MY FATHER'S DAY TRIBUTE- to TOM RYAN and MCSORLEY'S

AN EVENT FROM HIS YOUNGER DAYS

TOM RYAN

During my days growing up in Boston, I often heard the click clack of a typewriter from my father’s upstairs office.

As an editor at the Boston Globe, he wrote many editorials, mostly about current events, government and political. He was the National Editor and often had to fight for page space for events beyond New England. It was then a paper with a bent for local news.

But there were days here and there when events from his younger days emerged. He was after all, a Boston Irishman who had spent time in New York and.. well, who knows what else.

So in 1976 when New York’s legendary Irish pub, McSorley’s, was threatened with closing, this was determined a newsworthy event, as much as the Viking space craft successfully landing on Mars, the beginning of Concord service, or the first commercial supercomputer. The Globe sent my father to write about the place. This is how it came down and what he wrote:

‘When Globe editors decided to send their own reporter, the question never was whom to assign, but whether Tom Ryan should leave that day or the next morning. Obliged to write about a sanctuary of his youth, even if it was a saloon, Tom saw the assignment as a spiritual mission. His story, which appeared in June, 1976, on page one, was seen by colleagues as a masterpiece from which, four decades later, they were able to recite entire paragraphs.’

At McSorley’s, nothing escaped Tom’s Jesuitical eye:

“While doormen at more pretentious joints in the Village were attired in the uniforms of admirals, generals, Russian Cossacks and pirates, the doorman at McSorley’s, Thomas Kelly, was attired in what might be called a rumpled suit, and he did not make a practice of shaving every day, nor every other day.

The ale was unlike anything brewed before or since, foamless, bitter, black as coal, and just as opaque, and pumped from some mysterious source in the cellar. The bitter brew tasted as though anthracite might have been its basic ingredient, but by the second mug, taste was a matter of no consequence, for the potion had begun to work its magic. To the inarticulate, it gave the gift of eloquence, dullards became men of great wit, and the poor in spirit were comforted….”

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Scores of years later, Priscilla and I paid a visit. I had never been. There was no Thomas Kelly at the door, but the ale was still “black as coal and tasted of anthracite”….