Chris Schuba is still hooked up. When he was hanging on the Quad in the early ’70s, Schuba was, under the auspices of the University Club (U-Club), one of the drivers of the campus music scene, bringing, as Chris put it in the ’74 Carillon, “the most complete program of exciting music and comedy of any school our size…” We’re talking, that year: Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, the Kinks, Gordon Lightfoot, Mott the
Hoople – all still in the racks; then, big names!



Today, Schuba is overseeing the scene at, where else, Schubas – they are not possessive – which one reviewer termed a “classic neighborhood corner
bar.” It’s the kind of joint where Dave Matthews and Sarah McLaughlan show up to do a couple of sets for the 100 or so folks who find their way into what used to be the Schlitz beer hall behind the cool bar room.

Sarah and Dave have not happened for a good while, but they did, and their emerging kin do now. “It’s the first place that a lot of national recording artists
will play when they go out on tour for the first or second time,” said Schuba the impresario. “They love playing here and they’re treated well. Some people
think we have the best acoustics in the city
and we have a great piano.”

Schubas, “a quintessential Chicago locale,” is a North Side Lakeview neighborhood scene, and it carries a bucket-load of charm and history. The “neo-Gothic brick and masonry treasure,” bought in ’88 and beautifully restored by Chris and his co-owning brother Mike, was built in 1900 as a Schlitz Brewery “tied-house,” a companyowned bar serving only the corporate product. It was where brewery wagons drawn by teams of Percherons delivered barrels of beer in the early morning, so that small boys could fetch a covered galvanized tin pail – called a “growler” (escaping CO2 created a rumbling growl) – full of the brew for their dads.

Fair to say that Schuba oversees the bar/music club/adjacent Harmony Grill restaurant, but Mike
is in closer touch. Chris has a demanding day job at which he has been very successful. The Christopher Schuba Co. is an independent ad sales rep firm that enjoys exclusive Midwest region contracts – “we have to please the magazines and the advertisers” – with magazines like Rolling Stone, Cosmopolitan, ESPN, Spin, Vibe. When he came out of Carroll in ’74, Chris started selling ads for The Sun Times, The Daily News, but life got better when he jumped to mags and then opened his own shop in ’90.

“We book a nice group of magazines,” says Schuba. “Advertising is extremely challenging right now because of all the new media and all the places for advertisers to spend their dough. Magazines are still the best way to talk to the consumer; it’s the most personal medium. We talk about the product; no radio guy talks about the product. I think I’m a good salesman and I have a passion for product. I was a newspaper reader when I was five. I started out reading The Daily News – I delivered them.”

Schuba is the son of a Polish salesman and an Irish mom. Born on the South Side, he’s a die-hard Sox fan, so he’s happy this year. He’s a hard-core Chicago guy and there was never any doubt he would come home. Nonetheless, he loved Carroll, and
the fact that he met Catharine Swanson Schuba ’75 in University Heights was certainly not the least reason for his undying affection.

Schuba says: “John Carroll was a great place. It was a great community. I made a lot of lifelong friends there and it wasn’t just people in my class. When I was a freshman, I knew seniors… I was a political
science major and Dr. John Czerapowicz was spectacular. It was Vietnam…he gave me curiosity and taught me how to parse what was happening, what had happened…Jim Magner…”

The only negativity Schuba expressed about his university was this dollop of residual attitude about the late and, in many quarters, lamented I-Chis: “The
I-Chis are a legend in their own mind. You’re not going to get me to swoon about the I-Chis and their ostensible lore. I was there on the ground.”

He’s there on the ground now in Lakeview and also in nearby Lincoln Park, where he, Catharine and their son, Tom, 16, recently moved from suburban
Evanston. It’s clearly a good place to be.

jp