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Old Waldorf Bar Days
stead of orange juice, it gave the customer only a piece
of orange peel!
LAW AND ORDER
For years I have been writing about hotel detectives.
As a matter of fact, I once wrote a book about a hotel
detective. But it was not published. A publisher told
me he believed that anything tending to debunk the no–
tion that makes so many readers for detective stories
would be like holding the Bible up to ridicule-so sacred
is the mystery story in the public mind, and the super–
sleuth about whom it usually revolves.
But I was writing of a hotel detective. And a hotel
sleuth in the old days seldom detected.
Boldt had a staff of house officers or, as they came
to be called, "house dicks," whose office was, nominally,
to preserve law and order. Their province, of course, in–
cluded the Bar.
If
the barmen constituted its faculty,
they were its proctors. Their functions frequently ex–
tended more in the direction of showing moneyed ar–
rivals from Pittsburgh and the more Open Spaces about
town after dark, taking them to where a man, fresh
from a more or less smoky or arid territory, might wish
to go-to gambling houses, perhaps, and so on. The de–
tective was supposed to ·act not only as guide but as
bodyguard, and to see that the patron was returned to
the hotel as nearly intact as the adventures of the eve–
ning permitted. Espedal attention must be paid to the
gentleman getting back with his pocketbook depleted
only by the necessary e.xpenses. He was to be kept out
of badger and other con games. Among the house dicks
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