Skyway 12 Club

The Skyway 12 Club was a tavern located on the southwest corner of Wayzata Blvd. and Linner Road, just past the intersection of I-394 and 494.  Rey Freeman said that it would have sat where the Minnetonka Fire station #5 is now.  Wayzata Blvd. is a service road of I-394 now, and on either side of the freeway is a half cloverleaf.  Robb Henry says that the Club was at the intersection of Linner Road and the service road.

 

 

Will Jones from the Minneapolis Tribune discovered it at the same time he discovered the River Road Club in Mendota, describing both in his column dated March 29, 1955:

 

The Skyway 12 tavern at 15009 Wayzata boulevard has a player piano competing with the juke box.

It’s unfair competition at best.  The piano is electrified to the extent that it requires no foot pumping.  It doesn’t require nickels.  When in action, it drowns out the juke box.

There was a young juke box faction in the place Sunday afternoon when I was trying out the piano.  The guy who was with me listened to the thin electronic wall of the juke box, after hearing the loud, full-bodied plunking of the piano, and observed:  “That kind of music will never last.”

It didn’t.  The juke box fans gave after wasting two or three nickels.

We went through most of the rolls stacked on the top of the piano – older items like “Barney Google,” “If You Knew Susie,” and “Rose Marie,” newer ones like “The Old Piano Roll Blues” and the air corps song, and any number of Polish numbers.

Trying to Read Polish on a piano roll as it whizzes by, reading from bottom to top, is easily as good a Sunday afternoon diversion as Prizeword Pete.

“If you can think of a better way to spend Sunday afternoon,” said my friend, “you can name her.”

I have to go along with his enthusiasm for the player piano.  No beer joint should be without one.  Or, for that matter, no home.

 

Jones, September 12, 1961:

 

The Dick Maw trio reports to the Skyway 12 Friday night for regular Friday-Saturday-Sunday sessions.  The Wayzata Blvd. spot is being refurbished and hung with paintings by Maw to welcome the new policy.  And brother Don Maw is reactivating the Dick and Don Maw orchestra for the coming season, with Don fronting the group.

 

 

An item by Bob White, Minneapolis Herald, September 12, 1962, reports:

Sunday night most clubs are closed, but I discovered a club that’s bustling and swinging Thursday through Sunday night  The Skyway 12, on Highway 12 a mile East of Wayzata, is located high on a hill with a beacon light guiding you to the spot.  The place was packed and in full swing the Sunday night I paid a visit.  The Tim Bassett Quartet was backing singer Rosie Wallen of Minneapolis who really wails.  She was pulling out all stops for, Bill Bailey, Hard Hearted Hannah and other up-tempo ballads.  The dance floor was filled.  Other entertainers regularly at the spot include the Beachcombers and the Dick Clausen Trio.  Everyone’s in orbit at the Skyway 12, even Sunday nights.

 

 

 

 

In 1967 and 1968 it was run by Ben Musser and offered live music on Sunday nights.

 

 

On January 29, 1968, tavern buyer Gary Boster got a license to sell 3.2 beer, on and off. The Council was not optimistic: “Do you know how many owners went broke up there? asked Minnetonka councilman Ed Mason. “How do you plan to attract customers when they have to go a half mile out of the way just to get there?”

 

The Minnetonka Herald (February 8, 1968) reported that the tavern sat atop a hill with access only by service roads, none of them leading directly to the tavern. It also sat on residential property and the non-conforming use permit had to be renewed annually and could be revoked if there were complaints. Boster had his sights set on a set-up license in about six months if he was successful.

 

The Skyway was abandoned in about 1968.

 

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Robb Henry encountered the old tavern in the sixties, and wrote this about what was then a tumbledown wreck:

The Skyway 12 Club was an abandoned roadside shack, baking in the hot summer sun, when I first laid eyes on it.  A forlorn face with a crooked sign and broken windows looking down the hill onto Highway 12.

There was a story behind that face.  I’d just have to get back on my bike, ride off and wait for it.

A few years later, after I had started working with Mojo Buford blues band, my Dad mentioned that he had seen Mojo plat at this club.  This was news to me.  One could hear some real live Chicago blues just over the tracks and up the road.  I had no idea.

Eventually I found out that guitarist Eddie Lovejoy appeared there too, Sundays in late 1965.  He was somewhat of a local legend in the 196s.  I’d often heard his name mentioned by older musicians, always with awe and admiration in regard to his way around a guitar.

Never got to hear him play, although Mojo knew him, and I heard that he had played with Paul Butterfield in Chicago.  A real live guitar legend riffing in the roadhouse at the end of Oakland Road.

I only have the sight of it, a memory long past the sounds of 1965, just an abandoned shack with a broken sign at the top of the highway.  Right across the tracks, up the hill and through the woods, a few minutes from home.