The Great American Saloon Series / Nick's Big Train Cafe
Duggan, Joseph P.
"The Great American Saloon Series / Nick's Big Train Cafe" in the world: Rommel by James Mason, Napoleon by Marlon Brando, the Mandi by Lawrence Olivier, Lawrence of Arabia by Peter O'Toole, Dwight Eisenhower by Soupy Sales; none of them will do for me....
...Still, Professor Nahum Sarna's Understanding Genesis (McGraw-Hill, 1966) shows, from a Judaic point of view that should appeal to a broader audience, how modern criticism can be used to enrich the homiletic purposes of the narrative...
...Robert E. Lee is a large part of the story, so we will need co-stars who mesh...
...24 The American Spectator December 1977 And there was Nick's wife, a fragile woman, barely tall enough to see over the bar and garbed Italian mamma-fashion in black...
...They were mostly from Tulane and Loyola, flush-faced frat rats in rugby-striped alligator shirts and smooth-faced, slender girls, quiet and tastefully coifed...
...Sitting beside him in a straight-backed chair and holding his hand was a hangjawed woman with big glasses tumbling over her nose...
...Son-of-a-yellowbellied-rebel...
...The trinitarian Christian A Child's Bible (Wolfe Publishing Limited, 10 Earlham Street, London W.C...
...Eric, could that be...
...He poured freehand like he always does...
...And when wecame back"—she pointed to a corner of the ceiling—"there was one Strega bottle_ holding up the ceiling...
...Grant understood as much from the look of concern on my face...
...They age well, giving young adults a necessary foundation for reclaiming their cultural birthright, while helping them to define aspects of it as religious, historical, ethical, or literary...
...Joseph is the patron saint of happy families and a happy marriage, and your patron too...
...They would come all the way from Hollywood to see Nick...
...It was like my grandmother back from the grave...
...She scurried the length of the bar back and again, carrying the greenbacks she collected to the cash register...
...High on the wall across the room was a mural, painted in a sort of urban primitive style, of a big train...
...The best anybody else could do was twenty-four...
...The next thing I knew she had clasped her hand in mine and given me the card...
...I asked...
...If Robert Redford ever starred in Grant, that would sure button MacArthur's lip...
...Miss Dora peered through her ancient rimless glasses...
...That hamburger really had been too much for her...
...2, hardback and paper, 1971) provides an abridged text rewritten in simple language by Anne Edwards and illustrated by Charles Frontand David Christian...
...I had often thought how wonderful it would be to be played by Robert Redford...
...Maybe we can still work something out," Grant concluded...
...He's the greatest bartender that ever lived...
...It's this damn movie...
...You should pray every day to St...
...Nick muttered where he wished Tex would go and he murmured Italian blandishments to the blonde...
...Retelling them (or even selecting editions from which to read them aloud) requires thought, discrimination, timing, and a knowledge of one's child...
...She was outfitted complete in nurse's garb, cap and white sneakers and all...
...Jimmy was sloshing more bourbon into my...
...Maybe he'll have an idea or two...
...Joseph...
...Have you talked to Lee about it...
...Fact is," Grant answered, "Bobby and I aren't speaking...
...Wasn't enforced...
...Yes, he was born right here in N.O...
...His feet were propped up by a pillow that rested on a case of Falstaff empties...
...Bible stories thus force parents to enter into the minds of their children, as well as into perennial problems of scholarship and morals...
...In doing so, we hope to provide not only useful advice, but also some insight into the workings and frolics of nineteen extraordinary minds...
...If you The American Spectator December 1977 25...
...She asked us if we'd come to the back room with her and if she could treat us to a round of drinks...
...The drinks were powerful and tasty, and Miss Dora regaled us with stories...
...Our visit to Nick's was nearly a year ago, and Eric writes me now to say that Nick is back on his feet again...
...As it is, I have an option on Steve McQueen...
...Well, all right," he muttered...
...I nudged Eric and pointed...
...Nick Castrogiovanni...
...She pulled a one-ounce pousse-café glass to the counter...
...Here, you take this," she said...
...Army in Italy, come back and opened the bar in 1924...
...glass and I asked him if somebody could tell me more about the place...
...What's more, I have a special problem...
...It would be hard to get financial backing for the kind of project he envisioned...
...Father of Rachel and Benjamin Auspitz, aged 10 and 4. Telling Bible stories to one's children has several advantages for parents who do their homework...
...The tiny saloon enjoys wide renown for its smooth and flavorful drinks, and that night, as always, the place was crowded...
...We assented...
...We caught a lot of elbows from the crowd...
...There's so many stories about this place," Miss Dora resumed...
...Miss Dora choked...
...Otherwise the bar would've been wrecked...
...well, maybe Redford and Paul Newman would have been better, but we couldn't get Newman because he says it's against his political principles to play generals...
...I couldn't blame Grant...
...Anyway, it was easy enough to agree on Redford and Hoffman, but that muleheaded Bobby Lee insisted that he should be played by Redford...
...They brought me a hamburger with onion on it for supper and I never should've eaten the whole thing...
...Marc U. Porat...
...Okay, sweetheart," he said, "what ya got here is the next Star Wars, a genyoowine blockbuster that's gonna rewrite all the records, ya understand...
...How's that...
...And with Eric's company and that of a blonde schoolmate I did...
...They invite a wealth of interpretation, elaboration, legend, and lore...
...Two ceiling fans, one missing a blade, spun over our heads...
...And he didn't use no gadgets or no eyedroppersor nothin...
