1931 Old Waldorf Bar Days by Albert Stevens Crockett

PART IV Bar Patterns , W HAT now seems an almost incredible proportion of the brokers and opera tors in the Wall Street of twenty-five to thirty years ago-at least such as were family men-had homes in the immediate vicinity of the Waldorf, Westchester and Long Island and up.– town apartments not yet having come into widespread vogue as dwelling places for Wall Street. "Cocktail– hour" drew a real majority of them to the Waldorf Bar. Whether they drank or not, there they knew thei would find men they wished to see. Often one would discover "room-traders" like J akey Field and Bernard Baruch in the crowd, and the two Wasserman brothers, who were heavy speculators, were invariably present. Jay Carlisle, the Wrenn brothers-one of them a famous tennis player,-"Charlie" Knoblauch, the rough-rider, were often pointed out, and William D. Oliver, stock– broker, whose name is now perhaps a memory only to a few middle-aged or doddering old gentlemen, but then everybody's relative! For "Billie" Oliver, as some called [ 45]