Overview:
Why a historic dive bar, tucked inside an unassuming strip mall in Fresno, California, is called "Uncle Tom's."
One reason Fresno may get a bad rap is that we typically aren’t great at branding or self-mythologizing.
If we celebrate our history at all, it’s ag, it’s William Saroyan. Maybe it’s the Forestiere Underground Gardens (which we wrecked a lot of before someone belatedly figured they might be worth preserving).
Still, the history is here. It just takes a little digging (that’s an Underground Gardens callback). Ask a question or two, and you can find odd stories in places you never expected. Locals know: Fresno isn’t boring, Fresno is weird.
Case in point: a little liquor store, and a few doors down, a bar, called “Uncle Tom’s.”
Technically, it was the liquor store that I saw first, a big blue-and-yellow sign that blurred past as I was making my way north on First Street just past Tulare Street. Uncle Tom’s? I thought, driving by at 40 mph. Did I see that right?
The obvious question that came to mind was, who names a business – a liquor store, no less – after a famously biting insult in the African-American community? (Hopefully the fact that “Uncle Tom” is a slur that means something like “sellout” or “traitor to your community” doesn’t require too much of an explainer – just Google it.)
The name had several potential explanations: it was stunt marketing, it was operating at one or several levels of irony. Maybe it was just coincidental and never went through the kind of review process that businesses in other places go through (ie, asking more than three people not directly related to you “is this a good idea?”). There are people, after all, who are simply both uncles, and also named Tom (a not-infrequent joke premise, in stand-up comedy).
I needed to find the answer. And, as is so often the case in this town, asking one silly question got me much more than I bargained for.
Because as it turns out, Uncle Tom’s isn’t just an arresting name; it’s legitimately one of the oldest bars in Fresno. That we have so much history hiding behind an edgily-named, somewhat foreboding bar in a non-descript strip mall whose anchor tenant is an Autozone feels like Fresno in a nutshell.
The Original Uncle Tom
While it looks fairly intimidating from the outside – windowless, built out of beige cinder blocks, with a sign that looks like it was made in the seventies – the interior of Uncle Tom’s has a homey, dive bar charm. They open at 11 am every day, and the regulars seem to trickle in by lunch. The first time I visited, on a weekday early afternoon, I immediately struck up a conversation with a couple of barflies, who looked like they’d just arrived after a shift of some kind of blue collar work.
What made them choose this weird, little windowless bar in a strip mall behind a Starbucks, I wondered? Both said, essentially, that they’d been coming there since they were kids, parked in the corner while their fathers or grandfathers stopped by for a drink with friends.
I met the friendly bar manager, Tracy Valle, who explained that the bar – Uncle Tom’s per the sign, Uncle Tom’s Cabin per the website and Google Maps – was actually 103 years old, though not exactly in the original location. It used to be where the Autozone is now. That building was built in 1940, torn down in 1990, whereupon the bar and the liquor store moved into the newly-built strip mall just behind. You can read all about it in the newspaper clippings framed in the bar’s rear right corner, though you might need to a flashlight to make out the words.
Valle, who grew up in Calwa but now lives in the area, said she’s been working here for seven years, since right around the time the current owners – a pair of guys named Happy and Sonny – took over from the original family. I asked how she heard about the place.
“From being a regular,” Valle said. “My godfather used to come in here. I even hear the people who come in here now saying, ‘I used to drop my dad off at that corner bar and I used to sneak in there and go to the liquor store and they would all be in the bar and I’d go pick up cigarettes for him,’ or whatever. You know, it was different times back then.”
She says the place used to have “issues” with some of the employees, but that she helped turn over a new leaf. “We got rid of all of them. And so now it’s perfectly great again,” Valle says. “We’re probably one of the cleanest hole-in-the-wall bars there is.”
She’s not wrong, the place does exude a comfortable, if funky, English or Irish small-town pub vibe, a neighborliness that belies its cold exterior; something you don’t often find in 2026 America. My Modelo is crisp and cold, and it feels like a place I could easily wile away an afternoon drinking three or four more, if I wasn’t on assignment.
There was no hint at this kind of local color from the outside. Still, I had to ask the question that had brought me here in the first place. Hey. So what’s the deal with the name?
“The main owner, his name was Tom, so they always just called him Uncle Tom,” Valle says.
“Was it sort of like a joke, like the book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” I ask?
It wasn’t, Valle says. Just a coincidence. Do you get people who come in here, wondering about the name?
“Not very much,” Valle says. “People don’t really know history around here.”
“Everyone used to come here.”
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” both the bar and the liquor store, began their lives in 1921, as a candy store and soda fountain called Alta Vista Confectionary, on First Street and Tulare Street. Its founder was indeed named Tom – Licouris, a native of Licouria, Greece.
Born 1875, the public record offers a handful of free-floating glimpses into Tom Licouris’ early life: violating a diphtheria quarantine in 1921. Getting bitten by a dog in 1924. Losing his 7-year-old son in a horrifying milk truck accident in 1927.
More to our purposes, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” “Fresno’s newest and most modern bar – cafe” celebrated its grand opening (in the “new” building, where the Autozone is now), in 1940. The announcement noted that the owner, Tom Licouris, had “been in the restaurant and liquor business here nineteen years.”
That would make Uncle Tom’s, or some iteration of it, 105 years old, by my count. As of 1940, it was noted to include “a bar and cafeteria in one store, and a retail liquor, tobacco and sporting goods shop in the other unit,” as well as “booths for the ladies.”
