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Remembering Millie: Longtime Proprietress of the Knotty Pine Passes

Daughter tells how Mildred Butterfield connected an immigrant generation from the Depression era to a modern Tosa family.

As Katie Butterfield-Whitlock describes it, the Knotty Pine Tap was a basement with 60 layers of smoke on the gnarly pine wood walls, 60-cent tap beers, plenty of regulars, and a stash of candy and peanuts behind the bar for sharing at generous times – which were often.

At the center of everything at 7000 W. State St., from its founding in 1934 to its closure in 1999, a matriarchal line of three owners primarily ran the Knotty Pine, beginning with Katie’s grandmother Jenny Zorich, passed on to Katie’s mother Mildred Butterfield, and ending with Katie.

Mildred, better known as Millie, passed away Oct. 9 at age 86, just four days after she was hospitalized for aggressive tumors on her abdomen. As she had been her whole life, running the Knotty Pine and raising three children, Katie said Millie filled her last days with incredible energy.

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“She was still washing windows and climbing 17 steps every day,” Katie said of  Millie before she went to the hospital. “I’m kind of living in a fog because I still can’t believe how it happened.”

A Wauwatosa lifer

With the exception of three years in the Marine Corps, Millie spent her entire life living in Wauwatosa. Her mother and father moved to the area from Serbia, and her father Sam Zorich found work as a steam shovel operator in the quarry where Metcalfe's Sentry now stands.

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The Zorichs opened the Knotty Pine – first named the Dugout – in 1934, and Millie helped her parents run the bar as a kid.

“She would have to clean the spittoons and scrub the floors,” Katie said. “They grew up in the Depression and they knew how to work hard.”

Millie continued working hard, through her stationing at Camp Pendleton in California, where she was ranked a sergeant, and caring for a family while running a bar at a time when most woman didn’t take jobs outside the house.

“I’ll never be as great as her, as hard as I try to raise good children and work hard at my job,” Katie said. “We used to say, ‘How did mom work all day long, and at 6 we were all at table with hot dinner?' And it was not a bag of McDonald's; she cooked every day.”

In addition to passing down a strong work ethic, Katie said, Millie shared her family's special appreciation for tradition.

This family trait stood out most peculiarly when Millie’s father Sam insisted on keeping pigeons and a goat at their house on 68th Street – something less common in Wauwatosa than it would have been in Serbia.

“The goat would get loose and the police would call and say, ‘Sam, the goat’s running down State Street again,’” Katie said.

When the goat’s behavior was at its worst, Sam invited the neighbors over for a big dinner party. Jenny realized the goat was missing. Then she realized the goat was the main course.

“That’s the way he was; he was old country,” Katie said.

After that there were no more goats, but Millie and her family attached to many traditions that they kept alive at the Knotty Pine.

Christmas ham at the bar

As Katie puts it, the Knotty Pine was not a “get rich quick scheme.” Katie said Millie and Ken raised her and her siblings to look for more out of life than money – and this applied to the bar, too.

“They taught us to be really strong individuals, and to not look for the gold in everything,” Katie said. “Our gold was our family. That was the richness that we had.”

They charged basement prices for drinks in their basement bar, and often went out of their way to add an extra generous pinch of fun to a good time.

For decades, at least since Millie and her husband Ken took over the bar, the family would collect aluminum cans all year long and turn them in for money, which they used to throw their annual Christmas party with an open bar, a spread of food and music for all.

“We would have all those things you couldn’t have anymore,” Katie said. “We would bring two rounds of freshly ground raw beef, sometimes a third. We always prepared the food ourselves, and we always had ham.”

One of Katie’s most fondly remembered Christmases with Millie was when Millie was asked to donate the tree in her front yard to be decorated in the center of the village for community celebrations.

“She felt so incredibly honored that they chose her tree to be the Christmas tree,” Katie said, running her finger over the old photograph of her mother smiling with her tree (in the gallery above). “Now they just use the same tree every year. When she found out that they stopped letting people donate their trees, she couldn’t believe it. Those are the things that change, the little things that bring people such an incredible amount of happiness.”

For a family that so values tradition, it was hard to see the Knotty Pine go down in 1999 when it was bought by Outpost Natural Foods and demolished.

Katie was married and expecting a daughter, and they liked Outpost, so the timing was right.

“The day my daughter was born, the bar came down,” Katie said. “When I brought Samantha home [named after her grandfather Sam], I took her and climbed the rubble and I said, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s nothing there.’”

But, in true Knotty Pine spirit, they didn’t let the bar go without collecting a plethora of keepsakes.

They took pieces of the old knotty pine wood from the walls, put them in little bags, and handed them out to everyone who had come to the bar.

Today, in the Outpost, many of the signs are bordered by the pine wood from the old bar.

"We're very nostalgic," Katie said.

In lieu of flowers, the family is asking for donations to be sent to Froedtert Oncology or St. Sava Circle of Serbian Sisters.

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