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OLD WALDORF-ASTORIA BAR BOOK
and good spirit, who, through the courtesy of friends was
enabled to sample the offerings of many club bars, tasted
a cocktail that seemed authentic. And he never drank a
cocktail at a club bar during the prohibition era without
wondering whether it would prove his last.
Neighboring countries benefited much from prohibition
in the United States. For Canada the Yankee tourist trade
proved a great boon. From early spring to late autumn
the roads carried northward hosts of automobilists, bent,
not upon seeing the natural and other wonders of the
Dominion so much as on sampling the spirituous fare
available to any comer. Usually their first port of call,
once across the border, or after registering at a hotel, was
a government liquor store, which exhibited a generous de–
sire to accommodate, despite the legal limitations on sales
to a single customer. All one had to do was to go back as
early and as often as he pleased. A late afternoon in a
Montreal hotel usually yielded ebullient evidence of a
heavy American invasion, which proclaimed to all within
ear-shot that it had got what it had come for.
Certain steamship companies finally awoke to the pos–
sibilities that lay in catering particularly to our denied
and increasing demand for good liquor and plenty of it;
and week-end cruises, swift turn-about jaunts to the tropics
and return "voyages to Nowhere" won enormous popu–
larity and helped erase some of the "red ink" into which
the
~rans-Atlantic
steamship companies had sunk until they
were almost awash. Many who embarked on such cruises
later yielded curious descriptions of the foreign ports they
had visited, telling of a Havana that was paved with saw–
dust and contained mostly within "Sloppy Joe's"; and a
tour of the British West Indies often seemed to linger