16 Oct Creative bartending, June 4, 1945
This post-war time period is getting interesting! Dad volunteered to be a bartender at a shindig for the big brass! He and his pal Spalding invented two new drinks: the Fraternizer and the Buzz Bomb! Gosh, there may be something to this DNA thing after all!
4 June 1945 V-Mail
Germany
Good evening, sweetie, Haven’t had time to write for the past couple of days. Besides getting more work, generally, the officers had a party last Sat. night to which they invited practically all of the brass in the ETO, so you may imagine that not a great deal of paper work was accomplished on that day, what with house cleaning and preparations for the festivities. Fortunately, they hired a bunch of civilians to do most of the dirty work, so we EMs didn’t do so badly.The first sgt asked for volunteers (and there was NO pressure, as per usual army custom) for various jobs of the evening, so Spalding and I volunteered as bartenders! We were given the sa-weet-est yellow shirts to wear, and wore little tags with such as BARTENDER, Sgt Neibauer!!! Spalding and I couldn’t just serve drinks, of course, so we invented such little numbers as “Fraternizer” (tom-collins) and the hit of the evening, “Buzz-Bomb”!!! We painted a little MENU with all the stuff on it and after the Buzz-Bomb, put “With, or without, small chocking sounds” (Spalding idea). The BB started out to be a very tasty drink.Recipe: Ice in glass; add cherry and just a touch of ice; fill glass to half full of gin; add one tablespoon full of cognac, and fill with lemonade!! Doesn’t that sound appetizing? Of course, we had to make several experiments to arrive at said concoction. As I say, that is what it started out to be! But as business got busier, and they kept deserting the other bars (there were about 150 officers, so we had three bars) and coming back vertical— we decided there was something wrong with the mixture and began making V-2’s and etc!! Needless to say, had a big time, and the next day the Col. personally thanked us for doing such a good job, albeit quite curious as to just what we were slugging them with along toward the end!!! Yesterday, of course, on our day OFF (ha -ha) we caught up on all of the work we didn’t do the day before, so we are just beginning to get clear again. But we had fun, too. HEY, before the paper runs out — I LOVE YOU — ya hear? I love you, cutie,
Rol
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