Comic Tales of A Batender

Toots Shor, according to one of his many friends, "has more on the ball than Hubbell." To those for whom this quotation is meaningless, this book will have little interest, for it is a series of three articles, reprinted from the New Yorker, describing New York's most fabulous saloonkeeper and sports fan.

A biography can have three purposes: it can be informative in that it presents factual information of a man's work, it can be descriptive in that the reader can picture its subject, and it can be amusing. John Bainbridge's biography does all three, but it is mostly as a character study that it is Intended.

Shor's restaurant on fifty-first street in New York is the meeting place for the group known as the sporting fraternity. It is home to dozens of men who know sports, write sports and talk sports. It is a place which has the atmosphere of a club. As one of its habituees has put it, "I'd rather be standing outside of Toot's starving, than sitting inside Ciro's belching."

This is the color of the book. Through bits of dialogue, description, and quotation, Bainbridge recreates the atmosphere of Shor's hangout, telling of a man who judges people by whether or not he'd like to be with them at two o'clock in the morning, of a man who claims the only five syllable word he knows is "delicatessen."

It is probable that Bainbridge has not been entirely objective in this book. Although he quotes people who say that Shor is an "egotistical jughead" who is as "phoney as a three dollar bill," the overall tone is one of towering admiration. If the book suffers from this one-sidedness, it is only to those who would want the man to appear as very few see him. Bainbridge's work is not a black and white one. Rather, it shows Shor as a genial operative whom a let of people like.

His technique is good: a statement about the man, a quotation from a friend or an enemy and then an example to prove the point. The descriptive incidents are well chosen, and the striuging together is light and easy. Toots Shor is a New York Character and in 121 pages you know why.