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Rick Mynar, owner of Mynar’s Bar in West, and his fiancee Michelle Carroll preside over the community fixture highlighted in the new book “Texas Dives.”

A magazine writer and a photographer walk into a bar, and if that bar happens to be Mynar’s Bar in West, the punchline is a book.

Mynar’s Bar, holding down the corner of Oak Street and Roberts Street in downtown West for much of a century, finds itself a stop on a 13-bar tour captured in the new book “Texas Dives: Enduring Neighborhood Bars of the Lone Star State.”

Anthony Head, writer and a former editor of Bon Appétit magazine, wrote the book with photographer Kirk Meddle providing the photographs and attributes its inspiration to a hot afternoon nine years ago when he and Meddle turned off Interstate 35 for a beer in West.

They found Mynar’s, walked through its screen and solid doors into its midafternoon shadows and crossed its wooden floor to the bar where friendly co-owner Linda McWilliams, cigarette in hand and nursing a can of Dr Pepper, asked the two strangers, “Just passing through?”

For Head, who has written about scores of restaurants, wineries, bars and eateries in his career, her question crystalized a moment, or maybe a sensibility: the type of bar that cultivates community within a community. “I turned to Kirk and said, ‘We need to write a book,’” he remembered.

Armed with their new book, which they researched and wrote largely in 2018, Head and Meddle have spent the summer revisiting the 13 bars profiled in the book in a unique fusion of book tour and live concert. They visit Mynar’s Bar on Wednesday, Sept. 21, with Austin musician Sid Grimes bringing the music. The visit will be bittersweet as McWilliams, its muse, died last year. Head, speaking from San Marcos in a recent phone interview, said part of Wednesday’s event will honor McWilliams, who co-owned and ran the bar with her brother Rick for nearly 20 years.

Though the description “dive bar” may seem a negative, conjuring an image of a dark interior, smells of stale beer and cigarette smoke, and a vague sense of menace, that’s not the working definition that Head has for his book. “Dive bars have no legal definition, so we are all free to come up with our own definition,” he said.

His definition centers on community, one distilled over time and seasoned by its regular customers. “They treat the bar as their social club and in return they protect the bar,” Head said. “There are conversations going on in that bar for decades, customer to customer, night to night to night.”

Told that definition could cover many, if not most bars in rural Texas, Head said they limited their consideration to bars that had at least another one in the area for comparison’s sake and visited some 30 bars in their research, stopping at the ones making the cut for the book at least three times each.

Mynar’s finds itself in the company of dive bars in Fort Worth, Houston, San Marcos, Dallas, College Station, Port Aransas, Galveston and Austin.

Rick, 61, gives a good-natured shrug when asked about his reaction to Mynar’s role in the book. It’s good to be noticed and it may steer out-of-town visitors their way, but Mynar’s has always been more about family, both biological and the one composed of bar regulars, to him.

It’s been in the family since 1923 when his grandparents John and Rose opened it as a grocery store, with Rose later changing it to a bar after John’s death. Their son Felix, Rick and Linda’s father, took it over from his mother in 1977 and ran it for 33 years, six days a week, closing every night while also farming and ranching, Rick recalled. He died 18 years ago, although his memory still hangs over Mynar’s. Linda and Rick bought out the bar from their siblings in 2003, the year before Felix’s death. Now, after McWilliams’ death, “that leaves me,” Rick said.

Originally a grocery store, Mynar’s Bar has watched over the corner of Oak and Roberts Streets in downtown West for nearly a century.

The bar hasn’t changed much from the days of Rick’s boyhood when he swept its wooden floors for the princely sum of 50 cents a day. There’s a couple of TV screens now, some video slot machines, a side room for overflow crowds or special activities, and a wall opened up to reveal a pool table in the back.

Two locations speak the most to Rick: a worn spot on the floor at the end of the bar where his mother used to perch on a stool and a dark strip running along the back edge of the bar counter, rubbed in place by years of Felix holding a can of beer while chatting up customers and spinning stories.

The neon signs of mainstream beer brands glow on a far wall. Above, dozens of dollar bills hang from the bar’s wooden ceiling, relics from a game that had customers putting a tack through a bill, wrapping it with a coin for weight, then throwing it upward to make it stick. Gone is a panel near the bar’s aged cash register, the “loser’s wall” where the unsuccessful ended up posting their bills.

It all adds up to what makes Mynar’s Mynar’s, outside of its people, of course. Rick and his fiancee Michelle Carroll now run the bar after the death of McWilliams last year and while the business of a small bar is rarely easy, they do what needs to be done to keep Mynar’s alive. “This will never be changed, never,” Rick vowed.

Mynar’s clientele shifts with the hours. Afternoon regulars are there largely for beer and conversation, so the jukebox isn’t on. Around 7 p.m., a younger evening crowd drops in and the music kicks in as the bar gets noisier. Weekends find more out-of-town visitors in the mix as the regulars are home, then on Mondays the cycle begins again.

Norman Payne, 75, anchors a back table with a bottle of Miller Lite during an afternoon visit and considers himself a regular. “I’m the first shift,” he explained. He became a regular customer decades ago, dropping by after working in Hillsboro, and became friends with Felix, then Linda and Rick after Felix’s death 18 years ago. “(Rick’s) dad was the good storyteller,” he said, smiling at the memory. “I just listened.”

Payne spends many of his afternoons as a retiree at Mynar’s, but keeps an eye on the clock when he does. “My wife has supper ready between 5:30 and 6 p.m. and I don’t want to miss it,” he explained with a twinkle. His time at Mynar’s provides a break from home routine. “We’re side by side all day long at home, but we both need some time apart.”

On Mynar’s back wall is Denver Koon’s full-sized painting of the late James Hand, a West native and well-known singer/songwriter who often played Mynar’s with his band. Live music on Friday and Saturday nights is part of the scene at the bar.

Veteran West-area country musician Joel Wood is one of the regulars playing for the regulars and said there’s a welcome feeling whenever he plays Mynar’s. “These are normal, everyday people. There’s a real down-to-earth kind of vibe and they like old school country music, which is what I play,” he said. Wood also throws in a Hand song or two when he performs there and there’s usually several who recognize the songs.

“It’s kind of like ‘their place,’” Wood said. “Everybody knows everybody. No one’s a stranger.”

When, where: 7 p.m. Wednesday at Mynar's Bar, 121 E. Oak St., West.

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Carl Hoover has covered Waco arts and entertainment, and more, for the Tribune-Herald since 1984.

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Rick Mynar, owner of Mynar’s Bar in West, and his fiancee Michelle Carroll preside over the community fixture highlighted in the new book “Texas Dives.”

Originally a grocery store, Mynar’s Bar has watched over the corner of Oak and Roberts Streets in downtown West for nearly a century.

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