Books: Just History

THE OLD-TIME SALOON—George Ade—Long & Smith ($1.50).

Funnyman Ade's theme-song in this backward-glancing booklet: "Not wet—not dry—just history." No believer in the saloon's return, he can call up visions of its past with a dry eye, a drily humorous tongue. Though he gives a fair imitation of a man straddling the Prohibition fence, on p. 162 he drops over on the Wet side, admits to membership in the Association Against the 18th Amendment.

Author Ade pokes heavy fun at those who sentimentalize over "the poor man's club," says the brewers brought Prohibition on themselves by the abuses consequent on their forcing the sale of beer. Of the saloon's denizens only the barkeep emerges unscathed from Author Ade's hands. "He was at least as human and humane as his contemporaries and much more temperate in his habits. Let his epitaph be kindly."

Primarily "just history," The Old-Time Saloon is written with serious humor, earmarked here & there as Ade-made. With a crocodile tear in his eye, Author Ade describes an oldtime Kentucky belle: "You could span her waist with your two hands but she couldn't sit down in a tub." He recounts the feat of Tom Heath, who was ejected from an Irish saloon on St. Patrick's Day "because he ate the shamrocks on the bar, thinking they were watercress."

Author Ade's most astounding assertion: that he has never seen the inside of a speakeasy, never hopes to see one.

The Author, Within the memory of living men, 65-year-old George Ade was accounted one of the three brightest boys in Chicago (the others: Cartoonist John Tinney McCutcheon, Howard Hackett). From a reporter on Chicago's Record George Ade rose to the level of "Mr. Dooley" (Finley Peter Dunne) with his Fables in Slang which H. S. Stone & Co. printed, Clyde J. Newman illustrated. No longer most up-to-date of U. S. slangsters, but wealthy, still unmarried, Author Ade winters in Florida, lives as a gentleman farmer in Brook, Ind. Golfing enthusiast, football fan, he is known as Purdue's patron saint.