Bob Ashby, BE77
Deer Park memories live on
ALUMNI & FRIENDS | Over the years, the stories of the Deer Park Tavern have passed into legend.
There is its most famous guest, Edgar Allan Poe, who stayed at the Deer Park’s precursor—the St. Patrick’s Inn—before the hotel was destroyed by fire, giving rise to today’s legendary establishment.
There is the 90-year-old former bartender who recalled the busy night in the late 1950s when integration was becoming a reality in Newark, and she threatened to walk out if the manager wouldn’t serve the African-American customers who had stopped in.
There is the autumn weekend, some 15 years ago, after the renovation and reopening of the tavern. The place was packed, and in the shuffle of people, one guy bumped into another, knocking his drink to the floor. “You made me drop a beer in the same spot 50 years ago,” the second one yelled, and both shared a laugh.
Owner Bob Ashby, BE77, loves hearing all the stories of the iconic, and occasionally infamous, bar and restaurant that has added to lore and legend of Newark and UD for some 165 years now.
“Practically everyone who came to UD has a memory of this place,” he says.
Today, Ashby owns not just the Deer Park, but three McGlynns Pubs, 8th and Union Kitchen in Wilmington, and the historic Cantwell’s Tavern in Odessa, Delaware. It’s a far departure from where the New Jersey native thought he would be, back when he was searching for colleges and planning to attend Montclair State, just 20 minutes from his family’s home. “But my dad said, ‘You’d be a lot better off going to Delaware,’ and he was right.”
“The opportunities to network and connect, coupled with a strong business education—that’s what UD gave me,” says Ashby, who supports various programs at the University, from Athletics to his Lerner College, and serves on the Hospitality Leadership Advisory Board in a role that often brings him back to the classroom to speak with current students. “The University keeps improving. It’s a great thing to say you’ve graduated from here.”
Back in Ashby’s era, Newark nightlife was limited to the Deer Park and the Stone Balloon, then a thousand-person nightclub, where he got his first taste of the restaurant industry.
“I wanted to get into a business I could own myself,” he says. “I was social. I liked to cook. I knew how to bartend, and it seemed like the right environment.”
He helped open another Newark favorite, Klondike Kate’s, in 1978, as a general manager, but spent most of his early career with H.A. Winston’s restaurant, a TGI Fridays-like chain, where he learned the ropes of the business—the construction, marketing, finance, cash flows, invoices, controls.
“It was a good steppingstone to running your own business,” which Ashby would do in 1983, purchasing the old Polly Drummond Ale House in Pike Creek, and renaming it McGlynns. He selected an Irish theme because “I knew I’d be busy one day a year, no matter what.”
But business was better than that. In fact, sales would double in two months, from roughly $4,000 a week to $8,000, and by the end of the year, the pub averaged $12,000 per week.
Ashby opened and closed a number of additional restaurants along the way, eventually purchasing a decidedly timeworn Deer Park in 2001. He would spend six months restoring the one-time hotel to its original look, discovering hidden treasures, such as newspaper clippings from the mid-1940s, tucked within the walls during renovation, but now framed and adorning the space outside his third-floor office.
“There’s a lot of history here,” he says. “It’s a part of the fiber that connects people to Newark, to UD.”
Ashby’s own memories range from the infamous Deer Park Riots of 1974 (which he just barely managed to escape), to the night of April 5, 1974, when he met his future wife, Sandra Keene Ashby, EHD77. “She walks right past me and tells me what a stuck-up S.O.B. I am,” he recalls. They went on their first date the following night and will celebrate their 39th wedding anniversary in June.
