Like many working stiffs Tom Nicholson likes to meet his buddies for a drink at the end of the day. He sells rocks to road builders, and about 30 years ago he often found himself on the same jobs as a guy from U.S. Steel named Tom Shaughnessy. One night Shaughnessy introduced Nicholson to his favorite place to grab a beer and a snack before heading home, and soon Nicholson was a regular too. But the exact location of that lumpen haven, aptly known as the Hideout, was always a mystery to Nicholson’s family out in Mount Prospect–even to his wife.
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After Nicholson’s daughter Katie graduated from the University of Texas in 1984, she moved to Logan Square, just a few miles from her dad’s stomping grounds. She asked him where the old watering hole was, but he still wouldn’t say. Intrigued, she pressed his friends for clues, but they too played dumb. Once she ran into a childhood friend who was sporting a Hideout windbreaker and slyly asked, “Where’s that place again?” Even he just wagged a finger at her and said, “No, no, no.” Then her father, in a moment of weakness, let on that the bar was just north of North Avenue. After two full days spent combing the area, Katie and her husband to be, Tim Tuten, hit pay dirt: tucked in next to a brick mail-order warehouse just east of Elston, at 1354 W. Wabansia, was a small tar-papered house with an Old Style sign creaking in the wind. The name of the place was nowhere to be seen, but Katie says, “I knew it was the Hideout.” She and Tim went in, ordered a beer, and called her dad to say the jig was up.
“When we first opened a friend of ours brought in a woman who worked at the MCA and she sat down and talked to Big Billy the welder for an hour,” says Katie. “I have no idea what they were talking about, but you don’t see that too often.”
It was slow going in those early days, in the fall of 1996, as the foursome replaced beer coolers and fixed up the bathrooms in their spare time. Some old regulars who’d drifted off in the 80s came back; new customers trickled in. Former Bottle Rockets bassist Tom Ray and local washboard player Rick “Cookin’” Sherry noticed the Hideout en route to Home Depot one afternoon and decided to stop in. Over beers they talked with Katie, who turned out to be a big Bottle Rockets fan, and by the time they left they’d secured a weekly Tuesday booking for their acoustic blues act, Devil in the Woodpile.
