In the summer of 2020, the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, I met my business partner Ed Jordanich ’89 on the corner of Dunham and Arnold streets on the west side of South Bend. Tucked away in a neighborhood of brick roads stood a stately structure with a cornice atop the street façade that marked the construction date: 1905. South Bend’s historic Joe’s Tavern.
We had ventured there for a tour offered by the owner, Ed Gleckler, who played linebacker for Notre Dame in the 1970s. Gleckler is something of a brick-built man with a Long Island accent, who still looks like he could take down the tavern with his shoulder. He appeared then as he always does now, with a classic navy ND cap and a puckish gleam in his eye. Together we lumbered around the dusty and cluttered building that was up for sale.
“She’s got good bones,” was the first-look assessment of the potential buyers.
I had been an occasional customer at Joe’s Tavern when I was getting my start in local politics. Joe’s was a good place for meetings just on the periphery of downtown — not quite walkable, sometimes bikeable, but an easy five-minute drive down Sample Street.
Jordanich, who has an investment advisory practice, had never been to the bar. We had become friends through his own involvement in politics, including his work as treasurer for former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign, which I managed.
After Buttigieg dropped out in March 2020 and COVID hit about a week later, I mentioned the old tavern to Jordanich in a passing conversation. She was a beaut, but I felt like I needed to sleep for a few months before tackling the bar business. After a week or two, he contacted me and said he was interested in checking it out.
The wood-paneled walls were covered with Notre Dame football and University pictures, banners, leprechauns, Play Like a Champion Today signs, and other time-treasured items. Pennants stapled above the bar represented Notre Dame’s football opponents in 2018 — the last year the tavern operated. When Notre Dame won a game, the other team’s pennant would be turned upside down for the remainder of the season. RIP.
The year Gleckler bought the bar with his late wife, Carol, all the pennants were turned upside down. It was 1988, the season Notre Dame last won the national championship. The Glecklers operated the bar over the next three decades. Ed and Carol got married inside Joe’s one football game-day morning in a ceremony officiated by then-South Bend Mayor Joe Kernan ’68. Ed had been drinking rusty nail cocktails that day and has one still on their anniversary and on Carol’s birthday. Carol died in 2021.
Despite the challenges of the bar business, we didn’t want another neighborhood staple to have its pennant turned upside down permanently, so to speak: The corner watering hole seems to be slipping away — especially in cities the size of South Bend. Jordanich and I took a chance on keeping a local legend going, a place where old-timers could come in for an early supper and a beer or two, and younger folks could stroll in and say, “We like this vibe.”
The work took five years. We replaced the HVAC system, refrigeration and other equipment to maintain the bar’s classic look but make it new under the hood. We removed the exhaust fan above the bar, necessary back when smoking was allowed, and installed a red neon “Joe’s” sign that gives the tavern a pleasant glow — the handiwork of a craftsman whose shop is less than a half-mile away. We stripped the apartment above the bar down to the studs to create a short-term rental property.
The installment of Joe’s walk-in cooler is a tale worthy of a sitcom. We knew early on that we would need to replace the old, busted cooler attached to the back of the bar. What we didn’t know was the number of people it would require and the speed bumps we would encounter just to keep beer kegs cold: a mason to cut a bigger opening; a concrete team to pour a new pad; electricians to hook everything up; a roofing company to ensure our infamous winters wouldn’t create an ice shelf on the back of the bar; a colorful HVAC technician who, every time he showed up, told us we were really stupid for, one, doing the cooler this way and, two, opening a bar at all. If this cast of characters wasn’t enough, I had also enlisted a relative with career experience in refrigeration as our closer. He helped us find the right unit and get the job done. We can now safely say that our beer is cold. Really cold.
In the back room, we made a Prohibition lounge featuring old newspaper headlines reporting the raids that occurred at the tavern throughout the supposedly dry 1920s. Here’s a sampling: “Roberts Crawls on Knees; Finds Liquor; Nabs One”; “Three Arrested on Rum Counts: Establishment is Raided Again by Police”; “Five Held on Liquor Charges After Jeremiah Moore Sr. ‘Gets Busy.’”
While digging the foundation for the walk-in cooler, we found a thick glass beer bottle from the 1880s. We even found cash in the walls upstairs and a bullet behind the bar. The origins of these items are unknown, but they evoke all the footprints over the years that marked the tavern maybe once or thousands of times.
We want to apologize on the record to friends, family and old patrons for the many delays in reopening Joe’s. We just wanted to get it right. Jordanich and I joked that people wanted to talk more about the bar than about what we were doing in our daily lives. We often simply picked the next holiday as our proposed opening date. St. Patrick’s! Dyngus Day! The Fourth of July! The first home football game! So it went for a few years.
At last we opened our doors in October 2025. We enlisted Tony Simeri — the longtime owner and operator of South Bend’s popular, former Simeri’s Old Town Tap — to come out of retirement and help us with equipment, vendors, menus, ordering, products and hiring.
So far, so good. In our first year, stories of happiness have abounded. We’ve hosted birthdays, retirements, reunions, sports celebrations, graduations, funerals, chef pop-ups, bar crawls and executive retreats.
