Life Magazine Reveals Liquor from the Past

I have a stack of old issues of Life magazines from the 1950s and 1960s that I’ve picked up for a few dollars each at Half Price Books. They’re a cheap and amusing trip back in time, and I am especially enthralled by the advertisements. The complete lack of cynicism and oh-gee obsession with new technological conveniences remains addicting today – after a weekend afternoon spent flipping old pages, it usually takes a good half hour to shake the lust for Oldsmobile’s new fins, the urge to smoke Tareytons and to mix my Manhattans with Four Roses whiskey.

Much to my delight, Google has recently added the full archives of Life to their Google Books index, allowing searchable full-color scans of every page from 1935 to 1972. Now at my fingertips are the long bizarre treatises on the superiority of Calvert’s premixed cocktails, the thirst-quenching wonder of Sanka coffee, and the anti-dandruff power of Listerine (really).

Amongst this wondrous digitized Kodachrome cavalcade, there are also articles. I was pleased to discover that some of these aren’t so bad either. Case in point, an encyclopedic celebration of liquor, from late May of 1946. Prohibition was still fresh in the nation’s collective memory, and this article reveals a similarly fresh enthusiasm for the connoisseurship that had only been legally possible again for 13 years. 

We begin with the standard “history of booze” section, sporting William Hogarth’s now-obligatory 1751 Gin Lane woodcut, plus a charming Currier and Ives lithograph tracking the stages of drunkenness from “a glass with a friend” through “death by suicide”. Then there’s a beautiful color lineup of 1940s liquor bottles, from the era when booze packaging was as serious and official-looking as currency (with the exception of the cute little Haig dimple pinch bottle – don’t you just want to squeeze it?) and my favorite – a full-color two-page spread of thirty popular cocktails, each posed in gorgeous glassware and annotated with recipe instructions. Here we find a clove-studded Hot Toddy, the eponymous but now-rare Bacardi, plus our elusive friend Crème Yvette, who stars in the bizarre layered Pousse Café.
 

My kind of menu

Near the end is a celebration of famous American bars, then a stunning finale, and something I desperately want to see revived. Page 75 shows us the Vesuvius, a terrifying pillar of booze capped with a flaming rum-soaked orange from a bar called Town House in Los Angeles. There isn’t much information about this Town House place today, although there’s a New Town House that reveals no stated interest in signature cocktails. But judging from the white-coated barman and the $5 price tag on this tower of post-war alcoholic confidence, this was a cocktail destination in its heyday, 63 years ago.

 

I'll have what he's having

I’ve got loads of exploring to do now, with more issues of Life than I ever could have imagined perusing. And who knows – maybe all of this optimistic wonder will inspire me to bring some culinary ghosts back out of the archives. Anyone for a Vesuvius?