The Tender Bar

A New York disc jockey who vanished before his son could talk is the voice J.R. Moehringer spent his boyhood straining to hear on the radio. When it went silent, he found new voices at the corner bar, an old New York saloon full of cops, poets, actors, lawyers and gamblers. Regulars such as his Uncle Charlie, who looked like Humphrey Bogart, and Joey D, a brawler with a soft heart, became a kind of fatherhood by committee. The bar stayed a refuge through his floundering years as a scholarship student at Yale, a stint selling housewares at Lord & Taylor and a job at The New York Times. George Clooney later directed a film of it.

Howard Lutnick, chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, called it an uplifting story set in a place and manner no one would expect.