His secret? Hideouts
PROFILE | Club owner pushes extras for kids as Education Dept. adviser
During the mid-1980s, Tim Tuten hung around Weeds, a ramshackle hippie tavern run by a Mexican-American family on the Near North Side. He sat in the smallest corner of the bar talking about big dreams.
Tuten and his wife, Katie Nicholson, wanted to open a music club.
They quickly discovered the Hideout, a diverse workingman's bar just three tequila shots away from Weeds. Nicholson's father, Tom, liked to have a drink there after selling rocks for Vulcan Materials Co. in McCook.
Tuten has parlayed his knack for networking and playing incongruous musical cards at the Hideout into a special assistant gig to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. He began work on April 8.
"On my first day, Arne Duncan went to a Neko Case concert," Tuten said from his office that overlooks the National Gallery in Washington. Singer-songwriter Case, once a Hideout employee and headliner, was appearing at the 9:30 Club in D.C.
Duncan told the crowd of college-age students to consider careers in teaching. "We have a chance to change the country," an Education Department blog quotes him as saying. "We want to make sure every child has a great teacher. So those of you who love music, love art, love math ... we need that next generation of teachers coming in."
Tuten's previous day job was media relations manager for the Chicago Public Schools when Duncan was school superintendent. Tuten, 48, spent 17 years as a classroom teacher in Chicago.
"The Department of Education believes in a holistic approach to educating children," Tuten said. "Children learn in a multitude of ways. There is not one specific test that can determine a child's full development. Part of that might be music. It might be art. Or sports.
"Adult Americans may go to night school or a bar. My job as a bar owner was to try to create great programming with jazz, country, plays and poetry. At the Department of Education, part of my job is to identify the places where real Americans go. If people are at concerts, that's where we need to be. If parents are going to state fairs, we need to be there listening to them."
Tuten will be in the field making contacts for the Education Department. There are roughly 100 assistants working for a dozen assistant secretaries of education under Duncan. Tuten gives high marks to downtime.
He believes adults speak more freely in the setting of an after-work club, restaurant or concert. "Where do kids really shine?" he asked. "They might work hard in the classroom, but the extracurricular things like the marching band or the chess team are the things they really love. It's the extracurricular that brings out the best in people. And our department will be reaching out to the outside stuff."
In the '80s, Tuten taught African-American history at Near North High School near Weeds, which replaced Cooley High and closed in 2001.
"I wanted the Hideout to be Weeds, Lounge Ax and FitzGerald's wrapped into one," he recalled. "Weeds was this owner-operated weird place with homemade posters. Weeds on Thursday night [when there were jazz sets] was my dream. Now the Hideout has jazz on Wednesday night. I loved [poet] Gregorio Gomez and Monday night Weeds poetry. I wanted cutting-edge rock bands like Lounge Ax and the sensibility of the family bar with great roots music from FitzGerald's. And they were all great role models: Sergio Mayora [of Weeds]. Bill FitzGerald. Sue Miller and Julia [Adams of Lounge Ax]."
Tuten plans to return to the Hideout every couple of weeks. He is still getting regular e-mails from bands. He makes recommendations and forwards them back to Chicago. The bar is being run by wife/co-owner Katie and co-owners Mike and Jim Hinchsliff. All four owners have been friends since childhood in north suburban Glenview. They purchased the urban roadhouse in 1996. The space had been known as the Hideout since 1934.
"I loved the building, and as a history teacher I loved the fact it was a house built possibly by illegal Irish squatters in the 1880s or '90s," Tuten said. "But what is so powerful about the Hideout is that it is not in a neighborhood. It's a no-man's land in between Wicker Park and Lincoln Park. When I started going there in the 1980s there were African Americans, Hispanics, immigrant Polish people, and Italians ran it. It was multicultural. Everybody had in common that they were working-class people.
"And now it's the same thing as education: From little acorns mighty oaks grow. You see a little place like the Hideout and know that Neko hung out there, Kelly Hogan did everything for 10 years, Andrew Bird played there."
What are the chances of President Obama dropping in at the Hideout?
"Its never going to happen," Tuten said with a laugh. "But I will never forget that Jimmy Carter went to the Get Me High Lounge [a now-defunct Wicker Park jazz club] after he was president. My dream is that Jimmy Carter would come to the Hideout. I'm still stuck in high school. Jimmy Carter started the Department of Education, and I'm in this building named after Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had such an influence on me when I was young. And it's during the Obama administration."
Its an improbable dream come true.