BOURBON NEWS & NOTES – for 12 February 2021, by Susan Reigler
Toast Black History Month with Tom Bullock’s Old Fashioned
Famed African-American bartender Tom Bullock was born in Louisville in 1872. He practiced his mixology at several august establishments, from Louisville’s Pendennis Club, to the Kenton Club in Portland, Oregon, and most famously, at the St. Louis Country Club. It was there that one of his most devoted followers was George Herbert Walker, grandfather of president George W. Bush. Walker even wrote the introduction to Bullock’s The Ideal Bartender, a collection of recipes published in 1917, just before Prohibition struck.
That introduction was short, but on point, reading in part “… I doubt that he has ever erred in even one of his concoctions.” Interestingly, in 1913, Walker had been sued for alleged libel by ex-President Theodore Roosevelt regarding the latter’s drinking habits. Roosevelt maintained he had had “only had a few...
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