Editor’s Note: We received lots of emails from the BU community after we published a story, online and in print, on the closing of the Dugout last winter. Thank you for sharing your memories!

The Dugout wasn’t just a place to grab a drink—it was a special third space. It was where we went after long days of classes, where friendships grew over shared pitchers of beer and deep conversations in cramped wooden booths. You didn’t need an occasion to go to the Dugout; you just went and it felt safe and comfy.

Some of my favorite memories are the simplest ones—hanging out with friends and playing late 1990s and early 2000s pop hits on the jukebox. We made our own dance floor, and it was so much fun. I remember that our senior year, my friends and I purposely scheduled no Friday classes so that we could all meet on Thursday nights and hang out at the Dugout or Le Dugout (said with a bad French accent) until closing time.

I haven’t been to the Dugout since we had an informal class reunion there about 10 years ago, but it will always hold a special place in my heart of a time when the world was simpler and the possibilities of who I could become and what I could achieve felt limitless. I’m grateful I got to experience it during my time at BU, and I know I’m not alone in feeling that way.

Erica Stocks (COM’01, Wheelock’12)

The Dugout, during my undergrad years, was a joyous place—dark, dingy, stinky. Abrupt hard-working owners. It was a sweet spot to tell stories, pretend to be comics, just be wholesome happy college kids enjoying a short precious time in life. I remember my “boyfriend” coming out of the Dugout after his final, final exam; he saw me crossing the trolley tracks so I could get to a class at SMG [now Questrom School of Business]. He grabbed me, kissed me wildly while holding up the trolley. I admired the trolley driver for not running us over and bowed to the audience applause.

Long live the Dugout. If I ever get another cat, her name will be Dugout.

Mary (Leary) Lindstrom-Swenson (Questrom’67)

Many of my anthropology seminars had informal post-class discussions (with the professor) at the Dugout. I graduated in 1975. Grad school at Penn had nothing to match it.

Lou Carreras (CAS’75)

Thank you, Bostonia, for the wonderful, albeit bittersweet, walk down memory lane. Given its proximity to the College of Communication and my dorm (Myles Standish Hall), it was a place my classmates/dormmates and I frequently attended. (Some may suggest perhaps too frequently? LOL)

While I am among the legions of alumni who “…held milestone birthdays, toasted the end of classes, celebrated hockey wins, and gathered even when there was nothing in particular to celebrate,” I have one more memory. While it would be incorrect to say that the Dugout was ever a substitute for a graduate studies COM classroom, legend has it that several classroom discussions and studies during my senior year that began at 640 Commonwealth Avenue eventually concluded at the DO.

Requiescat In Pace.

Bill Harris (COM’71)

At the end of finals in the spring of 1971, several of us in the MBA program went to the Dugout after the last exam. Six of us huddled in a booth. Five men and a woman—the most beautiful one in our class. I had spied her at that fall’s orientation and tried all year to engage with her. Nothing happened. Actually, I sat behind her in graduate economics and still no great level of recognition from her.

At the Dugout, I was finally able to break the ice, and she focused on conversing with me almost exclusively! At the end of the evening, after beers (which was all we could afford), I asked to see her again. She said yes! I graduated with academic honors and she graduated with high honors—Number 1 in our MBA class. She also did the groundbreaking in 1993 for the Questrom building. On June 20, 1973, we were married and still are, almost 53 years later. Now that’s a Dugout story for the ages!

Matthew Barry Smith (CAS’70, Questrom’72)
Merle Sloss Smith (Questrom’72)

Like so many, I was so saddened to hear about the closing of the Dugout. I am a big fan of old bars and this was one of them. 

I chuckled when I read the reference to the Brink’s robbery being planned there. I’m the author of the more or less definitive book on the robbery: The Crime of the Century: How the Brink’s Robbery Stole Millions and the Hearts of Boston, published in 2008. I reference that myth in the new edition of this book, which I’m planning to publish in spring. Because, alas, it is likely a a myth, but a myth based on a bit of reality.

As Patrick’s original story indicates, the Dugout was once owned by Jimmy O’Keefe who ran a nightclub/restaurant  on Boylston and Mass Ave, where the robbers, particularly the bookie Adolph “Jazz” Maffie, frequented in the 1940s and early 1950s. Lots of people hung out there—including reporters. O’Keefe also ran the Dugout and Jazz Maffie, and another robber, Sandy Richardson, apparently hung out there after they were released from prison for serving their time for the robbery. That would have been in the 1960s/1970s.

They would have been local heroes by then, and they were very friendly with O’Keefe who would have no problem with their company.  However, my research indicated the 1950 robbery wasn’t planned there. It  was planned by Tony Pino and other robbers in a more private location. There’s no mention in my sources of any planning at the Dugout, although, as I said, Jimmy O’Keefe’s restaurant/nightclub did play a role….  

Needless to say, I loved your stories on this topic. What makes the closing particularly tragic for me is that, as I said,  I have revised and updated my 2008 book and will republish  in the spring. I had so hoped to have a book launch party at the Dugout for the BU community.  So I’m personally devastated.  

Thank you for the timely article. 

Stephanie Schorow
Instructor, BU College of Communication Mass Communication, Advertising and PR

I regularly spent time at the Dugout while at BU. Took a night class on history of religion and would spend the break at the Dugout, along with most of the other students and Professor Patchell. One night, the professor sent someone back to the classroom to get the two or three students still there so he could continue the class at the Dugout. Which he did. 

