158 / 184
158
OLD WALDORF-ASTORIA BAR BOOK
guage of my tribe."
John W . Gates, of "Betcha-a-million" fame, and his
bosom friend, Colonel "Ike" Ellwood, appeared in the
Bar, occasionally, though Gates' favorite hangout was the
Men's
Cafe,
across the hall. With them when he came to
New York almost invariably trailed Colonel John Lam–
bert, sometime warden of Joliet, Ill., penitentiary, but
president of the American Steel
&
Wire Company at the
time of the formation of the Steel Trust.
In
the Gates aura,
too, one would discover John A. Drake and the latter's
brother-in-law, Theodore P. Shonts-that was before he
was made chairman of the Panama Canal
Commis~ion
and Loyall L . Smith, a millionaire who had once been a
Chicago newsboy. And while its owner was a strict tee–
totaler, the round face of Diamond Jim Brady, brass fit–
tings salesman, gormand and dinner-party impresario,
~ould
be seen circulating among the crowd, as he button–
holed this or that "Big Feller," the orb illuminated by
forty to a hundred carats of diamonds or emeralds, or sap–
phires, or whatnot, that glowed or gleamed from an ex–
pansive shirt-front or a particularly nojsy necktie.
What now seems an almost incredible proportion of the
brokers and operators in the Wall Street of twenty-five to
thirty years ago-at least such as were family men-had
homes in the immediate vicinity of the Waldorf, West–
chester and Long Island and uptown apartments not yet
h~ving
come into widespread vogue as dwelling places for
Wall Street. "Cocktail-hour" drew a real majority of them
to the Waldorf Bar. Whether they drank or not, there
they knew they would find men they wished to see.
Many of these cocktail-hour patrons were hosts at tables.
As a rule, they actually drank cocktails at that time, Mar-