The Licouris family continued running Uncle Tom’s for the next 80 or so years, through the demolition of the “original”(ish) building in 1990, to the move to the newly-built strip mall just behind in 1991 (the same year they sold the liquor store). Tom the elder died in 1954. Tom’s son, Peter (brother of James, the son who was killed by the milk truck) continued running the bar thereafter, eventually joined by his own son, Tom Licouris the younger, who ran the liquor store before getting into real estate. Pete died in 2004, garnering a heartfelt write-up in The Fresno Bee, as befitting a beloved local bartender and business owner. “Uncle Tom’s owner a caring friend to many,” went the headline.
With all the ink spilled on Uncle Tom’s throughout the years, including countless times during the 1980s and 1990s, when Tom the younger was apparently a go-to source for The Bee on any story affecting retail, liquor, or magazines, it seemed that no one had ever thought to ask about the name.
And it’s not as if “Uncle Tom” suddenly burst into the public consciousness as an insult when Eminem’s B Rabbit called Mekhi Fifer’s character that in his 2002 pseudo-biopic, 8 Mile. The stage and radio version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin were still being performed well into the 1920s and 30s. If anything, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” would’ve been more recognizable as a play on a well-known title then than it is now. (It probably wasn’t widely recognized as a slur until the Civil Rights movement of the 60s and 70s, though it had been used that way earlier.)
At long last, I was finally able to make contact with Tom Licouris (the younger) – not the original Uncle Tom, but as close as I could get.
“My grandfather came from Ellis Island to Chicago in 1915,” Licouris says. “He came to Fresno in 1920 – actually Tulare first, the last stop on the Southern Pacific. And then he found the spot for Uncle Tom’s. It was the end of the trolley line. He said ‘this is the place,’ and he bought the building for $400.”
“Originally, he was a candy maker,” Licouris says. “Then in 1933, the end of prohibition, dad said he walked in there and the place was suddenly all full of liquor boxes and cards. And he realized, ‘Well, I guess we’re in the liquor business now.’”
Licouris says the family finally got out of the bar business for good about five years ago. But he clearly doesn’t mind reliving the memories.
“They widened the street in 1940, that’s when my grandfather built the new building, built it himself,” Licouris says. “It was so close to downtown, and in those days, Huntington Boulevard [less than a half mile south of Tulare Street] was where all the rich people lived. We were their bar. We were like the Pardinis are now when it came to places to sort of drink and hang out. A lot of people met their future wives and husbands there. You couldn’t go anywhere without knowing where Uncle Tom’s was.”
“We were open from 6 am to 2 am every day. A lot of the regulars would come in at 8 and stay all day. We sold racing forms, hunting licenses, fishing licenses. When we moved to the new building, the old timers literally brought their stools – carried their favorite stools over from the old place.”
Indeed, the level of affection people (well, mostly men, it seems) had for their favorite bar back in those days is endlessly fascinating for people of my own generation. As is the idea that a bar could be the place where you bought a hunting license, the place you spent 10 straight hours drinking, and the place to meet a future spouse, all rolled into one. And yet there’s some convincing evidence that Tom Licouris isn’t just spinning yarns.
On the occasion of the 1940-built Uncle Tom’s location’s demolition in 1990, Fresno Bee staff writer Lois Henry wrote, under the headline “Last call for old friend”:
“When they made that first hit, when the bulldozers first hit it, I had to walk away,” said a tall man with a gravelly voice.
The man, who gave his name as Leon, sat with his wife, Lola, in the new Uncle Tom’s bar and spoke of the old place that was torn down to make way for a Texaco gas station and carwash.
“Well, things have to change, I guess. We just hope it’s for the better, that’s all.”
Lola comforted him. “Fifty years from today, people will feel the same way about this new bar,” she said.
Leon first came to the bar in 1951, Lola in 1960.
The couple said they had their first date at Uncle Tom’s in 1961.
“Remember? You stood me up in that old bar,” Lola teased. “But I married you anyway.”
We used to be a proper country!
Still, as much fun as it was hearing the old stories (“We had congressmen, judges, Jim Costa used to come in here – it was the place,” Licouris says), I belatedly remembered that I’d originally tried to get in touch with Licouris in order to answer a specific question.
So, the name…
“Well, back in the day,” Licouris says, “People would call my grandfather ‘Uncle Tom.’ I guess just because he was a friendly guy. He would give candy to all the kids and he was sort of known around the neighborhood. He always had people around him, and his friends would joke that they were called ‘Uncle Tom’s Tabernacle.’”
Having already broached the subject, I had to press. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was still a decently popular stage play in 1933. Surely the name had to have some novelty or pun value at the time.
Sadly, Tom the younger can’t really answer that; after all, he was still in diapers when his grandfather died. But he’s not ignorant to the potential baggage.
“Over the years, I was kind of worried about people taking it the wrong way,” Licouris says. “Part of me was afraid we might have protests or something in the 70s. We took the ‘Cabin’ off in 1990. But the truth is, we never ever had anyone come in and say anything about the name.”
The “Uncle Tom’s” sign is still there. So is the liquor store, Uncle Tom’s Liquors, three doors down from Uncle Tom’s bar, with a smoke shop, a Little Caesar’s, and a travel agent sandwiched between. “Cabin” is still on the map listing and on the website. Is it “Uncle Tom’s” or “Uncle Tom’s Cabin?”
At a certain point, the name stopped feeling like the most important part of the story.