Allan Vaughan (CAS’70)

No eulogy for the Dugout would be complete without mention of the Miracle on Ice.

Few remember that the USA vs Soviet Union hockey game was on tape delay that wonderful Friday, February 22, 1980. Swarms (or as they say in Boston, “swaams”) of us students who had no afternoon classes descended on the Dugout, starting at 3 pm to get prime booths for viewing. By the time the game started, word had already trickled in that the boys won! All three TV networks sent their news crews to the bar, and what transpired over the next eight hours was magical. When Al Michaels made his famous call, the entire bar and network reporters and rival cameramen all broke into a rousing rendition of The Star Spangled Banner. And then we spilled out into Kenmore Square for a street celebration that was unmatched (until the Sox won the World Series in 2004!).

I guess it’s closing time.

Jonathan Schwartz (Questrom’81)

Great story about a sad event. I graduated from COM in 81 and we had a journalism professor whose day job was being a writer for the Globe. He told us the first day class that office hours commenced at the Dugout and would last until people stopped buying him booze. Definitely great conversations around those tables.

Peter Kaufman (COM’81)

I enjoy your publication very much, and was saddened to read of the Dugout’s closing. After enjoying the Dugout during my four years at BU, my last visit to the café, returning as an alum, is my fondest.

During the 2009 BU hockey season, my daughter Angelina, eight years old at the time, wrote a letter to Jack Parker (Questrom’68, Hon.’97) expressing her excitement with BU hockey. The coach was kind enough to write back and offer Angelina four tickets to a regular-season game at Agganis Arena. She attended the game, was thrilled to meet Mr. Parker, and went on to loyally support the team, learning all the players’ names, numbers, and positions.

Fast forward a bit: BU ultimately wins the 2009 national championship in storied fashion. Angelina and I (along with my brother David, also a BU ENG alum) attend the rally at Marsh Chapel and, afterwards, lose track of time a bit as we search the crowd for Coach Parker and wait our turn in line to greet and congratulate him. Well, Angelina is then off on a mission, with her autograph book, to rush and meet her favorite players, and is crushed to learn that most have already left the rally. I decide to take her to the Dugout for a lemonade and console her a bit.

We are sitting at the bar, Angelina with her lemonade and David and I with our beers, and who walks in wearing their red and white BU hockey jerseys?? None other than her favorite hockey players, and most of the starting lineup. Angelina was speechless.

The remainder of my last Dugout visit was spent with the team as they embraced Angelina, signed her book, shared stories, and displayed a level of warmth and tenderness that once again reinforced my pride in BU. The best power-play experience.

A storybook ending to my Dugout “career.”

Thank you Dugout, thank you BU, and thank you hockey team of 2009.

Go Terriers.

Mark S. Tanzi (ENG’86)

Why wouldn’t BU buy the Dugout?! It’s an institution and they own most of that part of Comm Ave already. They could make it student-run. Seems like a missed opportunity, no?

Andrew Golomb (COM’89)

My geology TA introduced me to the Dugout probably in 1974. He would hold court at one of the two tables flanking the doorway. Late afternoon beers with interesting, career-motivated students. After graduation, my wife and I would end any visit back to Comm Ave with a Dugout stop. Am truly sad.

Jeffrey Frankel (CAS’76)

I have fond memories of the Dugout when I was at BU from 1981 to 1985. My great journalism professor at the time, Doug Crockett, had two classes in the afternoon, and I was in the first class. He was an old reporter for the Boston Globe, a walking encyclopedia of how to report and write great news articles based on his many years of experience. He had a big red nose, usually wore a wrinkled tan raincoat, and had a great sense of humor.  He would tell us that we were “writing for the chowda heads on the Green Line” and that if we missed the lead of the story, “we missed the name of the game.” Yesterday’s news, he reminded us, “was today’s fishwrap.”

Anyway, after arriving in the classroom, he would get us going on our assignment, then leave the class, go to the Dugout, come back in time to send us on our way, and then greet the second class. He loved the Dugout, and for our last class of the semester, he took us all there and paid for our drinks. He had rules, though. Male students could only order beer—”No Brandy Alexanders!” he said—but women could order mixed drinks. He said that being in a bar was part of being a journalist, which I found to be at least somewhat true later in life when I also worked as a newspaper reporter.

Thanks for asking about the Dugout.

George W. Layng (COM’85)

I don’t think there is enough time or enough interview space for me to tell you what my four years at Boston University and the Dugout were like. I recently heard about its closing and wish there could’ve been one more night, almost like the last episode of Cheers. If those walls could talk…. Amen to the Dugout and all of those crazy stories buried inside.

Mike Eruzione (Wheelock’77)
Boston University director of special outreach

In the fall of 1961, having flunked out of one of New England’s state universities, I was working at the Sears catalog plant by Fenway Park and started taking night classes at what was then [the BU College of Business Administration]. So I would grab a meal at the Dugout before my night classes. At that point, the Dugout was still more of a diner than a bar. As time went on, I met three other young guys who had similar stories to mine. As the year went on, we all discovered that we liked the school and its curriculum, and we all decided to apply to BU. We were all accepted, and all went on to graduate from CBA with the class of 1965. Many a burger and coffee were consumed by the four of us during those four years. Although I haven’t thought of the “DO” in years, I have fond memories of the place, and I’m sorry for its loss.   

John Sawyer (Questrom’65)