SAN FRANCISCO BAR-TENDERS.

Globe, Volume VIII, Issue 956, 18 July 1877, Page 3

SAN FRANCISCO BAR-TENDERS.

The San Francisco correspondent of the Auckland “Herald” gives the following description of the bars and barmen of that city: — Except in the city dives, low under dens, “ dead falls,” men only are employed to concoct and administer the hundred and one drinks necessary to satisfy the peculiar state of the average Californian. These are taken from every class, hut a few months’ drill makes them all akin. They all wear the same livery, facings, and magnetic smirk. Generally fat, fair, and well looking, clean-shaved, bar the lip, and a bewitching imperial, hands dainty and white as a lady’s, and as richly adorned with sparkling gems. An oversuit of white linen, pants black broadcloth, boots patent leather, heavy gold chain and selfwinder, glittering white enamelled shirt bosom richly spattered with diamonds, hair gorgeously arranged in an imposing mass, lifted from the side head by a paste of grease, and plastered down on the forehead by a similar process, until the circling lines almost touch the cosmctiqued eye-brows, moustache waxed into dagger points, a rivulet of selfsatisfaction breaking up into little cascades all over the heavy powdered face, an unctuous voice that will not be denied ; there you have a San Francisco bar-tender. The nominal pay of a first-class bar-tender is about £3O per month. What he really makes, only Iris conscience can tell. From bar-tender to barowner is a quick leap. The duties of a bar-tender ought to fit him for the office of dispenser of medicines, at any rate whilst his compounds are quite as numerous and injurious to the gastric regions, they are by no means as nauseous. “ Straight ” drinks are at a discount. The Californian has a mania for sugar-coating his pleasures as well as his vices; hence the variety of fancy drinks: cocktails, milk punches, whiskey punches (cold), gin toddy, sherry cobblers, brandy smashes, gin-slings, apple-jacks, whiskey and honey, whiskey and gum, frozen absinthe, mint-julep, pousscafe bonanzas. These represent the aristocratic compounds. The commonality are satisfied to grow stupid quickly on rot-gut, fusil oil, Jersey lightning, and tarantula juice, with a coup dc grace of benzine. The saloons proper are frequented by judges, colonels, lawyers, merchants and their clerks, tradesmen and their employees, but their best customers are stockbrokers and their clients. These ever thirsty souls generally put away from fifteen to twenty drinks per day—their evening consumption is in proportion. Yet it is the rarest tiling in ’Frisco to see a man drunk. The climate is intensely exciting, and when a man reaches the possibility of drunkenness it kills him. Except in the dens in Barbary Coast (our vile quarter) you never hear of a disturbance. The crimes which disgrace the city have their origin generally in the sininfested districts which wise men avoid. On California street, Montgomery or Kearney streets, a drunken man would be as rare a sight as a clean smelling Maori. The Germans, a large element in our population, confine themselves to “heavy wet,” and have a striking resemblance to moveable beer barrels. They consume immense quantities of beer, and yet they are perhaps the most respectable and industrious class in our community.