...It's Nick," he said, and we began to shove our way across the floor...
...The nurse warned us not to get Nick too excited, and since my Weller had gone watery, I decided to inch back toward the bar...
...He really had learned how to talk turkey...
...He's too modest to speak for himself...
...Many of the stories themselves appeal immediately to children...
...Narrow wooden slats sticky with chipping varnish made up the ceiling, and out of them poked four naked incandescent bulbs...
...This is Nick's Big Train Cafe, a celebrated watering-hole in a city famous for its fonts of refreshment...
...Miss Dora was tired on her feet...
...As a result, they raise difficult questions, which a parent must be prepared to answer...
...A crapulous fat fellow in cowboy clothes who called himself Tex harassed the blonde in Cajun accents...
...My friend Eric Wedig had been urging me for months to come and visit Nick's...
...I have been working through (one does not read these documents) the nine volumes of The Information Economy, prepared by a research team of the Office of Telecommunications, of the U.S...
...Joseph P. Duggan, former assistant managing editor of The American Spectator, is an editorial writer for the Greensboro [North Carolina] Record...
...The blonde ordered a Black Velvet Smash, I a Weller and water...
...Department of Commerce, funded by the National Science Foundation's RANN/ Division of Advanced Productivity Research and Technology, and authored principally by Dr...
...After the War he won first place in a contest in Rome pouring pousse-cafés against bartenders from all over Europe...
...There used to be rooms upstairs...
...Her son, she told us, was both an M.D...
...Author of The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism and The Coming of Post-Industrial Society...
...Would she reminisce, tell a story or two, I inquired...
...I ain't feelin' well...
...It is," she said...
...It was a side of Grant I had never seen before...
...Nick could fill one of these with thirty-two layers of different liqueurs...
...I made introductions...
...I looked the place over...
...I asked for the Bayou Bomb, made from whiskey imported from Evangeline's old digs, Acadia...
...Now there is no upstairs at all...
...I tried again...
...Miss Dora, can't you tell me a little about Nick and the old days...
...It must have been near two in the morning when the cab came to take Nick and Miss Dora home...
...As soon as we began to discuss it, I had the worst argument of my life with him...
...it preserves some of the majesty and earthiness of the King James and Hebrew originals...
...John dribbled my Weller into a glass...
...I asked...
...this is one of the penalties of advancing middle age...
...We had no problem figuring out the co-stars who ought to play us...
...It was obvious, from just that one remark, that Grant was hopelessly out of touch with the mass taste...
...Eric had told us how Nick, the Grand Mixmaster himself, was out of commission with a broken hip, and filling his place behind the bar we found his younger brother John, who is 82 years old...
...Nick said he had slipped coming out of the can and broken his hip, but that wouldn't keep him laid up for long...
...He even gets in back of the bar now and then, and his pouring arm is limber...
...JOSIAH LEE AUSPITZ Writer...
...Joseph's Guild comes around every year for a collection and they gave us that...
...What about Prohibition, we wondered...
...Is that a picture of St...
...That's my name, Joe...
...It took us several minutes of determined squirming to reach the bar...
...She stepped away a moment to make change at the cash register and as I followed her movements I saw mounted in a slot on the register what looked like a holy card—the kind you get at Catholic wakes or that the nuns gave you when you behaved in school...
...Bible stories deal compactly with an epic range of experience not to be found in contemporary books for juveniles...
...to remember what else Miss Dora told us, but I know she said plenty...
...I can't seem...
...Thanks to Supreme Court rulings and to the marked inferiority of the sacred to the profane in television programming, the Bible is one realm of a child's experience that can remain relatively within a parent's control, even after the child enters school and passes from the age of innocence to that of barbarism...
...A towering Negro named Jimmy, wearing a white, busboy's coat four sizes too small and whose hair was buzzed like a Marine's, shook the blonde's creamy drink...
...It's science fiction they want these days, isn't it...
...But in '57 the hurricane tore the second floor off...
...Christmas Book Recommendations We offer here gift suggestions from some of the authors whose writings would top our own list of recommendations...
...I should've cut it in half, you know ?" I retreated and tugged on the Weller...
...We had just seen All the President's Men and we knew that Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffmanwould be the perfect pair...
...1977 Josiah Lee Auspitz DANIEL BELL Professor of sociology at Harvard...
...He'd gone overseas in the War, served with the U.S...
...My friends had the house specialty, Nick's Golden Spike, of which the chief ingredients are scotch and Lochan Ora scotch liqueur...
...You oughts talk to Miss Dora," he said, pointing to his left and downward...
...The St...
...THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES by Joseph P. Duggan Nick's Big Train Cafe At 2800 Tulane Avenue in New Orleans, across from the Dixie Brewery, stands a blighted little frame building with peeling paint and a disclaimer hung above the door: "WE DO NOT SERVE DIXIE BEER...
...And he produced another sheaf of papers, much thicker than the first...
...Joseph that you have a happy marriage...
...Then a blush of uxorial pride colored her face and she began to recount the memories...
...In a many-culted country one hesitates to suggest "background reading" or specific editions to a general audience...
...and a Ph.D., and was she ever proud of him, and her granddaughters, were they ever beautiful...
...I have been too busy writing a book to read a book...
...And beneath it on an overstuffed easy chair sat a frail man, up in years...
...Can you imagine that?—especially since Robert Redford is so obviously the perfect me...
...down on Poydras Street some 83 years ago, he told us...
Vol. 11 • December 1977 • No. 2
