January 2011

On January 5, 1948, Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the American Male was published, much to the delight of voyeurs, sociologists, and joke writers. The book had impeccable scholarly credentials: Its author was an Indiana University biologist and its publisher was W. B. Saunders, a respected company specializing in medical texts. Because of the book’s expected popular appeal, Saunders had ordered twenty-five thousand copies instead of its usual two or three thousand. They instantly disappeared from the shelves, and soon two printers were working around the clock to keep up with the demand. The book came to be called simply “the Kinsey Report,” perhaps to spare the squeamish from having to pronounce the word that begins the title. And for those who actually read it, the Kinsey Report was an eye-opener, revealing that premarital and extramarital relations, homosexual intercourse, oral sex, masturbation, “petting to climax,” and a host of other practices were much more common than almost anyone would have guessed.

On December 23 researchers at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, successfully built and tested the world’s first transistor. It was an ugly-looking affair, cobbled together from irregular chunks of metal and polystyrene and gnarled wires held in place with lumps of solder. But it worked. The researchers—John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley—had proven that a sliver of semiconducting germanium, suitably mounted and connected, could amplify electrical currents just as well as a vacuum tube.

The first week of 1923 saw two key milestones in America’s Roaring Twenties obsession with mental and spiritual matters. On January 1, in Los Angeles, Aimée Semple McPherson opened the 5,300-seat Angelus Temple, home base for her Church of the Four Square Gospel. McPherson had spent most of the previous decade as a barnstorming preacher, and her characteristically Californian mix of fundamentalist religion and mass entertainment would amount to a permanent tent revival.

On January 12, 1848, Rep. Abraham Lincoln of Illinois made his first major address to the House of Representatives. His subject was the war with Mexico, which was winding to a close. Lincoln had endorsed the war as a candidate in 1846, but now he vigorously disputed President James K. Folk’s pretext for starting it, that Mexico had “shed the blood of our fellow citizens on our own soil” by attacking an American fort on the north bank of the Rio Grande in May 1846.

The territory where the skirmish took place was claimed by both countries. Therefore, Lincoln said, if the settlers in the area (who were in fact Mexicans, as everyone knew) had objected to Mexico’s rule, they could have settled the issue themselves by rebelling. “Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better,” he said. “This is a most valuable,—a most sacred right—a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.”

On December 1, in what is now Monrovia, Liberia, three dozen former American slaves desperately fought off an armed assault by a thousand native-born Africans determined to reclaim their land. The freemen had been brought to Liberia by the American Colonization Society (ACS), which hoped to solve America’s growing racial problems by moving free blacks “back” to Africa. According to a sympathetic chronicler, the society’s founders felt “that giving freedom to the slave was not enough as reparation: he should be restored to the land of his fathers and resume an existence in Africa as a Christian and an enlightened propagator of civilization.”

It was the second day of my only stint as a bartender in Sun Valley, Idaho, and I was busily occupied fulfilling the hydration needs of customers in the Calico, a Trader Vic’s—like restaurant and bar. Madly mixing exotic tropical concoctions, I was interrupted by April, a somewhat surly and impatient food server, who launched a mega-order of drinks at me. I wrote them down and began assembling a diversified portfolio of spirits. Unable to define one, I hurried over to the drink mix book and began thumbing through it. April asked what I was doing, and I explained that though I knew how to make a regular martini, I wasn’t sure how to make a vodka martini.

With a withering look of disgust, April ordered me to grab a chilled martini glass, wash and empty it of dry vermouth, pour in some vodka and stick in an olive. “And?” I asked.

I’ve heard that in the training of men in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police headed for duty in the Northwest Territories, there comes a time when the prospective officer is given a stout, sealed wooden box marked OPEN ONLY IN AN EMERGENCY . The usual response is, “What’s in it?”

The trainer says: “Let me set the scene. You are stuck; your transport—horse, dogs, canoe, tractor, whatever—has quit. You are alone in a cold NO PLACE . That is when you open this. Inside you will find some bottles and glassware. You are puzzled and very worried. As you are opening the bottles and preparing to pour their contents, over the hill, or across the snow, will come another man. He will yell: ‘Not too much vermouth!’ And you are saved.”

Keep up the good work.

The recipe for the driest martini may belong to Jim Brosnan, former majorleague pitcher with the Cubs, Cardinals, Reds, and White Sox. His book, The Long Season , describes the following scene in St. Petersburg, Florida, in March 1959.

“‘Have you asked Hemus yet what he intends doing with you this year?’ my wife asked me.

“‘Yes. As a matter of fact, I talked with him today.’ I was stirring the gin gently with a vermouth soaked spoon.”

Max Rudin’s piece in the July/August issue of American Heritage was a masterly study, but one martini fact went unmentioned, the third ingredient to the famous cocktail—the olive, onion, or lemon peel! I don’t know who was responsible for introducing the olive or the lemon peel, but I’ve always been informed the onion made its debut at the bar of the Players Club in New York. The famed artist Charles Dana Gibson ordered a martini with an olive, but the bartender had run out of olives so he substituted a pearl onion. Thus was “The Gibson” martini born.