a huge crowd. It was a zoo, and it didn’t had a short, matter what day of the week it was.” stubby cigar Times at the Chapter House could get hanging out of wild. One account from the Daily Sun in his mouth. My December 1966 recounts a march across father went up campus by “approximately 75 Cornell men, to this kid and most of them freshmen,” who left Jim’s said ‘If you want Chapter House full of holiday spirits to the bartender’s carol at the girls’ dorms. attention, rap “The management of Jim’s appeared a quarter on relieved,” the article continued, “when the bar and say someone led the singing group out. As “Chauncey! their gala mood developed, they had begun Chauncey!”’ to break glasses and snatch slices of pizza Moose lifted from passing waiters.” up this kid A remembrance of 18th-birthday by the shirt, festivities by Dan Weinberg in the Cornell looked over his alumni magazine in 1986 describes round shoulder and after round of “sloe gin fizzes, rum and saw my father Coke, and Singapore slings,” despite the laughing, and new drinker having only a very foggy clue knew he’d been of what these concoctions contained. had.” Another tradition in the wintertime Eventually, was making a special hot toddy recipe that Ocello thinks included “brown sugar and butter and her father whatnot,” Ocello said. “They’d make a big wanted production of how secret it was and take something a cardboard pizza boxes and tape up the little slowerwindows to the kitchen.” paced than the From the ceilings hung personal mugs Chapter that old regulars returning for a visit would House. The ask to be taken down to fill once again, family sold and the musical entertainment Ocello out in 1968 remembered was an a cappella group called and moved the “Cayuga Waiters,” who sang in the to West middle room. Virginia, Ocello said her father was one of the where first barkeeps in New York to apply for Frank took a license to serve alcohol without a full a position menu. During the slow summers, Willis directing preferred to put out pickled eggs and a perfunctory hot dog machine and close the kitchen. Ocello remembered her father as fun loving, given to practical jokes and barroom antics, with her mother “a little more on the serious side” and taking care of the bookwork. Frank was a big Cornell hockey supporter, often hiring the players and hanging backlit posters of them in the center room. Ocello remembers that her father had a “little crew” that were often up for a joke. “He was catering sandwiches for a while, selling them to the houses,” Ocello said, “and one of his drivers ran into a little competition. He had his fraternity brothers come out and park the other driver in at the sorority house. They did a lot of things like that. Sometimes when things got too quiet at the Chapter House, my dad would look around and see who was missing. He’d say to the bartender, ‘Maybe we should hold a little money out for bail? What do you think?’” On another occasion, Frank To p t o B o t t o m : C h a p t e r H o u s e had some fun with a young, timid m e n u , J o h n a n d J e n n i f e r C l e m e n t, freshman, trying to make his way to the J o h n Hoey outside the Pub, K aren bar for a drink. O c e l l o , a n d J o h n H o e y (A l l “We had a very intimidating P r ov i d e d , e xc e p t O c e l l o b y J o s h bartender, Moose O’Neal. I don’t think I B r o k aw) . ever knew his real first name. He always
Amygdala and Yeast John Van Boven bought the Chapter House in 1968, some months after his first restaurant, the Alt Heidelberg, burned down. The German immigrant had cooked quality German fare at his restaurant and before that at the Rathskeller, in the hotel school, but still was advertising $1 spaghetti nights in the early ‘70s. When John died unexpectedly in 1975, his son Harold was working on his dissertation in economics at SUNY-Binghamton. He came back to Ithaca to run the Chapter House along with some other rental properties the family owned. “I put the business theory (à la Peter Drucker) and economic theory that I had learned in the classroom to practical use,” Van Boven said via email. “Revenues soared way beyond anything my father ever took in. As an ‘intellectual type’ I was shocked. I was thinking, do the students ever study? My written business plan and operations focused on stimulating the students’ amygdala (primeval brain) to give them what they wanted . . . and it was not food, nor drink. “We served “finger food,” enough beer to fill Cayuga Lake (keg and bottle), hard liquor, and wine,” Van Boven continued. “According to my distributors, some years I was the biggest beer account in Tompkins County.” The Phi Psi 500 foot race began in 1975 and included the Chapter House as one of its chug-a-beer pit stops. Other antics included Van Boven getting kidnapped for a Delta Upsilon scavenger hunt during rush week, a Guinness and Playboy “dart night” promotion, and one lucky bartender dating Dallas star Audrey Landers for a time. The conversation was edifying, too, Van Boven said. “After they had a drink or two (or three) I learned so much about non-Euclidean geometry, linguistics, entomology, entropy, etc. Some students would join us. Our discussions were out of this world.” Van Boven closed the Chapter House in fall 1983 after the drinking age was increased, and sold the building to Kimball Realty in April 1985. Charles Torrance and two fellow hotel school students tried to make a go of it as a non-alcoholic juice bar for a year, but the location was empty when James Clement started looking for somewhere to brew beer in 1987. Clement, an attorney in New York City, had taken a strong interest in the science of aging—he now runs a stem cell laboratory in California—and his reading led him to molecular biology, which led to playing with yeast, and then to wine and home-brewing. It took nine months to rehabilitate the Chapter House and turn it into a brewpub,
food services for Marshall University. “After a long time of having your own place there are headaches that add up,” Ocello said. “The laws were changing … at one time when Rockefeller was governor they were talking about coding bar glasses with how many ounces they hold.”
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