Talking about Tom Sharkey, the great heavyweight prizefighter, who kept a saloon with the old-fashioned swinging doors, Mizner said.
Saloon officials say the high alcohol content in the whisky, vodka and other booze keeps the toes sterile, despite being in the mouths of as many as a few dozen people on a given night.
In the heyday of urban ethnic immigration, even anti-Semites allowed that Jews were good at selling drygoods and producing movies, just as Irish Catholics were known to keep a good saloon and walk a decent beat.
Today we would consider Edmund Keyser, who kept a saloon in Philadelphia during the 1860s, a compulsive gambler.
The family brought in a jukebox, a dartboard, later a pair of flatscreen TVs, mounted at either end of the saloon and kept tuned, as a rule, to sport, quiz shows, or (on weekend evenings) talent contests.
He is likely to go down with Dale DeGroff (who calls himself the King of Cocktails) and Nick Zaloumis (who as Nick the Vest has worked for 30 years at Rao's) as a barkeep in the old style, a mixologist who has kept alive these feckless days the saloon traditions of wit, tact, patience and a boundless tolerance for drunks.
Jim Brisco, a former owner of the saloon, used to keep wild peach leaves for tea, his favorite remedy.
He dispensed with the cowboy-in-the-saloon rhetoric.
The saloon opens at eight.
"Never happened!" Chastened, I quit the saloon.
