The happiest and healthiest person in Wise Guy’s corner is also the one who has been here the longest. Bob Borgstrom says, “When I was a teenager we’d go to hockey games at the Stadium, and between periods we’d sneak over to the original Goat. People were always four or five deep at the bar, so we’d called out our drinks and pass over the money nobody ever asked how old we were and that was a good thing. But boy, did that place smell. Really bad because of all the animals around.”
Bob and a couple of other white-haired Billy Goat regulars remember all of the taverns and restaurants that used to pepper the neighborhood. And he remembers the day the Billy Goat opens: “It was painted fire engine red. It was like sitting in a firehouse. And it was tough on Billy at first. That first year he must have gone through 25 bartenders. All of them were stealing. That’s why he used to sit in a high chair right by the stairs with that kid’s hammer that squeaked and that he used to bang on anybody he saw staring at the girls walking down the stairs and say, ‘Don’t pay attention to that!’ What he was really doing was watching the bartenders and the cash register.”
“It’s after closing and nobody’s in here, and I see Mike when he’s dead,” Sam says. “He had some kind of pile of papers in front of him and he’s looking at the papers. I see that he is crying, and I say ‘What happens , Mike? Is anything wrong?’ And he says ‘No, no Sam, I just miss my wife.’ And the he get up, walk up the stairs out the door.”
Mike spends a lot of time at the Billy Goat, and a lot of other bars, after the unexpected death of his first wife, Carol, in 1978. He is angry, guilty, sad, and, when it is late and there have been too many drinks, he talks seriously of suicide.
He pulls out of it, gets back to work, dates a lot of women, tries to be a good father to his two grown sons. In 1982 he meets Judy Arndt, a pretty, smart, and understanding blond. She teaches him to play tennis. He takes her to the Billy Goat.
“A night was just not complete for him without a stop at the Goat,” says Judy. “I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that the Goat, with its tired linoleum floor, its lack of anything fancy, its lack of pretension, took him back to his childhood before he was famous and everybody wanted a piece of him. After Carol died, I think he came there so often because he just didn’t want to be alone. And he knew Sam would not let anything bad happen to him in the Goat”
