While few on Milwaukee’s East Side can match the astounding longevity of the family ownership of Wolski’s, which dates back well over 100 years, the Champion clan – which runs Champion's Pub, 2417 N. Bartlett Ave. – is doing a yeoman’s job.

These days Champions is run by Bobby Greenya, but it was opened by his grandfather Jimmy Champion, who had previously operated the Coach Inn in what is now The Estate on Murray and had worked at a number of other East Side institutions, too, including the Tuxedo Bar and Buddy Beek’s on Downer Avenue and Club Midnight, during the Denny Holland era, on North Avenue at Prospect.

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“We’ve been around forever,” Greenya says. “My family grew up with the Bondars (from Wolski’s) and the Vituccis and the Zafffros and those are all places that we've always loved to go to. I was at Pitch’s yesterday.

“They were amazing mentors when we first took over, too,” adds Bobby’s wife and Champions co-owner Maire. “If Bobby had any questions, you've got this hive mind who's been doing it for years.”

“I had Angelo Vitucci to kind of bounce things off,” Bobby chips in, “and Angelo (and his future wife) actually had their first date at my grandparents' place on St. Patrick's Day. She was from Ireland. So we've been lucky, we have a lot of people who have been able to help us out.”

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The bar business, then, was not only in Greenya’s Champion blood – inherited from his mother, who was Jimmy Champion’s daughter – but also served up to him by that veteran East Side community.

And, he had a place that had been a bar since before Prohibition – with a little stint as a hardware store during the dry years – too.

The story of the building itself dates to 1912, when in August, Thomas Troka pulled a permit with the City of Milwaukee to build a $3,000 store with a flat above it on a stone foundation on the lot just south of where he lived and ran a saloon since at least 1909.

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Troka was born in 1875 in Lipusz, Koscierzyna…, Poland to Michael and to Augusta Grabowska.

In 1890, the Trokas emigrated, landing in Philadelphia in March 1890. Six years later, Troka married Anna Jankowski, who was born in 1878, at St. Hedwig’s Church in Milwaukee.

By 1900, the couple lived with Anna’s parents Vincent Jankowski and Franciscka on Bartlett Avenue, further up the block on which Champions is now located.

Soon after, the family began to grow and by the time the census enumerator arrived at the door of their home and saloon next door to the Champions site, they had added 9-year-old Roman, 8-year-old Frank, 6-year-old Martha, 5-year-old Joseph, 3-year-old Clara, 2-year-old Agnes and 6-month-old Thomas Jr. to the clan.

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By that time, Troka had also become a U.S. citizen and standing up with him as witnesses in 1906 were John Czuppa and Martin Wolski (another Wolski tie!).

How an immigrant saloonkeeper with seven kids was able to build a new saloon is unclear, but there may be a clue in his choice of architects.

Troka hired Wolff & Ewens to design his tavern building.

Wolff & Ewens were the preferred architects of the Miller Brewing Company, designing many tied houses for the brewery, including the Miller Cafe downtown, above which the architects had their office.

While one trusted local brewery historian says the Troka tap was indeed a Miller tied house, the facts don’t appear to bear that out. The business does not appear on Miller’s own 1917 tied house listing, nor does the Milwaukee County Register of Deeds show any evidence that the brewery or its affiliated Oriental Investment Co. ever owned the property.

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Plus, there was already another tied house just to the north, built just two years earlier, and still another a couple blocks southwest.

While it was not uncommon for tied houses to be built independently but with the financial support, in the form of loans, from a brewery, Miller’s archivist Dan Scholzen found no records of such an arrangement.

He did, however, find documentation of a relationship in the form of financial records from 1918 that show Trocha owed the brewery a little more than $4,100 (roughly a whopping $86,000 in today’s money).

However, Scholzen doesn’t believe any of that was tied to real estate, but rather for beer.

“Based on this information I would guess that Troka was a customer of the Fred Miller Brewing Co., but did not necessarily operate a Miller tied house,” he says. “Miller regularly did business with independent tavern owners so this would not have been unusual.

“It does sound like a lot (of money), but there are many other names under both city bills receivable and country bills receivable listed at even greater sums.”

One saloonkeeper owned $10,000 at the time, Scholzen notes.

“Miller produced more than 400,000 barrels in 1917, the year for which this paperwork is summarizing, so business was still booming,” he adds.

