1946 The Stock Club Bar Book by Lucius Beebe

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a matter of common acceptance that even the most :firmly established usages are subject to the mutations of time, and that what was yesterday a practice confined to the far side of the railroad tracks (a part of town often frequented by the best people but always in closed hacks) is today definitely au fait in Mayfair. The concern of men of intelligence is not so much with what may.be fashionable as with what is reasonable, and, while..the notion of drinking cock– tails directly after breakfast may seem at first consideration an eminently unchristian practice, this ·has not always been the case. Disregarding as impertinent to the important matter in hand all learned controversy over the origin of the word cocktail, whether it sprung from the Aztec Xochitl or from the custom of com– pounding the arrangement with a chicken's feather for ornamental panache, the cocktail as it is known today first achieved widespread acceptance, so far as diligent research c.an establish, in the middle years of the nineteenth century. It gained favorable mention in the fifties and sixties as the mid– morning slug of the captains of industry and finance on whose waistcoats it was practicable to play games and who rode downtown from Murray Hill to Wall Street after a breakfast which woulcil I founder today's fragile souls who face the day fortified by an eye– dropper filled with orange juice and a slice of Melba toast. In the President-Grant-and-Erie-common age drinking was a notably masculine occupation and it went hand in hand with chewing tobacco and owning large stables. Everything was big; the whisky

17: Morning