Through His Backyard Bar, ND Grad Aims to Foster Authentic Catholic Friendship Bob and Margy Kloska are empty nesters now, though you wouldn’t know it on this particular Friday night. Even though the couple’s five kids are either in college or graduated, dozens of students from South Bend’s tri-campus – the University of Notre Dame, Saint Mary’s College, and Holy Cross College – have descended upon the Kloskas’ home on St. Peter Street. But apart from the fear of bothering the neighbors with the joy that soars out its doors, through its windows, and into the cold November night, this is no ordinary college house party. Far from it. Scott WardenBob Kloska stands behind the bar as he and the crowd sing “Y.M.C.A.” at St. Peter’s Pub in South Bend on Friday, November 15. The pub is located in the backyard of the Kloska family home near the campus of the University of Notre Dame. You’d never know from driving through the old neighborhood, but behind the Kloskas’ two-story brick house lies a hidden gem of South Bend Catholicism. From the outside, the small exterior building looks like an ordinary shed or detached garage, but from the inside, it’s unlike any place most have ever seen. The lighting is dim and inviting, and a gas fireplace flickers warmth around the small 18-by-20-foot room. The walls are covered with Notre Dame football memorabilia; pictures of Mary, Jesus, and the saints; drawings; and other knickknacks. A shelf full of classic literature, Catholic books, compilations of poetry, and other well-worn reading material lines its northern wall. The ceiling is covered in dark wood that rises toward the center. A couple of couches make the space even cozier. The back of the building, however, seems more familiar than the rest, as a well-stocked bar invitingly awaits its guests. And standing behind it, ready for duty, is the proprietor of the place, 57-year-old Bob Kloska – Bobby to his family and friends, which, in this community, seems to be everyone. Behind him, a handmade sign reads: St. Peter’s Pub, Saints and Sinners Welcome! Click here for more photos. For Kloska, it’s impossible to tell the story of St. Peter’s Pub without first sharing the history of the property on which it sits. In 1842, the bishop of the statewide Diocese of Vincennes, Bishop Célestine de la Hailandière, donated more than 500 acres to a young French priest, Father Edward Sorin, and several of his Holy Cross brothers. A portion of the land was used as the site of a new Catholic college – the University of Notre Dame. The rest was farmland, including the area south of the university where the Kloska family home now sits. The home was built by the Cressy family, who constructed it slowly – a “do-it-yourself project,” Kloska learned, that the family worked on in their spare time, nights and weekends, he said, between 1914 and 1917. Behind the main home, they built a carriage house, which was used to store a horse-drawn carriage and other necessary equipment. A horseshoe from the Cressys’ original carriage house hangs above the bar at St. Peter’s Pub. In 1930, the Cressys sold the home to Joseph and Margaret Ruetz (pronounced “Ritz”) from Racine, Wisconsin – “and that’s where the history really started to take off,” Kloska said. The Ruetzes raised seven children in the brick home on St. Peter Street – five boys, all of whom graduated from Notre Dame, and two girls who graduated from Holy Cross. The middle son was Father Ed Ruetz, who served the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend for 58 years before passing away in 2021 at age 95. The Ruetzes converted the carriage house into an office in the early 1930s – 1931, to be exact. Kloska is sure of the date because as his family was renovating the place, they found pages and pages of crumpled up editions of the South Bend Tribune inside the walls. Kloska has a thick file where he keeps photos and other historical items about the house, including a beat-up “Blondie” comic strip. “I’ve actually read about President Hoover’s plan to jumpstart the economy, which famously failed, from the insulation of the place,” Kloska said with a proud smile. Being the huge Notre Dame football fan that he is, Kloska, who graduated from the university in 1990, is most eager to tell the story of the Ruetzes’ oldest son, Joe, who, as a boy, delivered those same South Bend Tribunes to Knute Rockne. The legendary Irish coach lived down on St. Vincent Street, a couple blocks to the east of the Ruetzes. After high school, Joe, who nearly a century ago slept in the same bedroom as Kloska’s son, became a football star at Notre Dame, playing guard and quarterback. And while the story of Joe Ruetz might seem irrelevant, Kloska shares it knowing that it is as foundational to St. Peter’s Pub as the studs holding up the place. The story goes like this: After graduating from Notre Dame in 1938, Ruetz moved to Chicago to attend medical school, but his heart remained on the football field. Instead of pursuing medicine, he took a job as an assistant coach at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California. The “Galloping Gaels” were a surprising football powerhouse in the 1920s and ’30s. After the 1941 season, Ruetz was traveling by train from California to visit his family in South Bend. A seasoned adventurer, Ruetz had planned for a five-day hike in rugged southern Utah before continuing home, but an unexpected blizzard swept through the area, forcing Ruetz to survive for more than a month alone in the wilderness. He suffered from frostbite and dehydration. Kloska picks up the story: “I read somewhere that, as he was trudging around, he was losing all hope, and he kept thinking in his head, ‘All you have to do is lay down and you’ll die peacefully.’ But he had this other voice in his head saying, ‘Joseph Ruetz, you are a Notre Dame football player. You do not lay down and die.’ And he kept going.” In early January of 1942, Ruetz was rescued by a Ute Indian service truck that was carrying a doctor – the first people he had seen in more than a month. While he was in the hospital in Blanding, Utah, he learned that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. Once recovered, Kloska said, “He got on the train … he went into our kitchen, met with his mom and dad, and said, ‘I’m alive for a reason, I’m quitting my job.  … I’m going to fight Hitler. And he did.” Ruetz joined the Navy, spurning an opportunity to be commissioned as an officer. Instead, he trained as a fighter pilot and played for the Navy’s famed Saint Mary’s Pre-Flight football team, where he was named an All-American by legendary sportswriter Grantland Rice (known to Notre Dame fans for writing, famously, “Outlined against a blue, gray October sky the Four Horsemen rode again …”). Back on St. Peter Street in South Bend, Ruetz’s family held vigil in the backyard while he was off fighting World War II. They erected a flagpole, and with pieces of fieldstone found throughout the yard, the children built a small hill next to the detached office and placed upon it a statue of Our Lady. Every day, one of the Ruetz children played “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the bugle, and then they would pray the Rosary for Joe’s safe return. “Well, this was a super Catholic neighborhood,” Kloska said as he continued the story, “and three other families, at least … joined them, and they would pray neighborhood Rosaries back here for the safe return of all these neighborhood kids.” More than 400,000 U.S. servicemen were killed during World War II, but “every kid from the neighborhood, whose families would come to pray these neighborhood Rosaries, came back safely,” Kloska said. (Here’s an aside: After the war, Joe Ruetz became the head football coach at Saint Mary’s College and, later, at Stanford University, where, as athletic director, he went on to become one of the nation’s leading proponents of women’s college sports.) While the Ruetzes’ flagpole rusted out and was taken down years ago by the Kloskas – “it was a hazard,” he said – the family’s statue of Mary still sits on the fieldstone hill they built more than 80 years ago. This story is one of the many reasons why the faith remains deeply embedded in the ground on which St. Peter’s Pub sits, and why Kloska feels a duty to preserve it and, more importantly, to foster it. Two owners and more than 20 years after the Ruetzes sold the property in 1980, the house and the unattached office were in such disrepair that one of the conditions for the Kloskas to purchase it was that the Volkswagen Beetle that was “embedded in the backyard,” Kloska said, would need to be removed. “That’s how bad it was,” he told Today’s Catholic. After buying the home in 2003, it took three months’ worth of renovations before the Kloskas could even move in. Students and other guests mingle outside of St. Peter’s Pub in South Bend on Friday, November 15. The wreck of a building in the backyard, however, would have to take a backseat for several years, as a much bigger crisis was building. Just before they bought the house, Kloska was diagnosed with cancer in June of 2003 – stage 2B Hodgkin’s lymphoma, “which was sort of bad,” he added. “I had a big tumor about the size of my fist next to my heart,” he said. “And that’s what’s ultimately going to do me in, because the radiation I received 20 years ago is disintegrating my heart right now. There’s nothing they can do. I need a bypass, but they can’t cut into it. It’s like a rubber band that is in your desk drawer too long, and at some point, it’s just going to ….” He trails off before continuing, “So we’re just milking as much out of life as we can.” After being in remission, the cancer came back, twice – in 2005 and 2007. The sickness and the ensuing medical bills drained Kloska and the family’s finances. Before taking his current job, he taught philosophy and worked in campus ministry at Holy Cross College, and before that, he was a high school teacher. “I wasn’t even making a decent living until I came to Notre Dame Credit Union 10 years ago,” he said of his current job, where he serves as chief partnership officer. With an exceptional sense of gratitude, he tells two stories from the height of his illnesses – stories