New Horizons

Dick Mueller’s Firehouse Dinner Theatre put the Omaha’s Old Market on the map

By Leo Adam Biga

Dick Mueller, 85, is awash in memories of the Firehouse Dinner Theater, the equity house he opened in 1972 in his hometown Omaha’s then-fledgling Old Market. He repurposed a former fire station at 11th and Jackson into the theater, which proved, Mueller said, an “instant success,” hastening the district’s transition from derelict wholesale produce center to cool arts-entertainment hub.

Before the Firehouse, he followed a circuitous show business path as a nightclub performer and stage actor. His musician father played trumpet in his own Mueller Rhythm orchestra, in which Dick’s older brothers played. Dick played trombone in the Omaha Central High band, but his true talent was singing.

“My first hero was probably Bing Crosby,” he said.

Mueller sang in the choir at Central, where he and fellow teenagers Rich Hansen, Bill Snyder and Bob Larsen formed The Stylemasters doo-wop quartet. Patterned after The Mills Brothers, they shined in Central’s annual Road Show and around town. They decided to try their harmonizations out west.

Singing groups were all the rage and after testing the waters at a resort in Sun Valley, Idaho, the quartet signed with the Hammond/Romeo talent agency in Omaha, touring Canada and the U.S., opening for Sophie Tucker in Winnipeg. They were a hot number at the Chi supper club in Palm Springs. They sang on the nationally televised Arthur Godfrey show in 1957. Their one chance to play Las Vegas was interrupted by a U.S. Army hitch.

Meanwhile The Stylemasters cut singles on the Foremost label. That led to a Capitol Records deal.

The members got drafted into military service in 1959. “Our military career was kind of interesting,” Mueller said. “We had to go through basic (training), but as soon as that was over we joined the U.S. Army Field Band in Washington D.C. as the featured act.”