Celebrating Tanstaafl

Tanstaafl Pub has been serving up cold beers and mixed drinks for four decades, making it one of Arlington’s oldest and coolest bars. Owners Jim and Mary Ann LeRoy opened the little dive on April 21, 1976 at 409 North Bowen Road, just north of Division Street, and I was one of its first customers. The LeRoys were hippie-ish by nature and so was their bar. They named it after a chapter from Robert Heinlein’s novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress: Tanstaafl is an acronym of There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

My high school friends and I weren’t hippies in the 1970s, but we liked to party. Since the drinking age was 18 back then, we began hanging out at Tanstaafl and learning how much fun it is to get blasted on pitchers of beer, play pool, and listen to a rocking jukebox for five or six hours. Numerous other dive bars were nearby, such as Pearl’s Cherokee Lounge, Sunshine Bar, and Mary’s Lounge, but none of those bars was as cool as Tanstaafl, which drew an eclectic crowd from the get-go. Hippies, blue-collar boozers, old farts, and young lions mingled together without problems. Drinks were cheap. Mary Ann worked behind the bar and was a funny, opinionated, hell-raising woman. Service was fast and friendly. I remember seeing only one fight between customers in all the years I went there, and it was pretty tame.

I played 100 shows there during the 1980s and ’90s. Mary Ann didn’t pay the bands much, but band members got free alcohol. My then music partner Phillip Rodriguez and I drank so much expensive whiskey one night while performing that Mary Ann changed her policy to free beer only. A lot of musicians were pissed off at us after that.

Most of the area’s folk singers found a welcome home on the small Tanstaafl stage. But rockers would blast away as well. One of my favorite rock bands to play there was The Sultans. I still remember frontman Jeff Christian playing a song on his electric guitar by sticking the guitar neck into a moving ceiling fan.

For the first 20 years or so, the bar’s floor was covered with a hideous brown shag carpet that looked like it was shorn off the back of a wooly mammoth. When the LeRoys finally decided to replace the carpet in the 1990s, I wrote a story about it that appeared in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. My fellow reporters couldn’t believe I’d been given a green light for such a frivolous story, but I’d convinced the editors that replacing the carpet at Tanstaafl was monumental, like painting a new ceiling on the Sistine Chapel.

In recent years, the Leroy’s daughter, Mel, has been helping to run the bar, keeping the vibe alive and well. However, she said, “It’s still my mother’s bar. Make no mistake about that.”

The club is hosting more movie nights and special events. And, thankfully, they haven’t banned cigarette smoking.

Tanstaafl Pub is celebrating its 40th anniversary on Friday, April 22, with a ’70s-themed party, and continuing the revelry on Saturday, April 23, with a classic rock tribute featuring many of the musicians who’ve played there over the decades. –– Jeff Prince