that, upon their hearing, would indicate what the community means to Kloska and his family but, in reality, illustrate the impact Kloska has had on those around him. The first story harkens back to 2007, just before he was scheduled to undergo his second stem-cell transplant in Chicago, where he would spend more than a month recovering if his surgery went well. Having gone through a similar experience during his first stem-cell transplant in 2005, Kloska knew that his wife needed reliable transportation. Every day, Margy would drop the kids off at school and make the hour and a half drive to the hospital in Chicago. The daily visits weren’t negotiable. The situation was dire. Doctors gave Kloska a 50-percent chance of survival, and “she didn’t want to be absent the day that I passed,” he said. “People were coming up to my bed, visiting me, saying things to me like you would say to somebody you might never see again.” So, before his second surgery, Kloska took his family’s one good car to Ray Snyder at Portage Sunoco on the west side of South Bend. He trusted Snyder, who he said was “the saint of the west side.” Snyder, Kloska said, “devoted his life to helping poor people have workable cars.” At Ray’s garage, “you never knew when the car was going to be ready, and he never answered the phone, but you always knew he wasn’t going to cheat you, and he would do it for the fairest price possible. So, guys in my situation, we were forced to go to guys like Ray Snyder.” Snyder knew the situation. Kloska’s kids played at Chet Waggoner Little League, where Snyder was a South Bend institution. Kloska told Synder that Margy needed a reliable car to travel to and from Chicago – the air conditioning fixed, a working radio, and “to make sure it’s seaworthy and safe for her to go back and forth” Kloska said. Three days later, Snyder tells Kloska to come to the shop – and to bring Margy. It was bad news. “I don’t want your wife driving this,” Kloska remembers Snyder saying. “And I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Well she’s gonna have to, because I’m going in next week.’” But Snyder continued, telling Kloska and Margy that he had gone to a used car dealership and bought them a van out of his own pocket. “My mechanic bought us a van,” Kloska said in a tone that showed the gesture is still hard for him to process even 15 years later.  “Margy drove that, [and it got us] through everything, and that’s just one of a dozen stories I could tell you.” He picked one more to share. Following one of his surgeries, Marian High School hosted a fundraiser for the family, as the medical bills were piling up. The Kloskas were no strangers to Marian, as each of their five kids attended school there, and it’s where Margy now works as the director of admissions. “I wasn’t supposed to be around people,” Kloska said, “but my doctor said I could have a five-minute appearance on stage, but I couldn’t be around anybody, and I’m bald and decrepit and can barely walk.” Kloska continued: “And people came – family, friends, toll road attendants that I became friends with. Toll road attendants! The window person at the dry cleaner, my barber. It was like a George Bailey moment in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ and they raised $85,000 for us, and when we paid all the bills and everything, we broke even. It was just enough.” “For the rest of my life, until I die, I could never pay back what people gave to us, and the beauty of what they did for me and my family when we had cancer.” Kloska has been cancer free since 2007, though there has been a slew of persistent complications. This past October, he underwent his 23rd surgery on his vocal cords. He had a heart attack in 2021. And he says he finds himself in the hospital a couple of times a year with various maladies – “pneumonia, sepsis, or whatever,” he said. But beginning in 2008 or so, he felt well enough to begin dealing with the 18-by-20-foot eyesore in the backyard. “My dad said to knock it down. I don’t blame him. It wasn’t bad advice,” Kloska said. But he didn’t want to knock it down. And so, he began cleaning it up. “I just thought it could be a little cottage.” Inside, the small building had a flat ceiling that was falling apart. “It was gross,” Kloska said. And so, one day, he went out to the shed, grabbed an axe, and began swinging. “I took the whole thing down.” His demolition revealed an old, beautiful wooden ceiling, but while it looked great, it didn’t have any insulation and, therefore, wasn’t at all functional for the family’s needs. Kloska had a guy come out and replicate the old ceiling, and bit by bit, they built it into a usable space. First, they brought in a TV, then a couch. They’d hang out there, watch ballgames together. About five years ago, he said, they were using it a lot. Then Kloska had the idea of putting a bar in. “And that’s when it all transformed.” Soon after, their neighbor, Carter Snead, the former director of Notre Dame’s de Nicola Center for Culture and Ethics, gave them a piano, which Kloska put behind the bar and is now the pounding heartbeat of St. Peter’s Pub. Much of the decor of the pub has been salvaged – the chandeliers and the wall sconces were rescued from a neighbor’s house that was being demolished. A good deal of the Notre Dame memorabilia and Catholic imagery hanging on the walls was repurposed from the Kloskas’ own collection to give the pub the ambiance it has today. “But it really is a combination of our family, Jesus and Mary, and Notre Dame football, which are my three loves in life,” Kloska said. “And that’s what we are. And I don’t care if people come in and there’s too much Jesus on the wall. I really don’t care.” For the past several years, St. Peter’s Pub has welcomed visitors of all ages, races, and creeds for conversation, merriment, and prayer. