Runyon’s owner Healey dies at 77
Sports & media bigs flocked to bar
Joe Healey turned Runyon’s, a New York saloon into the sports world’s crossroads where players, umpires, writers, television executives, police and fans ritually congregated for nightly discourse that could last until nearly dawn.
Healey died Tuesday at age 77, more than two decades after his bar shuttered, leaving his former patrons to reminisce about golden memories of a more innocent time where pens were put away and athletes and media mixed with ease.
“It was a frat house for sports people,” former New York Daily News columnist Mike Lupica recalled Wednesday.
Healey died at his home in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., of prostate cancer, according to his wife, Leeanne Healey. She said he had been diagnosed with it about 20 years ago, and the cancer became more aggressive about 16 months ago.
Born Aug. 15, 1941, Healey was a son of James Christopher Healey, a congressman from the Bronx from 1956-65. A graduate of Villanova, he dreamed of opening a successor to Toots Shor’s Restaurant, “the joint” off Rockefeller Center where the sports world gathered from 1940-59, and then again when it reopened a block away from 1961-71.
While working as a bartender at Mr. Laffs, opened in the 1960s by New York Yankees infielder Phil Linz, Healey decided he wanted to create a Shor’s for his era.
Together with Jimmy Costello, whose father, Tim, owned a bar that was a New Yorker and Daily News hangout, Healey opened Runyon’s in April 1, 1977, on E. 50th St. off Second Ave. and named after sportswriter Damon Runyon.
The Yankees were on the rise, and Runyon’s became a hangout in an age where games ended earlier, and players and media arrived before midnight to dissect events they had just participated in and chronicled, many while eating sizzling steaks.
“That was our place for a cold one after a ballgame,” retired umpire Bruce Froemming said, especially remembering a night when he was doing card tricks there for Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. “One of his henchmen there, he couldn’t believe the trick. He said, ‘I’ll give you $10,000 for those cards.’ Of course we didn’t do it.”