Jon Smiley
photo by: Shutterstock
The bourbon-based mint julep was the drink of choice in the South in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
I’m sure most of us have heard of the mint julep, a bourbon-based cocktail associated with the American South and the Kentucky Derby. During the Civil War and up until 1920s, the mint julep was the drink of choice and Tom Bullock made one of the best around.
Born in 1872, Bullock was the son of a former slave who fought for the Union. He got his start as a bellboy at the Pendennis Club in Louisville, Ky. Alongside James E. Pepper, he popularized the Old-Fashioned and eventually honed his bartending skills.
Harry Turner skewered St. Louis society and introduced the city to fast cars and Bohemian revelry
What does a city as staid as St. Louis do with a guy like Turner?
50s Vintage Dame/Illustration Room
Near suppertime on a June evening in 1928, a man with a womanâs Spanish shawl draped over his broad shoulders held an ice pick aloft as he executed âa kind of an Indian war dance,â according to the police report, on the wet cobblestones of the Mississippi levee. Henry Smith âHarryâ Turner III, scion of one of St. Louisâ founding families, was held for observation at City Hospital, but there were extenuating circumstances to show him sane. He was under considerable stress, out on bond after being charged, not for the first time, with obscenity, thanks to his gleeful publication of yet another shocking article in his magazine. He was also, one suspects, three sheets to the wind.