Our Town: The Irish Heaven

The place hides in downtown Norwood. Time has separated it from its original setting in the old Cork City neighborhood where it was strategically located across the street from “Stink Alley” and Lyman Smith’s tannery. As a kid, I remembered the place as off-limits to the young, as well as women. We come from a tougher time.

“I remember this like it was yesterday,” George Smith recalled. “Late 1970s, I would play cribbage and talk with my Godfather Bob Barry at the Heaven, and one day we are sitting there and Joe Dugan – Babe Ruth’s old Yankee roommate, who retired to Norwood –was sitting next to me and this guy walks in and orders a Coke at the bar and sits down at the table next to us. I could feel Dugan getting madder and madder, he finally gets up, goes over to the guy and grabs the Coke from him and tells him that this is a men’s bar and if he wants a Coke then go to the soda fountain around the corner. He gets up, says ‘Yes, sir’ and leaves with probably 40 guys looking at him making sure that is all he did.”

“An ideal bar is something that’s gone beyond our ken,” Jack Kerouac wrote in his seminal On the Road: “In 1910 a bar was a place where men went to meet during or after work, and there was a long counter, brass rails, spittoons, a player piano for music, a few mirrors, and barrels of whiskey at ten cents a shot together with barrels of beer at five cents a mug.”

The movie It’s a Wonderful Life reflects mid-century social mores, where idyllic Bedford Falls has none of the jazz playing, flashing neon signs of Potterville, epitomized by Martini’s bar, whose bartender Nick declares, “Hey look mister, we serve hard drinks in here for men who want to get drunk fast. And we don’t need any characters around to give the joint atmosphere. Is that clear?”

“I remember I used to play softball for Bob Jessoe and the Sports Tap down in South Norwood,” Mike Falcone recalled. “One day I had to go into the bar to get something from Jessoe. I don’t drink. And this man in there says, ‘I’m gonna buy you a drink’. And I says ‘I don’t drink!’ And he says ‘I’m gonna buy you a drink’, and I says, ‘Well I can give it to the next guy’, and this guy gets mad at me, and almost wants to fight! Because I wouldn’t take his drink!”

I remember fathers who, without social media and confined to a small town, drowned litters of puppies, because they had no other way to get rid of them. I remember kids putting firecrackers in frogs’ mouths at the pond behind Father Mac’s pool. These were sons of those tannery workers, men often foreign and recently arrived, whose struggles landed hard on their progeny. Bullies didn’t harass with mean words posted on the internet; they beat the daylights out of you on the street.

But there was also a kindred kindness to their fellow man.

“Remember how we used to collect money for Little League?” Barry Sullivan recalled. “One Saturday morning each spring, we had to dress in our uniform, go down the old Junior High and they’d give us each a bucket. We’d go around, collecting change for the Little League. I used to get back faster than anyone, with more money, and they’d say how the hell did you do that? Instead of standing in front of the A&P or First National, I’d go into the Biz Club, and Lewis’s, and the Irish Heaven, and they’d give more money than anyone!”

I remember trooping into another weathered relic under a Karol’s Krueger Ale sign, on 1A at the Walpole line. Just after the drinking age was lowered to eighteen in 1973. We knew it was a hard place, the owner known for not allowing any swearing, but were stunned when denied service. “But we’re eighteen!” Bobby Mulcahy objected. “I don’t care!” Vinny Karol replied, and out we were thrown. We come from a tougher time, but time relaxes its grip, even on tradition. Though still referred to as “the Heaven,” the place carries a new name, Lou and Deb’s. Women are welcome, as well as the young. You can even drink a Coke if you want, without Joe Dugan bothering you.

It’s said that time doesn’t really pass, only people do. In the 1980s the most popular TV sitcom was Cheers, whose refrain was, “Where everybody knows your name.” Its throwback sentiment still resonates here in the Irish Heaven. Her name is Anna, early 60s, I’d guess, and she’s trying to leave. Every table she passes toward the door holds her up, the goodbyes, the hugs, the jokes, all of them old, the tables, the men, the jokes. It takes her twenty-five minutes to leave.

The place hides in downtown Norwood. I’m glad I found it.