1931 Old Waldorf Bar Days by Albert Stevens Crockett

Bar Patterns sometime. If he didn ' t take a drink, he at least took a peep at the "menagerie"; and if the attraction was sel– dom lions, there were certain hours of the day when the k d . h "b 11 " d "b " room was pac e wit u s an ears.

PRIVATr: JoHN

To dismiss a recollection of a place where so much rude, ungainly and uproarious story-telling was done, but where, too, so much real humor came out under the I stimulative effect of generously drunk spirit, without calling to mind one of its most decorative as well as most intelligent wits, would almost mean leaving the best egg out of this rum omelet. Up rises from a table at the farther end of the room a tall, slender man w~ose gray mustache bears evidence that the lingering traces of good liquor may be held too precious for desecration by a pocket handkerchief. "Private John Allen to the bar!" And "Private" John Allen never said nay to -such an invitation. The way he used to tell it, Congressman Allen-of Tupelo, Mississippi, suh!-had dubbed himself with the title by which he was invariably known. After the Civil War he found the South overrun with generals and colonels and majors, so that at encampments of Con– federate veterans, when it seemed that everybody he met had commanded an army, a brigade, a regiment, or at least a battalion, while he himself had never risen above the ranks, he concluded he must be the only pri– vate of the Confederate Army who had survived the [ 63]