The Tender Bar, Moehringer - B

                                          Thanks to Jack Blair for this recommendation.  This memoir is about the importance of a bar in Manhasset on Long Island in the life of the author.   Manhasset holds a special place in my memory, as it is the town that I aspired to as I came of age in Queens. It was the first place I ever earned any money,  the location of the North Hills Country Club, where my friends and I caddied. We'd hitch north on the Cross Bay and east on the L.I.E.  I went to one of the best Catholic schools in metropolitan New York, Archbishop Molloy in Queens, and St. Mary's in Manhasset was run by the same order of Marist brothers. The difference is that all of the other Marist schools were in dumpy sections of Manhattan and the Bronx, whereas St. Mary's was where the rich kids were.  I knew from a very early age that I didn't want on be on the bottom of the socio-economic ladder a minute longer than I had to. I dreamed of being in a place like Manhasset. A few years later, I worked for a lawyer who lived in Manhasset and was a member of a country club there - one a lot classier than the one I had worked at.  Being Irish-American, having some familiarity with bars and hooked on the location, it is no surprise that this book had me from the preface.  The author, known as JR, lived on the wrong side of the tracks in a crazy house owned by his grandfather and filled with a constantly changing cast of relatives.  His dad was totally absent; his mom struggled to raise him and was often so broke that at one stage, she filed for bankruptcy. His uncle worked at Dickens (later Publicans), a bar "142 paces away" and it proved to be his boyhood home away from home. When his uncle announced that JR had gotten into Yale, the crowd in the bar broke out in a chorus of 'Boola Boola'.  It was also the place where he found and adopted a panoply of male role models, that included bartenders, waiters, cooks, cops, and gamblers.  It was the home that nurtured him through his long, painful romance with the glamorous Sidney at Yale, a romance that I'm not sure he ever recovered from, as well as his stumbling start at a writing career at the Times.  The death of the owner led to the end of an era and the closing of  the bar. Fortunately for Moehringer, the closing coincided with his move west and his coming to the realization that, having grown up in a bar,  he had a drinking problem. The story closes on a melancholy note, as he came back to Manhasset, after September 11th to write about its new fatherless children.