the Round Table reported that the C-Haus had sold just one beer.

The deficits continued to accumulate until a couple of years ago, when Beloit’s Student Congress asked students to vote on whether their government should help address the shortfall by subsidizing C-Haus labor costs. It passed.

Dean of Students Bill Flanagan says the College could not, in good conscience, subsidize a student bar, but students, through their government organization could if it was important to them. Today, a small portion of student activity fees supports the operation of the C-Haus, which allows students of all ages inside to hear live or recorded music, eat pizza, play pool, air hockey, or foosball, or just hang out. It operates like a restaurant these days: everyone gets in, and beer is served downstairs, but only to those 21 and older. Management closely monitors who is drinking and adheres to city regulations set out in the liquor license, just like any other bar.

Photo by: Trevor Johnson'08

Campus band night in the C-Haus, September 2007.

Cardillo, the current C-Haus manager, explains that he aims to keep C-Haus books in the black, while making the place as inclusive as possible by broadening the types of bands that perform. He’s toying with the idea of adapting a room on the ground floor to make it more suitable for study and conversation, and he wants to encourage more faculty and staff to return to the C-Haus, an element of the mix that has been missing for some time.

“It’s a tough thing to keep it all together,” Cardillo says of managing all the different aspects of the C-Haus, a place he describes to prospective bands as “the best Wisconsin bar.” He’s committed to making the pub viable and has no illusions about the financial challenges involved. “I don’t see the C-Haus as a huge money maker,” Cardillo explains. “We just don’t want it in the red.”

And so the C-Haus goes, from year to year, sometimes feeling a bit like it will fade away forever into the Beloit College history books.

Rumble, a writer who has spent a fair share of his time on college campuses, says he admires the staying power of the C-Haus and the fact that Beloit, unlike many other schools, seems to recognize the value of the pub’s harder-to-pin-down qualities.

“Everything is about numbers and the bottom line and minimizing liability and risk,” Rumble says of many colleges. “The C-Haus, to me, represents a commitment to that ineffable, often unprofitable need for people to just go out and have fun.”

 

Tom McBride on the “C” I suppose I didn’t enter the actual “Coughy Haus” until I returned from a term off in the winter of 1974, but my first experience of “Senior Drink” was in the previous winter. During that time I was all of five or six years older than some of my students, who eagerly invited me, on my very first weekend on campus, to the Friday afternoon event. My memories are rather blurry, both because I was exposed to the brew and because this was a long time ago. I recall the place being overcrowded—it seemed that the entire campus was packed into that tiny space—and the good times rolling with tremendous intensity. The noise was as deafening as the spirits were festive. There was a sort of electricity emanating from the hundreds of glasses of Hubers being downed, a type of buzz coming from the hops. President Upton may have been quietly sharing a beer with a student. I can’t recall whether I saw him at this particular Friday drink or at another soon after. The juxtaposition of the granite-like president in his resplendent Brooks Brothers and the long-haired hippies in their holey jeans startled me. I knew I had come to an odd and special place. I still know that. Over the years I revisited the C-Haus site many times. I do recall the hard work that my friends Hurster, Hoyt, and Burton did in order to make the place classy. There should be a historic marker. I remember judging a talent show in the C-Haus, where a young woman who played the accordion and roller skated simultaneously won the prize. She was so bad she was good. Once we had a series of “Last Lectures” over there, with the premise being that each professor should give a lecture that would be his last. Mine was “Now It Can Be Told” and relayed ancient but somewhat amusing gossip about Beloit College from long ago. I think only Professor Jerry Gustafson appreciated it. But hey, it was in the C-Haus. How bad could things have been? What was it Dr. Samuel Johnson said? If you’re tired of the Coughy Haus, you’re tired of life! — Tom McBride

The C-Haus: A somewhat blurred
remembrance of its origins

In the fall of 1970, when we came to Beloit as first-year underclassmen under the old Beloit Plan, the drinking age in Wisconsin was 18. We were disappointed, to say the least, that state border counties, like Rock, had a drinking age limit of 21. The logic of this policy seemed silly even at the time, since it was to keep younger drinkers from driving distances to drink legally—in this case across state lines. But that was the reality that we lived with, and immediately began to find ways around, in those early years. At the same time, there was a College-sponsored institution on campus called Senior Drink (for of-age undergraduates only), where students could come together and drink beer on Friday nights. It was held in the basement of the small building on the southeast corner of College and Clary Streets. Basically an unfinished, cinder-block, cement-floored space, it was a place where participants were served beer from a keg at a card table—the rest of the week it was used as a student “coffee house.” We nevertheless looked forward to the time when we could drink there on Friday evenings, and then head off to Goody’s Bar for the real experience.

Photo by: Jeff Woods

The C-Haus as it looks today.

Sometime in 1972, the legislators in Madison came to their senses, realizing that the drinking age injunction on the border counties created more problems than they solved regarding drinking and driving, and they lowered the drinking age to 18 statewide. Again, this logic may escape those of us who, in hindsight, don’t think older adolescents, or their parents for that matter, should be drinking and driving at all.

