The evening before this was commenced your reporter had dined off Bill's notion of a snack: canapés of caviar no bigger than a stove lid, Kansas City T-bones which, conservatively, would serve a family of five people of outdoor habits, roast pheasant, one to a customer, and fresh figs, champagne and cognac beyond recall or counting. An hour later, glazed, dazed, and happy in a distended sort of way, we were in our drawing room wondering how the Southern Pacific Railroad can afford to have Bill on the premises when there was a gentle tapping at the door and one of the diner stewards made an entry with a tray of assorted ham, cheese, and tongue sandwiches, enough for a brigade at a seven-eleven conflagration, and six quarts of milk, this for the two of us. It was in case we were hungry during the night.
“The Wild Man will be very unpleased if you don't eat everything,” he said softly as he withdrew. “We open for breakfast promptly at seven.”
The transcontinental hospitality of the railroads is, for the record, nothing new in the current generation, which believes in its naïve way that the first-rail travelers went west in zulu trains and would be astonished to know that the first streamlined, airflow train was operated by the Baltimore and Ohio back along 1900.
Through cars from coast to coast did not, for the record, come into being in 1946 at the fiat of the C & O's Robert Young, and the writer has before him at the moment the account of the first through train from Boston to San Francisco which was operated on a six-day schedule under the auspices of the Boston Board of Trade.
“This train,” so reads the chronicle, “was made up of eight of the most elegant cars ever drawn over an American railway. They were built by the Messrs. Pullman, and the first car is a baggage, the front end of which has five large ice closets and a refrigerator for the storing of fruits, meats, and vegetables. The balance of the car is for baggage except for a square in one corner where stands a new quarto-medium Gordon press upon which the train's daily newspaper is printed.
”Next comes a very handsome smoking car, which is divided into four rooms. The first is the printing office, which is supplied with black walnut cabinets filled with the latest styles of type for newspaper and job work. This department, we may say without egotism, has been thoroughly tested, and has already turned out some fine work as can be done by those of our brothers who have a local habitation. Adjoining this is a neatly fitted up lobby and wine room. Next comes a large smoking room, with euchre tables, etc. The rear end of the car has a beautifully furnished hair dressing and shaving saloon. Following this comes the two new hotel cars, the “Arlington” and the “Revere” both of which are completely and elegantly furnished and are thoroughly adapted to the uses for which they are destined. Two magnificent saloon cars, the “Palmyra” and “Marquette,” come next. The train is completed by the two elegant commissary cars, the “St. Charles” and “St. Cloud,” each of which is finished in all of its appointments as any of the other carriages noticed.
“The entire train is equipped with every desirable accessory that may tend in the least to promote the ease of the passengers, elaborate hangings, costly upholstery, artistic gilding, and beautifully finished woodwork marking every portion of their arrangements. Among the new features introduced into these cars are two well-stocked libraries, replete with choice works of fiction, history, poetry, etc. and two of the most modern type of Burdett organs. These instruments are complete in every detail of stops, pedals, double banks of keys, etc.”
Refrigerators, library cars, two diners, hairdressing salons, a daily newspaper, and pipe organs! The pioneers certainly had things tough getting across Utah and Nevada in the seventies.
One of this department's first ports of call in the vicinity of the Golden Gate was, of course, Trader Vic's in Oakland, an institutional deadfall specializing in rums of a nature which the French would characterize as formidable even in their straight forms, but which Trader Vic prefers to serve in compounds of multiple proofs, blends, flavors, and degrees of lethal capacity. To watch Vic officiating back of his own bar, playing on the ranks of bottled Barbados, Trinidad, Virgin Islands, Haitian, Demerara, Puerto Rico, New England, Saint-Pierre, Antigua, and Jamaica the way Charlie Schwab's private organist was accustomed to run amuck at the console, is to watch destruction approach in some of its most enchanting forms.
As a smoke to complement his most urgent hellbroth, Vic has had manufactured for him in Havana an all-Cuba cigar twisted three to a bundle and selling under the name of Trader Vic's Crooks. For smokers with a taste for exotic and unconventional smokes that have an Islands touch of barter trade about them, these Crooks are an exceptional item, and this department can never, when confronted with a twisted cigar, forget his first encounter with this old-time type of seegar.
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