PANAMA: Bottle Alley Barkeep

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It's a sorta habit, the tropics;

It gets you worse than rum. You get away and you swear you'll stay,

But she calls and back you come.

—From an old ballad

The day he stepped off a ship in the Panamanian town of Colón, the tropics got Max Bilgray, a Chicago barkeep done out of a living by the Volstead Act. That was 35 years ago, and Bilgray never even tried to get away. He became, instead, the best-known saloonkeeper in Caribbean latitudes, the boss of Colón's far-famed Tropic Bar and Restaurant. This New Year's, Bilgray's customers will as usual wrap their hands around their holiday glasses of whisky in the bar on the narrow street Colón calls Bottle Alley, but Bilgray will not be leaning approvingly over his corner table. At 70, in failing health, Max Bilgray has sold out.

Hard Drinking. Saloonkeeper Bilgray earned his fame by making the Tropic into a serious drinkingman's bar—an honest saloon that scorned chromium, jukeboxes and B-girls. Its sights and sounds were shiny brass, dark wood panels, man-to-man talk and softly whirling fans.

Night and day—for the Tropic closes only on Panama's election days—customers came and went: freighter captains, Navy C.P.O.s, Panama Presidents and judges, pugs, policemen and passing yachtsmen. A young U.S. Army officer named Dwight Eisenhower once cashed his paycheck there; Argentina's exiled ex-President Juan Perón has dropped in lately. In the early '30s Aimee Semple McPherson, the thrice-divorced Foursquare Gospelbinder, visited Belgray's incognito.

Bilgray created a "Hallelujah" cocktail in her honor, causing her husband of the moment, Singer David Hutton, to start a suit for $1,000,000 (which he dropped after a satisfactory flurry of headlines).

Soft Touch. To Isthmians, Bilgray has always been a generous citizen as well as a storied saloonkeeper. He shelled out thousands to the needy, fed the down-and-out with the Tropic's free lunch, paid fares home for the stranded, lent as much as $5,000 on a few moments' notice. Selling out meant burning $40,000 in old chits. But when a sob story sounded phony, vinegary Max Bilgray could also summon a waiter and say coldly: "Bring Mr. Smith the key to the crying room." In a warm salute to Bilgray, President Ricardo ("Dickie") Arias recently drove across the isthmus and awarded him Panama's Order of Vasco Nuñez de Balboa-doubtless a unique honor for a saloonkeeper. Bilgray will not leave Panama now that he has retired; he intends to live out his days in Colón until#&151;

The spell of the tropics gathers the pile,

And the Dealer takes it all.