How Tom Bullock’s Julep Was Born

Your name is Tom Bullock. You were born on October 18, 1872, in Louisville, Kentucky. Your father is a formerly enslaved man who fought for the Union Army less than a decade earlier. You learn the trade as a bartender at the exclusive Pendennis Club, then move on to the Kenton Club, followed by the bar of a dining car.

The Story Of an Exceptional Bartender

Eventually, you settle in St. Louis, Missouri, where you find work at the St. Louis Country Club. It is the mid-1910s, and you are Black. That means you cannot hold membership at the club. You cannot even order a drink there. Working is permitted; socializing with white patrons is not. Racial segregation is everywhere, and at times brutally enforced. But your name is Tom Bullock, and behind the bar, you are exceptional. It is an unjust reality — that respect requires excellence far beyond the ordinary — but exceptional you are. Exceptional enough to become the first African American to publish a cocktail book, “The Ideal Bartender”, in 1917, complete with a foreword by the president of the St. Louis Country Club, George Herbert Walker, ancestor of two future U.S. presidents: George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush.

At one point, you are drawn indirectly into a political scandal involving a former president. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt, campaigning for the presidency, is accused by journalist George Newitt of being a secret alcoholic. Roosevelt sues for defamation, insisting that at the St. Louis Country Club he had enjoyed only two sips of a Julep and nothing more. That prompted a sharply ironic editorial in the St. Louis Post- Dispatch on May 28, 1913. Roosevelt’s claim, it read, “may seriously jeopardize his chances of winning the case. Who ever drank only part of one of Tom’s cocktails? Tom, than whom there exists no greater mixologist, regardless of race, color, or condition of servitude.” Here, then, is the cocktail as Bullock prepared it.