14-Feb-16 – In River North, he was more than a football legend, he was the proprietor of a well-remembered restaurant at Marina City in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Johnny Lattner died Saturday morning at the age of 83. He had battled lung cancer.

As halfback, Lattner scored 20 touchdowns and 120 points for Notre Dame during the 1953 season and won the Heisman trophy. Head Coach Frank Leahy called the six-foot-two-inch 195-pound Lattner “our bread-and-butter ball carrier.”

While his opponents averaged two yards a carry, Lattner averaged five. In a 1953 cover story, Time magazine described Lattner as “intelligently aggressive on the football field.”

After a year in the NFL, two years in the Air Force, and five years as a high school and college football coach, Lattner got into the restaurant business. His first restaurant, at 105 West Madison Street in the Loop, was destroyed by fire on January 6, 1968. The next day, Mayor Richard J. Daley called and urged him to start again and keep the restaurant downtown.

By the end of the year, Lattner and five partners had purchased from Hilton Hotels Corporation its restaurant at Marina City. They negotiated a deal to buy the restaurant furnishings from Hilton for $300,000, the equivalent of $2 million today, paid with $25,000 down and $5,000 per month.

In addition, they paid $5,000 per month rent for a dining room, coffee shop, and bar in the southwest corner of the commercial platform, where Dick’s Last Resort is now located, and a 5,000 square foot banquet hall at the base of what is now House of Blues. (Left) Marina City in March 1973. Photo by Mike Chunko. (Click on images to view larger versions.)

“Our food wasn’t great but it wasn’t bad,” said Lattner, modestly, in 2009. “We had fish, steak. Lunch, we would have a buffet – ham, beef, whatever. That worked pretty good. You could cut down the price of it a little bit.”

The banquet hall was more lucrative. They not only took over the banquet hall from Hilton but they inherited their banquets. The hall could seat about 1,200 people. “That was a nice profitable deal there,” said Lattner. “We could compete with the hotels as far as price.”

The restaurant closed in 1973. Lattner returned to the printing business and was most recently Vice President of Sales for PAL Graphics, Inc., a printing company in Broadview, just west of Chicago.

Lattner kept active in fundraising for several charities and served on the Physical Fitness Committee of the State of Illinois.

He lived in Oak Park with his wife, Peggy. They have eight children and 25 grandchildren, all of which live in Chicago. (Right) Johnny Lattner at Dick’s Last Resort in River North in 2009.

December 15, 2014, was officially Johnny Lattner Day in Chicago. 14th Ward Alderman Edward Burke sponsored the resolution, which was adopted by the City Council on November 5, 2014.

Visitation will be on Friday, February 19, from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. at Fenwick High School, where Lattner attended, in Lawless Gymnasium, 505 Washington Boulevard, Oak Park. His funeral will be Saturday, February 20, at noon at St. Vincent Ferrer Church, 1530 Jackson Avenue, River Forest.