But whatever the legislative logic, it was great news to the Beloit campus. So sometime during the fall of 1972, Senior Drink was opened to the entire student body, as were the off-campus bars, and “laissez le bons temps roulez,” or something equally Carnival-like, reigned. But with this new age of younger drinking came another set of problems, as now Beloit students could, and certainly did, leave campus for libation outposts.

In the fall of 1973, Coleman Hoyt’74 and Steven Welch’73—two entrepreneurial friends and roommates who spent much of their time running a used car shop called Scraper City Automotive out of their rented home on East Emerson (to the chagrin of their mostly faculty neighbors)—approached Mo Carroll on the administrative staff about starting a student-run bar at the site of the newly expansive Senior Drink. “Our bogus rationale was that it would be safer for kids to drink on campus than off,” Coleman remembers. The two of them would provide the rehabilitation labor if the College would approve seed money for materials. To their surprise, the College jumped at the idea. (Coleman has since wondered if the administrators had ever driven by their residence on Emerson Street.)

Photo by: Steven Welch'73

The pub, shortly after its completion in 1974.

Coleman and Steven, with a small crew of laborers, returned to campus early from break in January of 1974 and went to work building the establishment now affectionately referred to as the C-Haus. Steven, to this day an artisan with tools of any sort, was the design master and true craftsman behind the project, while Coleman was the public manager, mouthpiece, and handled security; they both went on to become the first managers (the taste of “management” proved quite sweet to some). Working in relative secrecy, the project took about two weeks to complete.The wood paneling came from an old local barn in major disrepair that was ripped down and carted by trucks to the campus, often under the cover of darkness. The solid (yes, solid) copper foot rail remains on permanent loan from a Beloit Corporation alley, brought to campus in the middle of the night by the crew, in a too-small Scraper City van and welded into shape by Steve Welch. The College and the local beer distributor provided tables and chairs. Stephen Glosecki’74, over several long, substance-enhanced nights, painted the murals, which completed the incredible ambience of the transformed space, with the paint just drying on opening night. And when we all saw the great unveiling, we knew the campus finally had a setting truly befitting Senior Drink: We had a real, and very classy, bar.

Although Budweiser was the major beer initially, the beer cognoscenti quickly began pushing for more local beers from smaller breweries. Largely due to the influence of Alan Kornhauser’72, a beer aficionado who was a mentor to many of us during the original Senior Drink—and who once drove to Pottsville, Pa., to pick up several cases of Yuengling Porter for those Friday evening imbibes—the early management and bartenders already knew that the best beers were being made by smaller breweries. Alan went on to the Beloit beer hall of fame by helping to launch a West Coast microbrewery called Anchor Steam.

Thus, like so many other aspects of the Beloit experience, the C-Haus was at least 10 years ahead of the national microbrewery curve when we began rolling kegs of Leinenkugel and Point down the back stairs. Likewise in entertainment: Beloit in the 1970s had already made a name for itself in enterprising and slightly non-traditional music venues and programs. Our first Beloit Homecoming weekend, in October 1970, was celebrated with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, featuring the two lead singers from The Turtles. They played in the Beloit College Field House to a packed crowd. By the January 1974 opening of the new bar, the campus was already host to an annual bluegrass and blues festival. It only followed that the C-Haus would continue this tradition of way-cool musical groups. Early performers included Ben Sidran, Jim Peterman (keyboardist with the original Steve Miller Band and a local Beloit farmer), several national bluegrass bands, and regular jazz and blues performers out of Chicago like Koko Taylor. It is no exaggeration to say the C-Haus “cooked” musically from the very beginning.

There were other aspects, which went on to become part of the tradition of the C-Haus. Later that spring, the C-Haus hosted a drinking contest named after a recently departed fellow Haven roomie. Contestants entered with a team of backers, raising funds for the C-Haus and ensuring a heavily partisan crowd (which paid for their beer). The winning team drank free for the rest of the semester. Capitalist instincts tingling at the prospect of giving away the product, management also anonymously backed our own entrant, a true Senior Drink stalwart, who can be known here only as Yosemite Sam. Needless to say, Sam won fair and square, thus saving the profit margin on a fair number of pitchers into the summer. The Dennis P. Shanahan Memorial Drinking Contest immediately entered into C-Haus lore.

From the outset, there was the presence of faculty members and administrators, who’d often stop by for a drink and to hang out. Some, like a certain young English professor (who has gone on to endowed chair and Today Show fame because of his incredible mindset and intellectual facility, if not sobriety), became frequent faces on certain evenings. The tradition of the graffiti bathroom was encouraged from the beginning, and we had foosball and darts, in the original bar. Coleman Hoyt and Steve Welch also inaugurated a policy that probably does not hold true to this day, which is a shame: The managers of the C-Haus would be students, often doing a field placement. Coleman recalls that he and Steven were paid $500 each that term to manage, although there were many more benefits that came with the position: They would never have to buy a beer for themselves during their Beloit years, and the bartenders, who were volunteers, could drink for free during those semesters in which they worked. Bob Burton’74 and Tom Hurster’74 both worked the bar a lot for those first two semesters, their last on campus, and came to a deep and abiding respect for Leinenkugel, Huber, and Point beers. It is a truth that the place became a second room for many of us in those early days and became the backdrop to many of our best Beloit memories.

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