J. R. Moehringer has an old-fashioned flair for infusing potentially hard-boiled subject matter with humanity and pathos. This gift was first evident in "Resurrecting the Champ," an article which originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times Magazine. The article detailed Moehringer's attempts to track down former boxing champ "Battlin'" Bob Satterfield. However, percolating just beneath the surface of this "where-are-they-now" sports story was an issue much closer to Moehringer's heart: the gnawing need to locate the father that abandoned him as a boy. The resulting story not only became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, but it also gained the attention and accolades of everyone from Chris Jones of Esquire to Katie Couric of The Today Show.
With the publication of Moehringer's first book, it is clear that his journey remains ongoing. The Tender Bar is a memoir that finds Moehringer digging deeper into his own past with yet another decidedly masculine backdrop, the local tavern. Moehringer writes about Dickens Bar in Manhasset, Long Island, with a rhapsodic affection that conjures a setting more akin to a family living room than a haven for drunken carousing and televised ball games. He portrays the various barflies as colorful fountains of homespun wisdom, reserving a special fondness for Steve, the owner of Dickens who provided a sanctuary for the drunks in Moehringer's neighborhood. In fact, in the wake of the meltdown at Three-Mile Island in 1979, several patrons even called Steve to find out if they could use the airtight basement of Dickens as a makeshift fallout shelter.
Moehringer found his own sanctuary at Dickens at a young age, long before he could even utilize the pub for its intended purpose. Instead, he found a home where the various rummies served as stand-ins for his absent father, who is merely a phantom-like presence in the book. He speaks of his disc jockey dad as a disembodied voice over the radio, and young Moehringer spent many hours with a radio pressed against his ear in a futile attempt to connect with the father that left him. However, at Dickens, Moehringer found a group of men who welcomed the boy into their world and supplied him with their own brand of woozy fathering. Colorful characters with names like Colt and Joey D. (not to mention Moehringer's own Uncle Charlie) guided him through his young life, functioning as the various components of the male role model he so desperately needed.
As Moehringer grew older and faced challenges that he never dreamed of as a boy, Dickens would continue to serve its chief function for him as a refuge with a built-in ramshackle family. The Tender Bar is no mere sugar-coated tale of drunks with hearts-of-gold, though, and the sweetness is often underlined with the bitter realities of both bar life and modern life. The story's climax set on September 11th, 2001, plants the fantasy world at Dickens firmly and tragically back into Earth.
The complexity and pure readability of The Tender Bar certainly has not escaped critics, whom are already hailing this memoir as "funny, vivid, and clever" (The Washington Post) and recognizing that "listening to Moehringer's soothing voice is like basking in the glow of a barroom storyteller-not the one who shouts to be heard over the din, but the one whose story is good enough to make everyone keep it down." (Publisher's Weekly).
Moehringer has assuredly survived the ups and downs of his unconventional upbringing, winning the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2000, and continuing to work as a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. With the highly praised publication of The Tender Bar he may very well find himself playing a role for his own readers not unlike that of his boozy benefactors back at Dickens: a storyteller with a gift for making the world seem a little less lonely.
