In Search of Jack Dempsey: A bar and a nail

So, I’m in bar in New York, sipping my cocktail and devouring a steak in a restaurant on Broadway just minding my own business. It wasn’t long before I was startled by a very big and heavy hand connecting to the back of my chair.

Stunned momentarily, I turned around to see who it was, but before I could utter a word, my father said hello to Jack Dempsey, who by now was smiling down at me. Did I mention that at the time, I was sipping a Shirley Temple? After all I was a mere nine years old and it was 1957.

I had absolutely no idea who Jack Dempsey was. No idea that he was at the center of maybe the most controversial boxing match in the history of the sport, still referenced and talked about to this day, The Long Count.

I also had no idea that THE Manassa Mauler was this friendly, warm, smiling man who gave me a souvenir of my visit. A tiny pair of leather boxing gloves with Dempsey’s printed on its attached ribbon. It became one of my favorite treasures because as a girl of 9, I loved tiny things. Lost in a house fire in the 1960’s, it took me more than 40 years to finally replace them when by sheer luck someone was selling a pair from his private stock. They were $40.00. A bargain. One dollar for each year.

I paid it gratefully and now they grace the Boxing Media & Press Office here in New Jersey along with a vintage authentic “Kewpie” Doll pin, exactly like the one Jack Dempsey wore on his coat for good luck when strolling the street outside his restaurant each morning. It’s adorning the drapes behind Eamo Clyne’s desk.

I never forgot Dempsey after that first meeting, and when I was a in my teens, I acquired an 8 mm film clip of The Long Count, which is now transferred to DVD. I list Dempsey as my number 1 favorite all-time boxer along with Joe Louis because I can’t choose one over the other. Classic Joe fights always bring me to tears, but Dempsey I had met, spoken with and was treated as if I were a grown up in a bar restaurant where, as a young girl, I could have felt out of my element.

Not with Dempsey. It was obvious that he loved to be with the patrons in his establishment and to make sure that they enjoyed his food and were well looked after.

In 1974 due to circumstances beyond Dempsey’s control, the restaurant closed. An icon, a gathering place, was now gone and as time went by, its memory faded at least just a little from my memory until Eamo Clyne got to the Jersey shore and we took up looking for boxing in places where no one would dream of finding it.

Eamo Clyne has a large following and somewhere along the line someone must have messaged me to let me in on the secret that one third of Dempsey’s original Broadway bar was bought by owners of a restaurant in nearby Pine Beach, NJ. The establishment was known as the Lamp Post Inn and it’s been there ever since with an autographed picture of Dempsey right behind it above the bar.

Could have knocked me over with a feather, as it’s only five minutes from my home and I never knew.

What we needed was a plan. We wanted a part of the bar, anything, a chip of wood, a rubbing of the wood design, a loose screw. We were like two heat-seeking missiles, or two mice in search of cheese.

Not a drinking gal, I had enough seltzer and Eamo enough Guinness slowly nursed, to re-flood Brisbane. We tried this on two different attempts and wondered what Willie Sutton would have done in a case like this. We wanted a chip off the old block as a souvenir and our situation was becoming dire as I tried to wiggle a lose nail out of its hole to no avail, while Eamo chatted people up to create a diversion.

The nail was unrelenting and I was never able to free it from the hard mahogany. Only a few months later, the restaurant sold and was closed for repairs. Then all hell broke loose and we were in the middle of a long haul with the pandemic of 2020. To this day in 2021, the Lamp Post Inn has still not opened although it has been fully renovated and Jack’s bar is still there.

Terrified that the new owners would throw the old bar out, I made it a point to check on it periodically. It wasn’t until late fall of 2020 that a construction crew was there working on the roof, and due to the balmy weather, the door to the bar was open. I slipped in unnoticed, into the still under construction bar, I telephoned my partner in crime, Eamo Clyne who’s currently in Dublin, to tell him that I was surreptitiously going inside to get that darn nail.

After all, the workers were far up on the roof and had no idea I was even there. Also, the nail in question was a safety hazard, protruding out from underneath the bar. I deemed that I was rendering a service by removing it, if I could. I carefully approached the place where the sharp protrusion had been but to my grand disappointment, the nail was gone. All the nails were gone and all replaced by screws.

Dejected at having failed the mission, I exited the bar and finally got to speak with the crew. They had no idea when the bar would open. I’ve been in touch with the owner who will let me know when he’s going to open so that I can interview him and do a new article about The Lamp Post Inn and Jack’s bar, which is a good thing.

He has no idea that when I do get to go inside to give him an interview, that while I’m sitting at the bar sipping a Shirley Temple with my framed picture of Dempsey beside me, I’ll be working out how I’m going to get a piece of that bar before I leave.