Anthony Glavin found memories of his home in Massachusetts were stirred when he accepted a kind offer of a lift in Co Kerry.
I was hitch-hiking in Kerry in the late 1980s when a gentleman kindly offered me a lift outside Castleisland. Hearing I hailed from Massachusetts, he mentioned how a near relation of his had once owned a restaurant in that part of the world.
I pressed him for further details, only to end up swapping stories with him about Jim Cronin - his first cousin, my old boss, and the eponymous proprietor of Cronin's Restaurant, a celebrated bar and grill in Harvard Square, Cambridge, where I had spent a summer pulling pints nearly 20 years before.
Founded by Jim's father in the 1920s, Cronin's Restaurant moved among various locations in North Cambridge before it came to Bow Street in Harvard Square in 1929. There it quickly established itself as a favourite hang-out for Harvard students, including the likes of J.D. Salinger and Norman Mailer, who both drank - and wrote - there in the 1940s. Indeed, according to Jim Cronin, "The Great American Novel was always being written in a back booth."
Jim had entered the family business at the age of five, set to peeling potatoes in the kitchen. By the time he entered Boston College, he was running the restaurant for weeks at time because of his father's poor health. At first the business was mostly like a younger brother who needed looking after, but eventually it became a way of life for Jim.
In 1962 the restaurant moved to its final location at 114 Mount Auburn Street, beside the MTA bus depot, and directly across from the US Post Office, both of whose grey-uniformed workers could be found on a bar stool at various hours throughout the day.
The literary aura of the place was still in evidence when I arrived there in the summer of 1971. On my first night behind the bar, Paul Cronin, Jim's youngest son, pointed out a big blond fellow, whispering how he had once published a short story in The New Yorker - and had struggled to write another line since.
Later that summer, Teddy Sullivan, another barman, showed me Kurt Vonnegut's autograph which he had secured the previous night. Teddy regretted having asked for it, however, as Vonnegut, no doubt hoping to enjoy an anonymous jar, had immediately fled the joint. For his part, Teddy was re-reading all of Shakespeare that summer, as well as writing a novel.
Not to be outdone, I was myself soon at work on a short story, set in that very bar and grill. "It was important to get a head in this business," I wrote. "If not, the waitress stirred the beer with a swizzle stick until it overflowed onto the bar."
If fewer Harvard students frequented Cronin's by the 1970s, the place still boasted enough characters to fill several novels. There was, for example, a dishwasher from Brooklyn - small, mustachioed, a bit like Basil Fawlty's Manuel - who answered to both Captain or Buckeye, and who left every evening at closing time for a cafeteria near South Station, across the Charles River in Boston, where he would spend the night.
Bernadette, a young waitress from Dublin, was one of the two actual Irish in residence - as opposed to Irish-Americans. The other, a pensioner named Pat Enright, arrived religiously each night at 11, ordering a bottle of stout which he mixed with a bottle of Ballentine Ale, and filling the bar with the scent of his Erinmore Ready-Rub.
Cronin's was never much to look at: faded red wallpaper and high-backed booths, a not quite seedy, yet utterly comfortable watering hole in an increasingly trendy Harvard Square. A piece of the bar, broken off in an argument over politics, was held in place by caulking, like the gunwale on a boat, while ice machines and dishwashers were pretty much held together by chewing gum and sticky tape.
A local chapter of Mensa met monthly in the back room, but only one of the assembled geniuses drank regularly at the bar, where the occasional rowdiness of the regulars was easily held in check by Cronin, a short, bespectacled, cigar-chomping disciplinarian, who operated very much as a father figure to his family of drinkers. When a member of the restaurant's softball team was temporarily barred for "unsportsmanlike drinking", another player affixed a small strip of black tape over the offending face in the team photograph above the bar.
Such wit was the order of the day in Cronin's, down to the graffiti in the Gents, which announced, among other bulletins, that God's will was in probate. And when an unemployed embalmer once grandly described himself as a Restoration Man, your man from Mensa down the bar dryly inquired if he had known Alexander Pope.
Jim Cronin himself ascribed the restaurant's success to a secret formula: "partly personality, partly location". Yet its last location proved its undoing in the autumn of 1978, when Cronin's Restaurant closed for good, swept into history by the rising tide of real estate speculation in Harvard Square.
"I wish they'd turn the booths into condominiums," one of the mourning regulars remarked. "We could move right in."