Sam Sianis, ‘cheezborger’-flipping owner of Chicago’s Billy Goat Tavern, has died at 91
His dive bar became famous thanks to Mike Royko’s columns, a baseball curse, and a “Saturday Night Live” skit.
Chicago is a sprawling metropolis. But for those looking to sum up the city in a single place, an afternoon with Sam Sianis at the Billy Goat Tavern, a watering hole as rich in local character as a Saul Bellow novel, offered a master class.
Like any pilgrimage site, the Billy Goat — or the Goat, to regulars — is hard to reach, down two flights of stairs to a subterranean street below North Michigan Avenue. It was, however, conveniently across from the headquarters of the Chicago Tribune and a few blocks from several other dailies, making it popular with reporters, editors, and press operators.
A dark, greasy-walled saloon, the Billy Goat is a true Chicago dive, open up to 20 hours a day to serve the newspapers’ shift workers. And for more than 50 years, regardless of the hour, visitors were likely to find Mr. Sianis tending bar or manning the small kitchen in back.
A Greek immigrant who arrived in Chicago in 1960, he helped his uncle, William Sianis, open the Billy Goat Tavern (sometimes called the Billy Goat Inn) at its present location in 1964. Six years later, when Billy died, Sam took over and ran it until his semiretirement during the pandemic.
Mr. Sianis died at a hospital in Chicago on May 15. He was 91.
His son Billy, who now runs the Billy Goat with another son, Paul, confirmed the death.
Millions of Americans knew of Mr. Sianis and his bar without ever crossing Chicago city limits, thanks to one of its most famous regulars, syndicated columnist Mike Royko.
Over the course of some 7,500 columns, Royko, who wrote for the Chicago Daily News and the Sun-Times before moving to the Tribune, painted a rich portrait of the Windy City and its denizens. Many of them he ran across in the presence of Mr. Sianis.
They came to the Billy Goat because Mr. Sianis made it an equal-opportunity establishment: Prolific drinkers, wayward pols, off-duty cabbies, and the occasional celebrity all received the same friendly beer and a shot, often from Mr. Sianis himself.
“Sam was the perfect host,” Don Rose, a journalist, said in an interview.
In Royko’s columns, the Billy Goat became a font of tales, true and tall. Mr. Sianis once kicked out the same customer six times in one night for fighting while drunk. And Mr. Sianis swore he witnessed another man down 150 drinks in a sitting.
Royko took down those stories, real or no — in the process making Mr. Sianis and the Billy Goat famous.
“When Royko writes a column here, it goes all over the world,” Mr. Sianis told the Rockford Register Star of Illinois in 1981. “A few weeks ago, a girl from Australia was in who said she saw a Royko column about Billy Goat’s and had to stop by.”
When presidential candidates found themselves in Chicago with an itch to rub shoulders with the common man, they invariably headed to see Mr. Sianis. John Anderson, George H.W. Bush, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama all sidled up to the Billy Goat bar for a burger and a chat with the proprietor.
Among the early regulars was a group from the Second City comic troupe, including Don Novello, John Belushi, and Bill Murray. They downed beer and coffee and marveled at Mr. Sianis’ kind but firm handling of first-timers who expected his tiny grill to turn out anything other than cheeseburgers.
All three ended up on Saturday Night Live, and in 1978 they debuted “The Olympia Restaurant,” a recurring sketch in which a Greek immigrant with limited English (played by Belushi) lords it over an oddball kitchen staff and a retinue of bewildered diners. Novello wrote the skit, and Murray played one of the cooks.
As the orders pile up, the chatter is overtaken by the cooks and servers and Belushi, all shouting in comical Greek accents, “Cheezborger cheezborger cheezborger cheeps cheeps Pepsi!”
The phrase “cheezborger cheezborger” entered the pop-culture lexicon and made the Billy Goat and Mr. Sianis a tourist attraction. During the summer of 1978, at the inaugural ChicagoFest festival on Navy Pier, Mr. Sianis set up a booth where he and Belushi recreated his quirky grill for thousands of fans.
The Billy Goat had yet another claim to Chicago fame. Mr. Sianis’ uncle Billy bought the bar — which was originally across from Chicago Stadium (now United Center) and called the Lincoln Tavern — in 1934. After a goat wandered in the door, he renamed the bar the Billy Goat and adopted the animal as a pet.
The goat, called Murphy, became something of a celebrity himself. In 1945, the elder Sianis brought him to Game 4 of the World Series, between the Cubs and the Detroit Tigers, at Wrigley Field.
It began to rain. Murphy began to stink. The Cubs’ owner, Philip K. Wrigley, kicked them out.
As he was leaving, Billy Sianis put a curse on the team, vowing that it would never win a championship. When the Cubs lost the Series that year, he sent a note to Wrigley: “Now who stinks!”
Over the next 32 years, the Cubs had just seven winning seasons.
Sam Sianis swore to maintain the curse after he, too, was rejected when he tried to attend a game with his own goat in 1973.
In 1984, when the Cubs were contesting the National League championship, the team relented and allowed Mr. Sianis to bring a goat onto the field.
But the Cubs did not win a World Series until 2016.
Watching the tiebreaking seventh game that year from the tavern, Mr. Sianis banished the curse by ringing the bell that had been worn by Murphy in 1945. The current goat stood beside him, looking as nervous as the rest of the crowd. Then it urinated on the floor. Mr. Sianis led it away.
“Don’t touch the goat,” one fan said, according to The Financial Times. “It’s bad luck.”
Sotirios Athanasios Sianis was born Dec. 12, 1934, in the Peloponnese village of Palaiopyrgos. After his mother, Theofina Kastounis, died in childbirth, his father, Athanasiosis Sianis, bottle-fed his son goat milk.
Sotirios completed a year of high school before joining his father in managing the family’s crops and herds.
He immigrated to the United States in 1955, settling first in San Francisco, where he worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad, and then moving to Chicago to work for his uncle. He went by Sam, but never lost his strong Greek accent.
Not long after Billy Sianis died and Sam took over the bar, female suitors began appearing at the Billy Goat, Royko wrote in one of his columns, “making goo-goo eyes” at the new unmarried owner.
Worried that his friend would end up in a bad match, Royko urged him to visit Greece, where he might find a more suitable spouse. Mr. Sianis returned from his home country in 1973 with a new bride, Irene (Dariotis) Sianis, in tow.
Along with their sons Billy and Paul, she survives him, as do two other sons, Ted and Tom; two daughters, Patty Sianis and Jenny Constantinou; and 12 grandchildren.
Mr. Sianis never officially retired, though his sons took over the bar’s day-to-day management around 2016. But even in the last few years, he would come in a few times a week to flip burgers, pour beers, and sign autographs.
“When I’m at the Billy Goat,” he told the Tribune in 2020, “I feel better!”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.