1931 Old Waldorf Bar Days by Albert Stevens Crockett

OldWaldorf Bar Days study and zealous contemplation, if not amazement, in the fact that men once were able, year after year, to get outside so many kinds of more or less ardent spirit, and in such quantity, and still survive. Well, they didn't all survive. They made patients for the specialists at Carls– bad and other European cure resorts, and in many cases quit this sphere when still in their prime. But when all is said, the searcher for prehistoric man, for ancestors of much greater stature, may halt when he reads of the exploits of the exponents of the American School of Drinking, point to the record, scratch his head, and say: "There were giants in those days." And others will draw a moral. "DAN, THE B ARBOY" With this prefatory tribute to certain accomplishments of the long-departed School of American Drinking, I in– troduce a member of its faculty, who for twenty-three years of its history wielded a wide influence upon a good– sized portion of the American public. Or if he did not directly exert that influence, he at least mi,xed the drinks that did the wielding, and handed them over. But first let me describe the volume in which he kept the curricu– lum, as it were, and whose contents will later be spread. It is a leather-bound volume, its edges brown and its pages dog-eared from frequent use. For no one man could keep all its inf0rll1;ation in his head. Briefly speak– ing, it is a compendium of recipes for making all sorts of hard thirst-quenchers-a cyclopedia of directions for composing almost every kind of fancy drink served in the old Waldorf-Astoria Bar. T o make these of more value to the historian and the student of the mores of [ 108]