Floyd Saunders (Courtesy of the Beer Nuts)

It is rare that I resurrect my Chicago Sun-Times stories, but these are thoughts from the print version of Nocturnal Journal (pre-WGN radio show.) Floyd Saunders died Sunday morning March 10 at the Grove of Fox Valley nursing home in Aurora. He was 92. With the time change, birds chirping and the afternoon sun, it felt like the first day of spring.

Floyd was a man for all seasons. He deserves to be remembered.

Sept. 27, 1996—

There’s something behind a sunset.

And Floyd Saunders intends to find out what it is.

Saunders, 70, is the weekday bartender at the Wrigleyville Tap, the baseball/rock ‘n’ roll tavern at 3724 N. Clark, in the long shadows of Wrigley Field.
Saunders is a cherished figure on the North Clark Street strip. He counts the BoDeans, Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder and Smithereens bassist Mike Mesaros among his friends. In fact, he just sent Mesaros a congratulatory wedding card. Saunders’ gentle and shy nature is complemented by a gap-tooth smile that looks like a winning Scrabble line.

This weekend Saunders will help close out another humdrum Cubs season. Then he’ll begin planning a fall trip to his native Key West, Fla. Saunders hasn’t been to Key West since 1965, when he had to fly to Florida after his 84-year-old mother was beaten to death. She was walking home from midday grocery shopping in the Coconut Grove section of Miami.

“I want to see Key West before I die,” Saunders says during a shift break. “Sure, I like to fish, but all I’ll be doing on this trip is sightseeing. I’ll walk by the house I grew up in, I’ll walk by my grandmother’s house. Everyone talks about the (Mallory Dock) sunset. When you’re young, you don’t pay any attention to a sunset.

Image courtesy of Dan Long and Bobby Sussman.

“I might as well see it this time.”

The trip was cooked up by Dean Lencioni, manager-partner in Toon’s, 3857 N. Southport, and Bobby Sussman, a Toon’s regular. Saunders and his wife of 38 years, Marlene, live a couple of doors down from Toon’s. Saunders used to tend bar there in the late ’60s, when it was known as Doninger’s tavern.

Lencioni, 37, says, ” Floyd stops into Toon’s all the time after his shift. For a long time,,he’s been talking about how he wanted to see Key West one more time. We wanted to take him for his 70th birthday, which passed. But the conversation just kept coming up so we just decided to do it. I got us rooms at the Casa Marina resort; it’s right next to the nude beach or something. I didn’t even know that.”
Saunders can’t wait to see the Highway 1 boulevard that greets visitors as they arrive in America’s southernmost city. His grandfather George planted the tall coconut trees that line the boulevard. Saunders’ father, Jeff, was a Key West cigar maker and printer. He worked at the Key West Citizen newspaper, across the street from Sloppy Joe’s tavern.

During the Depression, Saunders’ mother, Bonnie, brought home boxes from the cigar factory and spent her days carefully lining them with pretty paper. “My father even worked for the WPA (Works Progress Administration),” he says. “One day he brings home two trucks full of coconuts from the beach and dumps them in the backyard. They were going to be thrown away anyway. For two months all we ate was coconut cake, coconut ice cream and coconut candy.”

When Floyd Saunders was a boy he wanted to become a photographer. Then he saw an advertisement in a Miami paper about the Ray School of Photography in Chicago. It was 50 years ago this fall that Saunders bought a one-way ticket on a Greyhound bus from Miami to Chicago. “I didn’t know nothin’,” he says. “I’m standing around looking at all these tall buildings. I didn’t know nothin’ about B-girls. I stopped in this bar on State Street. Then I found out what B-girls were. I had to wire home for more money.”
Saunders graduated from photography school, but he has kept the best pictures in his mind. Between 1950 and 1975 Saunders was a drill inspector at the Chicago Latrobe factory on West Ontario. “We made the moon drill,” Saunders says, holding his arms apart about a foot and a half to depict the size of the drill. “It’s the drill they drilled in the moon. I’ve still got a package of shavings from that.”
Saunders penetrated the tavern business by accident.

His wife was a waitress at the now-defunct Mindy’s Oakwood Lounge on Belmont near Lincoln. A bartender didn’t show up for a shift and Saunders was recruited. He had never tended bar in his life. Saunders later moved to Doninger’s to help with the overflow Sunday crowd when the Bears played at Wrigley Field. “About 1975 the factory moved to Augusta, Ga.,” Saunders says. “We all got laid off. That’s when I started tending bar steadily.”

Jimmy Jones, owner of the Wrigleyville Tap, met Saunders at Doninger’s. Jones asked Saunders to help cook at the Tap in 1988, and that quickly led into a regular bartending slot.

Saunders is easy to like. He’s the type of guy who wears a T-shirt from Burlington, Iowa – because his wife is from Burlington, Iowa.

“Everybody feels comfortable around Floyd,” Jones says. “From left-field bleacher bums to Eddie Vedder, but especially women. I don’t understand the attraction. Everybody wants to have their picture taken with him. He is the mayor of Wrigleyville, as far as I’m concerned.”

There’s a lot of little boy left in Saunders especially when he talks about his upcoming trip.

“I know we’re going now,” he says, eyes as big as turtle shells. “We already got the reservations. We already got the plane tickets. And I’m going to take it all in.” The autumn sun creeps down Clark. The Cubs are waiting for next year. But offer a warm toast to Floyd Saunders. He’s heading south to shake up some coconut trees.

Visitation for Floyd Saunders is 3-9 p.m. March 15 at the Cooney Funeral Home, 3918 W. Irving Park Rd., Chicago. Services are 11 a.m. March 16 at the Cooney Funeral Home.

The World War II Navy veteran is survived by his son Jefferson Saunders, daughter Sandra Heredia and stepson Robert Scanlon, 19 grandchildren and 21 great- grandchildren. Floyd was preceded in death by his children Elizabeth Gentry, Darlene Moffat, and Laura Obert.

“The Mayor of Wrigleyville” will take a final lap in his old neighborhood as the Saturday procession travels from Irving Park to Southport, Southport to Addison, Addison east to Clark (by Wrigley Field), turning north on Clark and Irving Park to the Irving Park Cemetery, 7777 W. Irving Park Rd. where he will be laid to rest next to his beloved wife Marlene, who passed away in 1998.

Floyd in Key West (Courtesy of Dan Long and Bobby Sussman)

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