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Curiosity: The Man above the Bar at the Bowl

You might sit at the Sister Bay Bowl’s bar dozens of times before you notice it. Tucked up high behind the upper cabinet on the north side of the bar, a single picture hangs. Just a man in a bomber jacket, hands on his hips, with a beautiful sunset of purples, oranges and pinks behind him. 

Is that a picture of the owner, or the owner’s father? After all, it’s the only photo up there, looking down every night as old-fashioneds fill the bar, bowlers take their score sheets to the counter to pay, and bartenders curse an order for another round of grasshoppers.

But it’s not the owner. It’s Bob Collins: a man who was never on the payroll, but who made a big contribution to the Bowl’s success.

A closer look at the Bob Collins photo hanging in the Sister Bay Bowl. Photo by Myles Dannhausen Jr.

Collins was the morning DJ for the Chicago radio superstation WGN-720 AM from 1986 until 2000. His show was the top-rated morning show in Chicago, and he happened to be a good friend of a Sister Bay restaurateur by the name of Al Johnson. Collins visited Sister Bay often, staying in Johnson’s boathouse. That inevitably led to on-air plugs for Al Johnson’s and the Sister Bay Bowl’s fish fry. 

“He would be doing his show and he’d say he was heading to Door County and my first first stop is going to be the Sister Bay Bowl for that great perch fry,” recalled Sharon Daubner, daughter of Earl and Rita Willems, founders of the Bowl. “I’d have people come in and say, ‘yeah we heard Bob Collins say he was coming to the Bowl tonight.’ And once he got there, we never had him pay a dime.”

“He loved Al Johnson’s, and he loved the Bowl,” recalled Sharon’s son Mike Daubner, who grew up working in the family business at the Bowl before opening his own restaurant — Boathouse on the Bay — down the street. “He became great friends with my mom and dad [Sharon and Dick Daubner]. Dad would go to WGN with cherry pie and talk about the Bowl, Al’s and the fish fry. It was a really popular show, and it helped.”

By the mid-1990s, the Bowl was regularly serving more than 700 fish-fry orders every Friday night, topping out at 775. Many of those were thanks to words from Bob Collins. 

An amateur pilot, Collins died Feb. 8, 2000, at the age of 57, when his plane collided with one guided by a student pilot on the approach to the runway at Waukegan Regional Airport outside Chicago. When Collins died, the Bowl’s owners honored his memory by putting his photo above the bar, where it still hangs today. 

And his endorsement still resonates with Chicagoans. A 2016 Tripadvisor review is titled, “Bob Collins would tell you, Sister Bay Bowl is the best.”

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