Last month word got out that Quenchers Saloon, a beer-lover’s pub that straddles the border of Logan Square and Bucktown, was up for sale. Owner Earle Johnson, 75, put the building on the market in November, but word didn’t spread widely till after he placed a big sign above the door. Johnson has owned the place for nearly four decades, and as he recently told Tribune reporter Josh Noel, he doesn’t have the energy to run a bar anymore.
The potentially imminent sale of Quenchers spurred me to inquire after the artwork’s fate. I posted Noel’s story on Twitter, joking that I wanted to buy the Quenchers drawing—and Noel replied to say Johnson had more of Willis’s art. When I reached Johnson, he confirmed that he owned several drawings, and that he’d kept them in the bar’s basement for years. He turned out to own eight more, and he was kind enough to dig up the poster-board pictures to show me and Reader director of photography Jamie Ramsay. “You’re the first people who’ve seen them—I haven’t even really looked at them for years,” Johnson says. “I was afraid I’d lost these, because I’d lost track of them and I couldn’t find them. I went looking for them several times. And then when I reorganized the whole basement and categorized everything, I came across them and had a great sense of relief.”
Johnson has tinkered with the idea of showing Willis’s art. “It’s something that should be displayed,” he says. “They should be someplace where people can see them.” He’s considered exhibiting the drawings at Quenchers, but he’s afraid one would go missing. “The security isn’t always the best here,” he says. “We lost a moose head out of here. It had been on the wall, and we were redoing something—I think it was just sitting on the stage. Somebody took it.”