“There is no reference to the property either in brewery or Oriental Realty records from that time period and so there is no indication that Miller built or owned the tavern. It is still possible of course, but I can't say definitively either way.”

So, while you could surely get a taste of the High Life at Troka’s saloon, and likely enjoy it in an atmosphere decorated with Miller Brewery advertising, it seems unlikely you’d have been doing it in a Miller-owned place.

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Like his Miller tied house neighbor to the north (now home to Tess) Troka ran afoul – through no fault of his own – in 1914 of the Baker Law that limited the number of taverns that could be licensed in the city.

When it was determined that Milwaukee had too many taverns, more than 200 of them faced closure, Troka’s among them. (You can read more about this here.)

However, his was among those saved by the Stemper Bill that was introduced the following year.

After the arrival of Prohibition in January 1920, Troka – who appears to have been from a saloonkeeping family as other Trokas had taverns on Lee Street and Wright Street at this time – again ran foul of the law, though not for the reasons most of his colleagues did at that time.

In September 1921, Troka’s saloon was raided and he and seven men were arrested for gambling (rather than for illicit alcohol as was typically the case during the dry years).

The case against all of them was dismissed three days later when they testified that they had been playing,  “only for chocolate bars, candy and soda water.”

In 1923, Troka constructed a large row of garages on land south of the tavern, but his time there was coming to an end. Within a few years, the Trokas would be living on 4th Street and Thomas was working in a box factory (later, he’d work for the WPA).

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By 1926, Charles Shriner had purchased the building and opened the Bartlett Avenue Hardware store.

Oddly, Shriner took out a permit for a kitchen addition the following year, suggesting perhaps his hardware store might simply be a front for an illegal liquor outlet, as was sometimes the case during Prohibition.

Shriner, who was born in Vienna around 1880, and his wife Martha, born in Germany, had been a grocer at the dawn of Prohibition but would indeed convert his hardware store to a tavern upon Repeal in 1933, operating it very briefly before leasing it out to Harold Wilson.

However, Shriner left the tavern after just a couple months to focus on his new business: a hardware store around the corner on Cambridge and North.

Times were tough for Shriner by then. In April 1934 he declared bankruptcy and in December of 1935, he died.

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Back on Bartlett Street by then things had gotten interesting.

On Sept. 24, 1934, Earl Verette filed an occupancy permit to run a bar in the old Troka place and TWO DAYS LATER newspapers carried a report of his brother Clifford being fined $5 for selling liquor without a bartender’s license in the tavern.

Interestingly, Verette was accused of selling beer without a license back on Aug. 13, though the license was later obtained.

Furthermore, the testifying police officer said that while the tavern was officially in Earl Verette’s name, a city employee (unnamed) lived in the building and was believed by police to be the actual owner of the place. The officer noted that yet another man’s name was on the gas bill, though at least one alderman at the hearing voiced that all of this was irrelevant to the discussion of Verette’s bartending license.

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By 1940, 32-year-old Sigmund “Cy” Letkiewicz was running Cy’s Tavern in the building and living upstairs with his wife Frances.

After a few years, Letkiewicz – who would later operate a tavern on Bremen and Chambers in Riverwest – moved on and was replaced by Edwin Jankowski, who likely was related to the Trokas (Anna Troka, as you may recall, was a Jankowski), and who operated the bar as Jahoo’s.

Polish immigrant Stanley Werbinski also ran the bar at some time during this period, though I couldn’t determine exactly when, but when he died in 1950 after operating Stan’s Old Mill Resort in Okauchee, it was noted that, “earlier he had a tavern business at 2417 N. Bartlett.”

By the late 1940s, however, the place had become home to one of Milwaukee’s more unusual taverns.

Artist Tony Pochert and his family, including his wife Marge and their children lived upstairs while they operated The Sketch Bar below.

Tony had set up an easel behind the bar and would draw portraits of customers while Marge would, in the words of the Journal Sentinel’s Lisa Sink, “impress customers with her exotic gourmet food.”

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Tony’s portraits soon lined the walls of the place, Marge “dabbled in watercolors” and even the children became adept artists. Playful Marge would sign her name backward on her works.

Tony and Marge met in the 1930s when they were teenagers and members of the Milwaukee Players theater company. During the war, Tony worked at Globe Union and Marge sold war bonds.

The Sketch Bar endured into the 1950s, closing when Marge was diagnosed with lung cancer.

