IN LIGHTER VEIN.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20233, 17 February 1934, Page 1

IN LIGHTER VEIN.

Dry Humour and Wet Legislation. NEW YORK, February 6. When Rutherford B. Hayes was President of the United States, his wife, a strict temperance lady, served lemonade at State banquets, which is alleged to have given some of the diplomats, unused to that beverage, cramps. Women who shared her sentiments in regard to lemonade and temperance, presented her with an enormous sideboard, from which the citrus beverage could be served in the State diningroom. In time, the highly ornate lemonade bar found its way to an auction room, and to-day it has found a resting place in one of the storage rooms of the Heurich Brewery. Christian Ileurich, owner of the brewery, is in his 92nd year. He looks like a man of 50, doesn’t wear glasses, he2rs perfectly, has a rollicking sense of humour, runs upstairs two steps at a time. This he ascribes to beer. The lemonade ladies have all passed away. Reporters the other day asked President Roosevelt if he had celebrated repeal. “ Yes,” said the President, “ I went for a swim in the pool.” And the first words of Henry L. Mencken, ardent fqe of Prohibition, said on hearing of Utah's ratification: “ I have to go and take a drink of water—my first in thirteen years.” The President’s Wife. Seldom has there been a First Lady so accommodating as Mrs Franklin Delano Roosevelt. She is no stranger to hard, uncomfortable journeys to see that miners will have decent living conditions; she flies to New York and back again to establish rest rooms for jobless girls, and she has been known to don an apron and wash dishes for some overworked farm ’woman on one of her incognito journeys. However, she has said “ No ” to one proposition. The National Association for the Advancement of the “ Fine Art of Drinking ” asked her to contribute a punch recipe in a contest to discover the country’s twenty best drinks. The First Lady sent the following letter:— “ I regret that I cannot enter a recipe for punch in your contest. I am personally a Dry, and do not drink anything containing alcohol. I am, however, in sympathy with the aims of your organisation.” When Prohibition went into effect, the last man to get a drink at the bar of Green’s Hotel in Philadelphia was Robert B. Stevenson. On December 5, when the hotel resumed serving liquor, the first man to get his drink was the same Robert B. Stevenson.