No More Bull

Bullwinkles is closed and I won't cry. I lived next door to the Bull at 1340 Tennessee with four roommates for a year beginning in the fall of 1984. Nobody at our house dug the Bull. We walked up to the Hawk on Ohio Street to whet our college whistles. Bullwinkles attracted the fraternity/sorority crowd and we were GDIs (Note: The Hawk seems to be a frat bar now). We saw a lot of topsiders. The smell of Polo cologne wafted down Tennessee street. Cars in the scant curbside parking area sported Reagan-Bush '84 bumper stickers. Sorority girls played Don Mclean's American Pie on the jukebox and sang along all semester. American Pie echoed out the Bull's front door for a hundred nights. We witnessed young men urinating in the alley between our house and the bar as we watched Miami Vice on the Admiral in our living room.

The good thing about living next to the Bull were the unsanctioned carry-out longnecks. It's against Kansas law to take open beer outside a bar unless you're in an enclosed beer garden, but we filled a Dillon's shopping cart full of empty Budweiser longnecks on our back porch by April. My roommate Kurt returned them to the bar, much to the owner's delight. We warmed up to Bullwinkles a bit after that, but it was the end of the school year and I didn't return to the Bull.

The current landlord also owns my old house at 1340 Tennessee. A few years ago someone erected a wood fence between the house and the bar. No more alley urinators. Perhaps a young go-getter will buy both properties and the muli-unit apartment house behind the bar (all three are available for $849,000) and tear down the trio to build a laundromat. I'll bet somebody opens a new 3.2 beer bar in the old Bullwinkle's building and calls it Rocky's or Jay Ward's Last Chance. Maybe then I'll stop by for a longneck to go.