Author John Malcolm Brinnin’s description of Fiddler’s Green as “the mythical sailor’s heaven” (“The Sway of the Grand Saloon,” October, 1971) was “too much for an old cavalryman to bear,” according to James C. McBride, of Wichita Falls, Texas. He writes: I shouldn’t hope to find a sailor there, but the shades of Stuart, of Sheridan, and of Jonathan M. Wainwright, who named his retirement home in San Antonio “Fiddler’s Green.” The War Department’s 1948 history of the Medal of Honor quoted a song of the Sixth Cavalry:
In all justice to Mr. Brinnin, the Oxford English Dictionary describes Fiddler’s Green as being of nautical derivation and defines it as: “A sailor’s elysium, in which wine, women, and song figure prominently.”