Reminiscing occurs almost daily: the older woman who grew up a few doors down and wanted to see the tavern and talk about it one more time; the beer representative, still working our circuit, who got his first raise here in the 1990s; the neighborhood kid, Tom Gryp ’79, now head of Notre Dame Federal Credit Union, who used to play with friends in the upstairs apartment.
We’ve also gotten to know many men who were part of the Breezers Club — which operated clandestinely across the street at 1202 Dunham for decades. The Breezers were founded in 1926 by some local gents who were obsessed with the automobile. Their name comes from their practice of getting in their cars and “breezin’” around town or to other Midwestern cities on road trips. Their early base was the area around St. Casimir Parish, its dance hall and other nearby establishments of the Roaring Twenties. Over time, they bought a hangout. It was “open” to members only on Sundays. Why? Because that’s the day Joe’s was closed.
At the end of the bar near the kitchen, we left a scratched plaque intact. It reads: “Joseph ‘Joe Cook’ Kucharski. ONE MORE . . . THAT’S IT!” Joe Cook is our joint’s namesake, and in his honor we’ve made the latter part our bar’s slogan. We think it derives from the workers who would come into Joe’s on Fridays to cash their paychecks. Joe would take the paycheck, deduct the previous week’s bill, and then give them their cash. Everyone would restart their tabs and cry out: “One more . . . that’s it, Joe!” before, of course, exceeding the threshold.
The most famous Joe’s story has a connection to Notre Dame football. In 1992, the producers of Rudy selected St. Casimir as the setting for the funeral of Rudy’s friend Pete, who dies in a steel mill accident. While filming, crew members noticed a small corner bar down the street.
There they saw most of the same Notre Dame paraphernalia that we found when we ventured into the tavern in 2020. After a while, more senior crew members made their way over and a producer decided to make Joe’s a filming location. It became the backdrop to the bar fight between Rudy and his brother Frank over Rudy’s dream of playing football for the Irish. That scene is meant to be the brothers’ local bar in their hometown, Joliet, Illinois. Pete opens the scene hollering, “Hey Joe, whaddya know?” — a tip of a ND cap to the bar.
In the film, the tavern’s walls are the same. The bar top is the same. The soft light glow is similar. The hustle and bustle of busy hours creates a similar sound. The primary site of the altercation — the jukebox — now has an original Rudy movie poster on the wall, a gift from Ed Gleckler.
Bar fights are not a feature of Joe’s these days. And we are decidedly not a late-night spot, unlike other local establishments with Notre Dame roots — such as Corby’s Irish Pub on East LaSalle Avenue, the bar most associated with Rudy. We are more than happy to be known as “the other Rudy bar.”
Owning and operating Joe’s during the last year has been an elixir in a world that has become more vengeful, negative, depressing and distrustful. People each week tell us that going to Joe’s almost feels like stepping back into a time more respectful, cheery, fun and open. It is so important right now to have places where people can come together in fellowship. It’s hard to get mad when you’re with friends eating a burger, drinking a beer and watching sports on television in a place that’s part of South Bend and Notre Dame history. Joe’s has survived booms and busts and social upheavals — Prohibition, the Great Depression, World War II, the closures of the Studebaker and Oliver companies, ethnic riots on the west side and more — and no doubt will continue to endure.
A final story, because bars are mostly about stories and people, after all.
Last fall, shortly before our quiet open, we had some folks over to test our drink-making skills, beer taps, plumbing and the other odds and ends that go into the service industry. We had about a dozen friends in the bar when a man walked in wearing a full-length white robe and sandals. Was this some strange vision? An early Halloween costume?
The bearded man ordered a Stella Artois, and I politely told him that we weren’t open to the public yet. He said he understood and introduced himself as Father Reginald Wolford. A Dominican friar, he had just transferred into St. Patrick-St. Hedwig Parish near downtown, and he was out walking his parish boundaries to get a feel for the city. The east side of Arnold Street was in his parish, and the west side was part of St. Casimir, where Rev. Ryan Pietrocarlo, CSC, ’11, ’16M.Div., now another Joe’s patron, is the pastor.
By the time Wolford finished talking, I handed over a frothy, cold Stella, telling him that my Catholic upbringing would not permit me to deny service to a man of the cloth. We got to talking. Ed Jordanich and I shared our backgrounds at Our Lady of Hungary and St. Mary of the Assumption grade schools, Marian and Saint Joseph high schools, and Notre Dame. One of us made a joke about being a bar owner — and whether that was a worthy or moral profession.
“Running a bar is its own type of ministry,” Wolford said.
A few months later, on March 19, 2026, we invited him, alongside friends, family, regulars and South Bend Mayor James Mueller ’04, to a formal blessing of the bar. We picked the date because it’s the Feast of Saint Joseph — the patron saint of workers. We invited the laborers and contractors who helped us breathe life back into Joe’s.
After we shared historical facts about the bar and heard brief remarks from guests, Wolford told the assembled, “I now need to make my way to the keg area.” Everyone laughed.
There, he brought out his aspergillum and recited the Catholic beer blessing:
“Bless, O Lord, this creature beer, which thou hast deigned to produce from the fat of grain, that it may be a salutary remedy to the human race; and grant through the invocation of thy holy name that whoever shall drink it may gain health in body and peace in soul. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.”
Amen. Welcome to Joe’s.
Mike Schmuhl is the director of Velo Strat, a strategic consulting firm.