But the Pocherts did not retire. Instead they opened The Sketch Mart and Art Supply Store and ran it for about 15 years on Green Bay Avenue.

Once Marge beat cancer, Sink noted in her obituary years later, the couple moved to Port Washington in 1967 and opened another Sketch Bar, which operated until 1979, at which point the Pocherts retired to Rib Lake.

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By 1957 50-year-old Steve Hauke had taken over the bar, which he named Hauke’s Place, and in 1960 he sought to convert Shriner’s addition into an apartment by adding a bathroom, which was initially denied, but ultimately came to pass.

Four years after that he remodeled the place but seems to have then listed it for sale in 1966, describing it in a classified ad as a “GOLD MINE.” Surely the box factory and other industrial businesses nearby sent a steady stream of customers in, plus neighborhood residents and college students from the growing UWM not far away.

In 1973, Hauke again listed the place for sale, seeking $41,500, and around this time Jimmy Champion was encountering some trouble over at the Coach Inn on Murray Avenue.

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The Pociechas, who had previously operated a tavern in that space, had since gotten the building as an inheritance from Lolly Pociecha’s mother, Antonina Gibes, who owned the building, and they wanted to get back into the bar business.

“We weren’t looking to move,” Greenya says of his family’s Coach Inn. “But the woman we were renting from passed away, and they wanted to kick us out. But because we had the liquor license, they couldn’t, because the license is tied to a person, not the address. So we bought this place.

“My grandmother came over to look at it and got off on the wrong foot with Steve Hauke, and she was good friends with the people that started Golden Chicken, and they had their first franchise across the street from where The Estate is now.

“She came over and sweettalked him while my grandmother looked all over the place and said, ‘OK, yeah, we want to buy it.’ And then because (my grandparents) didn't give up the liquor license because (the Pociechas) kind of pissed us off, we held onto it and ran both places.

(For more on Jimmy Champion, click here.)

“My grandfather kept the old guys that he had in the business over there, and my uncle, Jimmy Champion Jr., ran this place with kind of a younger crowd. There was music, and he would have things like hat night and just different weird things.”

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Once the Coach In closed, the elder Champion joined his son over at Champions and remained involved in day-to-day operations until about 1982, when his son Timmy took over, but was a fixture in the place until his death in 2000, Greenya says.

Timmy Champion bought the place from his parents in 1996.

Greenya didn’t exactly grow up in the bar because his parents didn’t run it, but he did go there once in a while, he recalls.

“She never wanted to do it, nor did she ever want me to do it,” he says. “A lot of people say they want to own a bar, but it's challenging. It's a lot of work, and you never want to be your own best customer.

“And I think that's what she was worried about. She grew up in the business and she saw how hard my grandparents worked and the toll it took on them and all the stuff they had to do.”

Still, the pull was strong and when Greenya got out of the Navy, he started working at the bar.

"From the time I was 5 years old, I knew I wanted to own my grandfather’s tavern someday,” he told OnMilwaukee. “I’ve loved it for as long as I can remember.”

“I've been working here since ‘92,” he says. “I was working here on weekends and going to school. I lived in Madison and was staying in the back apartment here.”

Then, in 2000, when uncle Jimmy wanted to retire, Bobby and his wife Maire Mills-Greenya stepped in to keep the family business going. They ultimately bought the place from Uncle Timmy three years later.

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“We got the liquor license transferred on June 29, but then we had to wait for the Fourth of July holiday,” Greenya recalls. “We cleaned the bar (during the time) and my wife was pregnant, very pregnant.”

“We legally opened on July 5,” Maire says.

“And then two days later she gave birth,” Bobby adds. “So we’ve never been bored.”

Since then, the Greenyas have taken down the garages, built a sprawling patio with an outdoor bar and a covered deck.

Importantly, they re-opened the front windows – which had been closed up for many years – bringing light back into the tavern.

They’ve been hosting a regular talk show-style variety show that’s been popular, and the shuffleboard game here is legendary, too.

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Inside it feels as homey as ever, with family photos – including a great shot of the Champion family on the set of television’s “Family Feud,” on which they competed in 1982 – and the two trophies from Jimmy Champion’s Coach Inn Golf Invitational, which is still going at Lake Park.
(You can read more about that here.)

Though the Greenyas no longer live upstairs – they moved across the street and Greenya laughs, “my commute tripled when we moved” – make no mistake, Champions is still a three-generation family place and it feels like it.