1946 The Stock Club Bar Book by Lucius Beebe

slug was four ounces, the cuspidors in the Astor House might :reasonably be confused with umbrella stands, and the business of agitating the liver and stirring the senses into function began early in the day. Gentlefolk often drank a brandy sling heavily laced with Stoughton's Bitters 1 a notable cure-all of the times, before descend– ing .to· breakfast. Hardier if less elegant souls had a slug of rock and rye while shaving and brushed their teeth in a light Moselle. The square hat compartment which was part of every man's chif– fonier of the period was often as not devoted, not to father's best gray topper from Yourmans, but to a .bottle of Lawrence's Medford Rum, a chummy bedroom companion and an aid in tying the com– plicated stocks and Ascots then in sartorial favor. During the ride downtown the pre-breakfast restorative, no matter how liberally applied, tended to die on the captains of finance and ind~stry and a few of the less sensitive of that valiant genera– tion paused at spas previously ascertained and charted near Canal Street before continuing to the shadow of Grace Church, but this was frowned on by the conservative or J. P. Morgan element which maintained that a man should be able to read his own mail, at least' the first delivery, unaided by the office staff. One skirmish with the stock ticker, however, and a ~hiff of what I Jay Gould was doing in the gold market usually set even the Morgan partners to reaching for their hats and telling the receptionist they were just going across the street to the Subtreasury for a few minutes. They invariably returned from the Subtreasury eating a clove. This practice, mark you, of midmorning refreshment originally carried with it no least suggestion of relinquished moral control or

18: Stork Club Bar Book