1931 Old Waldorf Bar Days by Albert Stevens Crockett

Hall ofFame fast. But, say, when I found out I couldn't get a room, it suddenly came to me that I didn't have one single, clean, boiled shirt in my baggage, and tonight I've got to go to a dinner where I just must wear a white shirt. I didn't want to buy a new one. Well, at the desk they connected me by telephone with the laundry. There they told me it would take two days. That wouldn't suit me. So I said to the fellow, 'Look here, I've got to have a shirt tonight. If I dori't get it, I'll run through your hotel naked.' And, by George, sir; he promised me a shirt'.'' BREAD AND MILK FOR GATES , John W. Gates, of "Betcha-a-million" fame, and his bosom friend, Colonel "Ike" Ellwood, appeared in the Bar, occasionally, though Gates' favorite hangout was the Men's Cafe, across the hall. With them when he came to New York almost invariably trailed Colonel John Lambert, sometime warden of Joliet, Ill., peni– tentiary, but president of the American Steel & Wire Company at the time of the formation of the Steel Trust. In the Gates aura, too, one would discover John A. Drake and the latter's brother-in-law, Theodote P. Shonts-that was before he was made chairman of the Panama Canal Commission-and Loyall L. Smith, a millionaire who had once been a Chicago newsboy. And while its owner was a strict teetotaler, the moon-face of Diamond Jim Brady, brass fittings salesman, gor– mand and dinner party impresario, could be seen cir– culating among the crowd, as he buttonholed this or that "Big Feller," the orb illuminated by forty to a hundred carats of diamonds or emeralds, or sapphires, [37]