Razing the bar for family photos
15 years after selling their home — along with a bar top covered in precious pictures — new owners allow Hoellers to reclaim their memories
Joe Hoeller knew exactly where he left nearly 200 precious family photos, yet he thought he would never see them again.
Around 1988, Joe spread out the pictures on his rec room bar top and sealed them there under 10 coats of clear polyurethane.
This was in the basement of the southwest Milwaukee home the retired police officer and his wife Vicki owned from 1977 until selling it in 2002.
It might surprise you that Joe and Vicki did not look for a way to take the photos with them when they moved. And it might surprise you even more that the new owner of the home never replaced the bar top. When guests sat down for a drink and asked about the people in the photos, the owner would have to say he didn’t know who they were.
After 15 years of those weird conversations, the owner put the ranch home on S. 91st St. up for sale. That was in August of this year. Joe and Vicki, who live in Oak Creek now, drove past one day and noticed the house was on the market.
They told their daughters, who went to the real estate website and could see from the interior photos that little or nothing had changed in the home since their parents owned it.
The daughters, Kim Dunlop and Jean Kostuch, went to an open house in August and there was the bar with all the well-preserved photos of their family spanning a few generations, pets, parties, friends, vacations, concert shots of Tom Jones and Wayne Newton, Robin Yount batting and Don Sutton pitching, Samson the gorilla and lots more.
Kim and Jean embarked on a recovery mission.
“There were a lot of dead people on there, so it was our desire to get the bar
back,” Kim said.
The sisters talked to real estate agents involved in the sale, and finally they talked to Amanda and Tom Cottrell, a young couple who bought the house and closed on the deal in November.
Amanda and Tom agreed to let them take the bar tops, as long as they provided them with new ones. That happened during seven hours of sawing and hammering on Dec. 2. Kim’s son Jacob and Jean’s husband Jeff did a lot of the work.
I talked to Amanda, and she surprised me even further by saying she and Tom would not have tossed out the photo bar if the Hoeller family had not come along. “Actually, we probably would have kept it like that. We thought it was really cool. I know I’m personally into making memories like that,” she said.
Joe and Vicki had no idea their family had retrieved the bar, but they were about to find out. On Christmas Eve, two long photo-covered sections were presented to them as gifts.
“A Christmas gift of memories. This brought tears to my eyes. It does every time I look at it,” Vicki said.
Kim made a video of her parents’ reaction to the gift. They were pretty surprised. You can hear Joe say, “Holy crapmeister!” He told me, “I was amazed. Are you kidding me? I had given up on the pictures.”
The couple also was presented with boards showing the autographs of people who attended parties at the Milwaukee home during the 1980s. These had been covered up with paneling but resurfaced during the bar switchout this month.
Joe said he plans to put legs on the photo bar sections and use them as serving tables.
Amanda and Tom already have written their names, their pets’ names and their closing date on a support beam in the basement of their new house, and they’re feeling inspired to display their own photos in some fashion.
“I was telling Tom I kinda want to do that,” Amanda said. “Maybe one day.”