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OldWaldorf Bar Days
study and zealous contemplation, if not amazement, in
the fact that men once were able, year after year, to get
outside so many kinds of more or less ardent spirit, and
in such quantity, and still survive. Well, they didn't all
survive. They made patients for the specialists at Carls–
bad and other European cure resorts, and in many cases
quit this sphere when still in their prime. But when all
is said, the searcher for prehistoric man, for ancestors
of much greater stature, may halt when he reads of the
exploits of the exponents of the American School of
Drinking, point to the record, scratch his head, and say:
"There were giants in those days." And others will draw
a moral.
"DAN, THE B ARBOY"
With this prefatory tribute to certain accomplishments
of the long-departed School of American Drinking, I in–
troduce a member of its faculty, who for twenty-three
years of its history wielded a wide influence upon a good–
sized portion of the American public. Or if he did not
directly exert that influence, he at least mi,xed the drinks
that did the wielding, and handed them over. But first
let me describe the volume in which he kept the curricu–
lum, as it were, and whose contents will later be spread.
It is a leather-bound volume, its edges brown and its
pages dog-eared from frequent use. For no one man
could keep all its inf0rll1;ation in his head. Briefly speak–
ing, it is a compendium of recipes for making all sorts
of hard thirst-quenchers-a cyclopedia of directions for
composing almost every kind of fancy drink served in
the old Waldorf-Astoria Bar. T o make these of more
value to the historian and the student of the
mores
of
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