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kloska and his family livestreamed a nightly Rosary. Hundreds of people joined them, virtually. The pub’s biggest nights now take place on the Friday evenings before Notre Dame home football games. On Friday, November 15, ahead of the Irish’s 35-14 win against Virginia, Irish music played quietly on a wireless speaker as people trickled after the sun went down – co-workers, friends, the Kloskas’ parish priest. When a new guest enters the door of the pub, Kloska – or whoever might be positioned accordingly at the time – loudly rings a large iron dinner bell mounted above the bar. He clarifies this for the first-time visitors. “OK, so this is what I’ve got to train everybody on,” he said in his raspy-but-effective voice. “When the bell rings, you have to stop what you’re doing, you turn toward the door, and you just yell, ‘Hey, welcome!’ … Everybody who walks in has to feel like we want them here.” While all the drinks are free at St. Peter’s Pub, no one who came early came empty-handed. One guest brought a couple of packs of craft beer, the priest came with two full bags of choice pipe tobacco, and another brought a shockingly good bottle of scotch, which caused Kloska to hesitate. “This is too many years aged to just pull it out tonight,” he said, to which the guest retorted, “No, tonight’s a perfect night!” Kloska keeps the nonalcoholic beverages outside but keeps the beer and other libations near or behind the bar. Guests can’t help themselves; they must be served. This is done with a purpose behind it, as the nights at St. Peter’s Pub aren’t frat parties; they’re meant to be a place of social (and, therefore, responsible) drinking. And while all are welcome, Kloska has posted on the pub’s social media sites that St. Peter’s is primarily meant to be a place where family, friends, and invited guests can gather to bend an elbow for the sake of little-C communion. As is custom, business picked up around 8 p.m. The bell began ringing consistently as a younger crowd of students moved in. By 9 p.m., the small pub was packed shoulder to shoulder, with guests spilling outside, drinking, and chatting by the fire. At 9:30, members of the Notre Dame Glee Club made a surprise appearance, turning the small club into an intimate concert hall as they sang Irish classics and closed the night with Notre Dame’s Alma Mater – an ode to Our Lady – and the famous “Victory March.” Bookending the glee club’s performance, two young men and a young woman took turns on the piano and guitar banging out classic sing-alongs such as “Piano Man,” “Hey Jude,” and others. Kloska said he puts a stop to the party at 11:30 p.m. or so to keep peace with the neighbors. On the last home Friday night of the football season at St. Peter’s Pub, people laughed and cried, they sang their hearts out, and they prayed. And all the while, Kloska stood behind the bar and joined in, smiling like he’d won the lottery. “St. Peter’s Pub is here to love people, to give back,” Kloska said. “I want it to be the happiest, most loving, welcoming place. And there’s a spiritual mission. … This place is blessed, and it’s consecrated to Our Lady. … I’m astonished at the magic that happens here, but I’m not, because it’s not me. I pray all the time, ‘Please, I want this to just be a little portal to heaven.’ When people come here, I want them to feel different. I want them to feel loved. I want them to experience something that’s lacking in the world. And to a large extent, a lot of people do. And it’s astonishing to me.” The night ended a little early. The neighbors texted – it was a little louder than normal. “Maybe it was because the door was open so much,” Kloska thought after the crowd and the noise had dispersed. “But I get it. They have young kids. Still, what a great night.” He reflected some more: “It’s just kids being kids, and then there are some old people mingled in, and we’re all just enjoying each other and the music and the moment. There’s something, I think, profoundly good about doing this. And I’m astonished at how all this has happened, but it has, and it’s clearly the work of the Holy Spirit. I just hope the Holy Spirit can keep my neighbors at bay so we can continue doing it.” Scott Warden is editor-in-chief of Today’s Catholic. The post St. Peter’s Pub: A Hidden Gem in South Bend appeared first on Today's Catholic.