Susan Smith: Last Bash at Union South

Originally published Nov. 20, 2008

By Susan Lampert Smith

Saturday's game against Cal Poly will mark the very last Badger Bash at Union South.

For more than 30 years, the Wisconsin Marching Band has charged up the fans during a pregame rally amid the bratwurst smoke of Wisconsin's other union.

The anonymous pile of gray concrete will come a tumbling down early next year, to make room for a new and improved student union serving the south end of campus. Not many will mourn its passing, but I will. Sure, it could never compete with the older Memorial Union, which has the Terrace, Lake Mendota, classic architecture, a Rathskellar and a venerable theater.

Union South has a bowling alley. And, did I mention, concrete?

Still, it holds a warmish spot in my heart, because I worked there as a student in the late 1970s, and met my husband and several of my lifelong friends while serving beer to the drunken Badger faithful.

Back then, we served so much beer on game days that we had a line of half-barrels, taps continually open, and just passed cups hand-to-hand beneath the taps until they were full. I remember standing, at times, in a beer lake that lapped at my ankles. Back then, both Unions held a February German Mardi Gras called Fasching. It mostly involved beer. A bus ran between the two Unions with a barrel on board, so no one would ever be far from beer. At Union South, Fasching included tossing cups of beer into the open atrium. Try that now, and you'd probably be arrested.

Union South was also the site of the worst grade I ever earned at the UW: A "C" in bowling. I still can't bowl worth a damn. Still, there were plenty of student memories made at Union South.
So stop by Saturday, and raise a last toast to the "other" Union.