Young SteveI never really had much of a chance to not live a drinking mans life.

I grew up in an area of New York City named Inwood. It was a very Irish Catholic neighborhood with a bar on every corner.   The great newspaper man Walter Winchell used to refer to it as Ginwood.

The corner Saloon on my street was called the Shannon View.   In my childhood mind this was the place where all the fun happened.

It was the place I was told to go to if there was ever trouble and I could not find my parents.

It was where the young people and the older people all gathered together to share thoughts, laugh, sing and teach each other.

It was wear my Dad would go if he was a few bucks short on the rent. He would get it from the Shannon View’s benevolent owner.   He would tell my father upon making the loan ” if you can’t pay me don’t stop coming in. I’ll loose the money but not the customer”.

I look at Saloons as a great convivial place where everyone who has the price of a drink in his pocket is as good and smart and entitled as anyone else, regardless of social status or wealth.

It is the most equal place in the world.

I started tending bar at nineteen years old.   Through the years I have met some of the most interesting, smart, funny, intellectual and sexy people in the world.  

My ability to handle myself in bars led to other career opportunities.   My entire broadcasting/journalism career started because I met a radio DJ in a bar.   It is a career that has lasted well over twenty years.   Yet, no matter how much I have accomplished, no matter how many Television shows and Radio shows I have done, deep in side I am just the kid who wanted to hang in the Saloon with my Dad and his friends and listen to the stories and sing the songs and have the fun.

I owe a lot to Saloons and I appreciate the Saloon way of thinking and conducting ones self.    Call it a Saloon State of Mind.   A place where there are rules and oddly enough no rules.

I hope, with this blog, I can relate that way of life to the comings and goings in today’s complicated world.

I named this blog “The Saloon Guy ” because that is the greatest imprimatur I can give someone.   Growing up the way I did and where I did, if you were asking about someone and were told ” he’s a great guy, you know him, he’s a Saloon Guy”.   That was just about as good as it gets.

Slainte.

Steve McPartlin