1931 Old Waldorf Bar Days by Albert Stevens Crockett

Old Waldorf Bar Days then among college and university men all over the United States, and in many parts of the world. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Cornell men, for example, in large numbers, either there supplemented their collegiate cur– ricula, or else went to it for post-graduate courses. Other institutions of learning were represented among its stu– dents, but at least the names of those four have been perpetuated in its annals by having cocktails named after them-if there can be such a thing as perpetuity when one is dealing with something dead and gone. For the American School of Drinking is a thing of the past. You, perhaps, may reason that it survives in every other corner of the world save ours, and point trium– phantly to the unchallengeable fact that the sign, "Amer– ican Bar," has started more foreigners trying to read English than all our missionaries and exported Standard Oil cans, tied together. Brother, you are a mere theorist. Practice will make you a pessimist. If you think otherwise, be your own tester. Take a steamer for Shanghai, or Yokohama, or Singapore, or Bombay, or Cairo, taste what comes when you order, and find yourself gazing at the hole of a doughnut. Faint traces still exist, it is true, of that once potent school of bibulous instruction that in its day and in its own peculiar way influenced more thought than the cis– soid of Diodes, or the screw of Archimedes, rivaled the reputation of Socrates for making the worse appear the better reason, and ta.ogled up ~million times more brains than have ever tried to make out what Einstein has been driving at. You may be so lucky as to find those reminders ['6]