Bacchus Smiled

John (“Jack”) Farrell was born in 1942 in Bridgeport, an Irish-Catholic enclave on Chicago’s south side. He was the oldest of seven children. “My mom made no bones about telling people I was her favorite,” he says with a grin. “She said it was because she’d known me the longest.”

Farrell’s father was a Navy man who served in the Pacific during World War II and worked for the Veterans Administration when he was shipped back home. His mother was a precinct captain for Chicago’s Democratic Party machine. Farrell’s family, including his grandmother and aunt, helped put Mayor Richard J. Daley in office in 1955.

It was a pleasant childhood, he says. Full of Catholic tradition and raucous meals. At the age of 11, Farrell began working for a pharmacist in the Chicago suburb of River Forest. He continued during college, returning on weekends and breaks from Butler University in Indianapolis, where he was majoring in pharmacy.

“That man was my mentor,” Farrell says of his employer. “He was Jewish. But the pharmacy was right across the street from the Catholic church, and he never charged the nuns for their prescriptions. Every month, he’d just mark the bill ‘Paid in full,’ but those sisters”—Farrell leans forward with a glint in his eye—“they would come over and say to me, ‘Mr. Weiss forgot to give us our Green Stamps.’”

After graduating from Butler, Farrell took a job with the Gold Seal Company, a maker of bleach and soap. Within months, he was a top salesman, and became a regional manager out of Milwaukee, which meant traveling throughout the Midwest. On one of those trips, he looked up a college buddy’s friend—a girl called “Minute Rice.” She was, in fact, Mary Catherine (Cathy) Rice, the daughter of Erling Rice, who ran the Twin Cities Red Owl grocery chain.

She was working as a copywriter for the Powers department store in downtown Minneapolis when they met, but Farrell says she very quickly decided what she wanted: “When I left, she followed me down to Milwaukee and said, ‘Let’s get married.’ I didn’t encourage it, but let’s say I didn’t tell her to stay home either.”

It turned out to be a wise move; the couple has been married now for 42 years. And it was through Erling Rice that Farrell got into the wine business.

Rice called his son-in-law in 1970 to say he had an opportunity to invest in Haskell’s, the small spirits and wine store founded by known bootleggers Benny and Fritzi Haskell in 1934. Benny died in ’68, leaving Fritzi, the original wine lover, to run the store alone. After two years, she’d had enough. Rice and three partners—his own son, the basketball player George Mikan, and Farrell—bought the business for no money down.

Jack and Cathy moved immediately to Minneapolis, and he took over as the on-site manager of Haskell’s. Not only was he the best salesman of the four, he was also the only wine drinker—thanks to his wife.