Kathy Jack, center, and her wife, Susie Buck, celebrate Jack’s retirement with friends at
Sue Ellen’s. (Regina Lyn/DVtv)
DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
Taffet@DallasVoice.com
Kathy Jack, who will long be remembered as the person who created Sue Ellen’s, retired from the bar’s parent company, Caven Enterprises, after a retirement party last Sunday, Jan. 19.
Jack began her career at a women’s bar called The Unicorn located on Lemmon Avenue where Uncle Julio’s Mexican Restaurant has stood ever since. She was there about four years until it closed.
Jack’s next job was as door person at the Old Plantation on Cedar Springs Road where S4 now stands. That dance bar closed the following January and was replaced by the second Village Station, which moved a block down the street from its original home, the building where Roy G’s is now.
Jack worked her way up the ladder to become manager of the new Village Station.
Jack said after the Unicorn closed, there was no bar for women to go to dance.
“I’d see a lot of my old customers,” she said. “They’d tell me, ‘You need to open a bar for us.’”
She said she’d tell her bosses what her customers were telling her.
“They absolutely didn’t want to open a lesbian bar,” she said. “They didn’t know about lesbian bars. I said, ‘I do. Give me a chance.’”
She said Caven’s management always trusted her, knowing that if she didn’t know how to do it, she wouldn’t have asked.
Sue Ellen’s opened on Jan. 19, 1989. It is now the oldest lesbian bar in Texas and second-oldest in the country.
To Jack, the formula was simple: Know your clientele and listen to what they’re telling you.
She had already proven she could work with men and had some experience working at another lesbian bar called High Country.
‘I’d been going to lesbian bars for some time,” she said. “I knew the lesbian crowd. They knew me. I wanted to give the women of Dallas a place to dance, have a good time and listen to some good live music.”
In addition to local bands, she had several singers who’d stop by whenever they were doing concerts in Dallas including the Go-Go’s and Melissa Etheridge.
Sue Ellen’s became so popular that the original narrow shotgun bar just wasn’t big enough. When a flower shop on the corner of Reagan and Cedar Springs became vacant, Caven snatched up the space to enlarge The Strip’s only lesbian bar.
As popular as Sue Ellen’s was, everyone kept telling Jack that she needed to open her own place. She left Caven in 2006 to put together her business plan for Jack’s Backyard. Friends helped her find investors, and she found a perfect location on West Commerce Street, among the junk yards and trailer parks. This was before there was a Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, a Trinity Groves or luxury apartments.
The property had a couple of indoor areas for the bar and a restaurant as well as plenty of outdoor space for small concerts. And Jack’s had something the bars on Cedar Springs only dreamed of — plenty of parking with more than 100 spaces for cars as well as curb parking on Commerce Street.
The bar had an Austin vibe and attracted more women than men, but it drew as many straight people as gays and lesbians. Lisa Loeb, Band of Heathens, Hays Carl and several top-name lesbian bands performed.
Jack’s Backyard became a popular eating destination as well.
“My wife Susie was the chef,” Jack said.
With indoor seating supplemented by tables arranged around fire pits, it remained open year-round.
“Smores packages with all the fixins kept people coming even as it got cold,” she said.
Jack’s opened in 2008 but by 2011, property along Commerce Street was going up in price; she lost her funding, and Jack closed her venue.
In 2014, Jack came back to manage a whole new Sue Ellen’s. A few years earlier, TMC was looking for a more intimate space and Sue Ellen’s was bursting at the seams. So the two iconic bars swapped buildings, and Sue Ellen’s moved to its current location on Throckmorton Street.
“I missed it,” Jack said of the bar she helped create.
She opened the second-floor music lounge to any non-profit or group that wanted to party or meet.
What’s the biggest difference between when Sue Ellen’s first opened and now? “Men and women party together more now,” Jack said. “I brought back some of the people who had stopped coming. The crowd is a little older, so we changed the music a little bit to a more open format. We threw in some country western and became a little more diverse.”
Jack was proud to host a group called Lesbian Happy Hour, a group of African-American professional women. When they were discussing holding events at Sue Ellen’s, the group asked if they’d even be welcome.
“They said they never felt welcome before,” Jack said. She told them, “‘That needs to change.’ Today if you were to ask what the most diverse bar on the block is, they’d tell you Sue Ellen’s.
“It’s what I wanted from the beginning. Anyone can come in and feel safe.”
One of Sue Ellen’s biggest fans is Linda Grey, the actress who played Sue Ellen Ewing on the TV show Dallas. She’s visited the bar a few times and thinks it’s a hoot it was named after her character.
Jack said Sue Ellen’s is in great hands. For the past two years, she’s been working in the corporate office and training Mindy Robbins, the bar’s new manager.
“She was the perfect person to take my place. Great personality. She can build things up. Come up with great plans for parties,” Jack said.
Jack continues to work as the Dallas Mavericks’ inclusion ambassador for the LGBTQIA+ community, helping plan Pride nights and watch parties and talking to employee resource groups about spending an evening attending a game. But one of her favorite duties is talking to kids about the things the Mavs offer, like basketball camps.
And she’s looking forward to working with incoming Mavericks CEO Rick Welts, the only gay CEO in the NBA.
In February, Jack and her wife celebrate 29 years together followed in April by their 10th wedding anniversary. They plan to do some traveling and eventually move to Costa Rica. Jack said they want to live in Guanacasta Province on the Nicoya Peninsula on the Pacific coast.
“But there won’t be a huge farewell,” she said. “It’ll be a see ya soon. We’re not going to sell our house in Dallas.”
Looking back over the years, Jack called her time in the bar business “an accidental career.”
“I’m so thankful to Caven who let me take the plunge and to all the people along the way who kept it going,” she said.