Goff still remembers the day he first encountered the place.

"I was in high school at the time; it was one of the watersheds of my life. It was the second Saturday in May of 1964. I was 16 and it was like the sky opened. I had been looking for something like that. I had heard of Bob Dylan but had never heard him and when I walked in they were playing (Dylan). I think I went there every weekend for two years. Those people (the older beatniks) wouldn't have anything to do with me. I was a kid.

"For people of my age group -- we were sort of the bridge between the beatniks and the emerging counterculture -- the Avant Garde was kind of a natural place for us to come."

By the fall of 1966 Strohmeier was finished with the Avant Garde and he sold out to Dick Weening and Tom Nord. A couple months later, they sold to Gordy Simon and Jim Barker, a pair of Avant Garde regulars.

"I had gotten divorced and that’s one of those operations you have to be right on top of," says Strohmeier about selling the place. "Part of why I opened it was as a place for my wife and I to go. We weren't married yet when it opened."

Poetry continued on Wednesdays and was complemented with Tuesday film nights to screen the works of the New Wave: Antonioni, Fellini, Truffaut; and other weeknights got deeper into blues, bringing up Charlie Musselwhite from Chicago, and allowing musicians to plug in regularly, something Strohmeier did only occasionally.

On the weekends, it became more and more likely that patrons would share the room with loud rock bands, especially the Velvet Whip and the Baroques, which were particular favorites of Barker.

While neighbors had been willing to put up with beatniks and arty types, to an extent, when the music began to rumble, a group of them petitioned the Common Council to shut down the Avant Garde. When the City didn't take the action requested by neighborhood residents, vigilantes began to hurl projectiles through the big arched windows. Some believed many of the spark plugs and bits of hardware were launched from unmarked cars belonging to Harold Breier's police force.

Strohmeier explains that during his tenure as owner of the Avant Garde, he was careful to cultivate good relationships with neighbors, knowing the kind of power they could exert.

"I used to be pretty careful with the neighbors," he remembers. "I’d have the place cleaned up early in the morning. I wanted to make sure that the neighbors were pretty content. I had a good relationship with the alderman and pretty good relations with the police department; they didn’t give me much static. Just the one raid and I didn’t have any problem with them after that. They felt comfortable that younger people could go there and their morals wouldn’t be deteriorated."

As other venues became more important rock clubs in town, the Avant Garde started to lose customers. Combine that with a reported Barker drug bust and suddenly the Common Council had little problem revoking the venue's licenses, which it did in October 1968, the same month in which the Avant Garde's lease lapsed.

"By that time," says Goff, "the counterculture was already starting to unwind. That kind of a venue really ceased to exist. It survived the transition from folk to rock, but it was then killed by rock."

After six years of bringing the happening and hip world of music, poetry, film and theater to Milwaukee's East Side, the Avant Garde became yesterday's news.

"It (existed) during a transition period," says Strohmeier. "Before the beat generation the arts scene was limited; Milwaukee was like a wasteland. It opened in late ’62 and by around ’69, it transitioned from essentially a beat scene to hippies. You didn’t need the coffeehouses to go to; (the scene) was expanding everywhere."

Strohmeier admits he doesn't get out to the bars and coffeehouses much these days; he spent plenty of time in them in the '60s. But prodded for a couple of places that capture a piece of the Avant Garde vibe, he points to two:

"There are some around that have it. There’s a place on Center Street (Fuel) that has that feel. I think Comet is another one."

Note: An article by Goff and Mike Angeli, which appeared in the November 1975 issue of Milwaukee's Bugle-American, provided some of the historical information -- and the photos -- for this article.