The Great American Saloon Series

...The three prime requisites are good booze, good bartenders, and good conversation...

...For once I can't say that I find the free market principle in action very edifying...

...The less said about most of the wine the better...

...Keppel (mistressin-chief to Edward VII) would have envied...

...Those who think othe~vise do so at ~ their own peril...

...In London there is White's for the blue-bloods and millionaires, the Carleton for deep-dyed Tories, the Savile for Aesthetes, and the Savage for authors, artists, and professional men, to mention only a few...

...Often they seem to be sterile museum exhibits of a dead way of life...

...No doubt this is all quite commendable in its way...

...During the last club elections, for example, a well-intentioned lady running for the Board of Directors made carpeting the concrete floor of the Men's Bar a keystone in her platform...

...Kirk's greatest achievement has been to educate American conservatives on their tradition...

...The Men's Bar, National Press Club (V~ASHINGTON)--The trouble with most great American saloons is that they no longer exist, a conclusion reluctantly reached after the most thorough possible research (witnessed by the palsied scrawl of this article in original manuscript...

...But, be warned, those haunting and haunted old corridors have a way of becoming habit forming and, although the Surgeon General has never said so in so many words, I suspect that, in many cases, they can be hazardous to your health...

...So much for the dispensibles...

...At the Press Club, the sexual revolution has been nonviolent and inoffensive, a true phoney war with no killed or wounded on either side...

...Scant reupholsrering and few fresh coats of paint have been more than countered by the pleasant, gradual process of decay and the pervasive sense, strengthened with each passing day, of countless hours merrily misspent within club confines...

...W. Wesley McDonald The Great American Saloon Series by Aram Bakshian, Jr...

...But the nerve center of the Press Club, its true essence, is to be found in the Men's Bar (nowadays, the sex barrier having been broken, it is sometimes referred to as the Tap Room...

...As for the dispensors, they are an altogether worthy lot, including several stout, veteran Hibernians, an obliging Nubian or two, and the intellectual doyen of Washington tapsters, the redoubtable John Prokof--a keen chess player and philosopher manque of Lithuanian origin who views the world, and its microcosmic reflection in the form of his clientele, with a good-natured contempt that is wholly warranted...

...Since the Club occupies the thirteenth floor of the National Press Building, such exits are not encouraged...

...the small lounge with the large window over-looking most of Washington and, before the sun sets, the Potomac as it flows toward Mount Vernon...

...New York can also boast a long and varied list, as, on a smaller scale, can my native Washington where the Metropolitan Club opens its doors to the oldest families and fattest Babbitts, the Cosmos Club to literary men and scientists, and the National Press Club to captains and camp followers of the Fourth Estate...

...It is that purpose that The Conservative Mind has so ably served during the past two decades...

...I have been in love with the splendid, squalid old place ever since we first met, despite the disparity in our ages (it had already passed the half century mark and I was still a callow teenager, editor of my prep school newspaper at the time...

...It is not so much a club as a series of bars, sometimes as many as six of them simultaneously pumping nectar into the ever-yawning maws of the capital's scribblers, news sources, and PR men...

...But bare floors and brass rails alone do not a great American saloon make...

...Even on the worst of evenings, there will be a sprinkling of literate sots spouting Shakespeare, remembering Mencken or reciting barid episodes from the dynastic vendettas and internecine strife that comprise the internal politics of the Club (just now, alas, the liberals seem to have the upperhand...

...She was badly beaten by an old Turk, the yenerable syndicated columnist Holmes Alexander, and one doesn't hear much silly reform talk about the bar anymore, praise be to Allah...

...The Martinis are excellent and, besides all of the major imported and domestic bottled beers and ales, one has a good choice of lagers and even Watney Bitter on tap...

...Exeunt sawdust, brass rails, and cuspidors...

...Others have changed everything but the name...

...Fortunately, the few ladies that enter are usually either strikingly pretty and therefore permissable for scenic value, or such hardened old reportorial harridans that one hardly thinks of them as sex objects...

...Most of the better Bourbons and Scotches are always on hand along with a good range of assorted aperitifs, liqueurs, and liquid rubbish of the Compare and Dubonnet varieties...

...Any evening you might find a mixed forest of journalistic saplings, spruces and burnt out stumps, babbling profound nonsense and nonsensical profundities--local press, foreign correspondents, members of national bureaus, a large Commonwealth Contingent Ithe Canadians seem the best behaved of this lot, and are almost always well-read, civil and house broken), and whatever else chance happens to blow through the swinging door...

...The Alternative April 1974 27...

...The flow of bumpkin legions to the city, and their dubious metamorphosis into smart young moderns with ample leisure time and pocket money (and an almost total lack of creative imagination) has made itself felt amongst the race of publicans...

...True, some of the grand old watering holes still survive in name, a few even with authentic trappings, but the overall impression left by such relics is one of real rather than figurative embalming fluid...

...Drinking, once a noble pursuit for its own sake, is relegated in such cases to the role of psychic lubricant, raising the audacity of the randy boob and lowering the inhibitions of the lonely boobess, prelimina~ to the real business of the evening which, in any event, is seldom consummated on the premises...

...It's a good club, a great saloon, and definitely worth experiencing...

...The National Press Club is by far the most disreputable of the three, and by far the most fun...

...No matter...

...if it is not to be restored, still we ought to understand conservative ideas so that we may rake from the ashes what scorched fragments of civilization escape the conflagration of unchecked will and appetite...

...the grand ballroom which so many visiting celebrities and heads of state have used as a forum during their Washington forays...

...Tasteful tipplers and discerning dipsomaniacs can still find solace in a number of good private club-bars around the globe and revel in an ambiance that, fifty years ago, was typical of the better sort of saloon...

...In all three departments, the Press Club scores well...

...Had she advocated wallto-wall sawdust, the old girl might have stood a chance but carpeting--my God...

...all of them remain today much as they were when I first saw them...

...The long panelled corridor, embellished with front page mats of a bygone era, the dignifled main lounge with its overstuffed sofas and wing chairs and the yellowed Edwardian nude who looks down from the east wall, through generations of cigar smoke and alcohol fumes, with a smiling detachment that the late Mrs...

...enter dim lighting, juke boxes, and not-so-beautiful people in quest of a transient hump...

...You never know who might walk in, who might pass out, or who might suddeMy decide to leave via a window, as happened a few years ago with a despondent veteran member...

...the library with its odd assortment of classics, trivia, and snoozing senior members...

...While amateur sex has been going public, serious saloon keeping has been going private...