Les Paul legacy lives on at Club 400
Waukesha establishment has ties to guitar legend
WAUKESHA – Luke Skywalker had Yoda; Jimmy Lindenberg has Poky. You’d have to say Lindenberg’s chances of business success look pretty good.
Some business mentoring is formal, embedded in organizations like SCORE, and offered by experienced executives in suits who know their way around a marketing campaign and a balance sheet.
But mentoring also can come from a guy who shows up in a Montreal Expos T-shirt, carrying a free-beer-for-life card in his wallet. Who’s to say what’s best?
In early October, Lindenberg, a former geography major turned bar operator, bought the Club 400, a tavern and
restaurant at 322 Williams St., just south of Carroll University.
Selling the spot was its owner of the last 36 years, accountant turned bar operator Dan Pokwinski, generally known since second grade at Holy Cross School on the west side of Milwaukee, where a stern nun had trouble pronouncing his last name, as Poky.
Pokwinski used to hang out at the Club 400 playing sheepshead — crack, re-crack, double on the bump — when he went to Carroll in the late 1970s and Wisconsin’s legal drinking age was 18.
Club 400 was a neighborhood joint then. Some of the regulars lived upstairs in the second-floor rooming house. They’d show up early in the morning when the doors opened.
Pokwinski and his buddies came in later. When they did, tavern owner Elsie Polfuss, whose late husband, Ralph, had first opened the Club 400 with his father in 1948, was strict. She didn’t want any college-age shenanigans.
“She would always say, ‘OK, you guys don’t sit at the bar,’ ” Pokwinski recalled. “‘You guys … go around the corner and be quiet. As long as you guys behave I’ll let you be here.’ ”
A few years later, Elsie died, and Pokwinski, who by then had graduated and was working none too happily as an accountant, pitched an idea to a friend who was similarly disillusioned with accounting:
We could turn the Club 400 into a college bar. Let’s buy it.
Which they did, in 1981. At the time, the tavern had a single picture on the walls of Elsie’s brother-in-law, Lester William Polfuss. Most people know him as Les Paul, but Pokwinski had never heard of him — knew nothing about arguably Waukesha’s most famous son, the fleet-fingered guitarist and electronics inventor, who once sold 4 million records in six months, and who happened to have played the Club 400 not long after his brother and father bought it.
“Didn’t have a clue,” Pokwinski said.
But he figured it out. Evelyn Polfuss, Les’ mother, helped. Already in her 90s (she lived to 101), she would come to the Club 400, accompanied by an aide from the nearby nursing home where she lived, get herself a glass of beer and hold court.
“She’d talk about her two sons,” Pokwinski, 60, said. “She loved Ralph as much as she loved Les . ... She’d talk a storm up.”
When she started bringing in memorabilia about her more-famous boy, Pokwinski said, “that’s when I realized
“I had heard about Les Paul when I was younger, but he’s almost like folklore and this is so tangible — he’s here.” Amy Letcher, actress from Los Angeles
that this is history ... and it became more of a passion for me to find out about it.”
Later, he got to know Les Paul, who would stop in unannounced, or sometimes ask him to open the bar early so he could show it to friends — Bruce Springsteen among them.
So the Club 400 now has a wall dedicated to Les Paul-related photos, records and documents, which attracts the attention of visitors like Amy Letcher, a 24-year-old actress from Los Angeles who was in Waukesha with her boyfriend as he visited his father, an Oconomowoc resident.
“I had heard about Les Paul when I was younger,” Lechter said, “but he’s almost like folklore and this is so tangible — he’s here.”
Lindenberg, the 31-year-old son of entrepreneur Jim Lindenberg, whose business interests include the Master Z’s billiards stores, didn’t need help figuring out the value of the Les Paul connection. In fact, he plans to make music more of an emphasis at the place.
And he knows how to tend bar; he did that at the Club 400 for almost two years before buying it. But running a tavern is different from working in one, particularly when it also serves food, and that’s where Pokwinski comes in.
Since the change in ownership, he has shown up at Club 400 pretty much every day, counseling Lindenberg on such tavern-keeping topics as how to fry buffalo wings, how to keep the books and how to make the cole slaw (start with five pounds of red and green cabbage, add two cups of sugar, plop in “three to four goops of mayo, and then you get your glove on and you mix it.”)
All of which Lindenberg appreciates, so much so that he guaranteed Pokwinski free beer for life — and issued him the card documenting the promise.
“He’s great,” Lindenberg said. “… And he said he’ll be here as long as I need him.”
As for Pokwinski, he’s glad to hand off the Club 400 to someone who appreciates it and its place in the community.
“Jimmy’s salt of the earth, good guy,” Pokwinski said. “I did not want to leave a problem with Carroll. I did not want to leave a problem with my neighbors.”
“I wanted somebody to continue the tradition,” he added. “Maybe do it better.”