It took nine tailors (1948)

30 IT TOOK NINE TAILORS beer drinking. I bowled for Ithaca in the New York State Bowling League and had an average of 180. My average at beer drinking was much better. During my junior year at Cornell, on the morning of February 18, 1911, I woke up too late to get to my eight-o'clock class, which was not at all unusual; but when I looked in my mirror, I saw that somehow a subtle change had come over me. At first I couldn't realize what it was. Then, suddenly I remembered. It was my birthday! I was twenty-one years old. "Adolphe," I said to myself— probably with gestures— "you must do something about this/' So that morning I left my upper lip unshaved, and I have never shaved it since. At the end of my junior year, when I returned to Cleveland, the mark of my maturity had reached twirling length. I was wearing a snappy Norfolk jacket, peg-top pants, a 3-inch starched collar that was slowly strangling me to death, and yellow oxfords with bulldog toes. I smoked a pipe with a half -pint bowl and conversed almost entirely in a collegiate patois that baffled both Father and Mother. On my bedroom wall I tacked numerous pennants, dance programs, souvenirs, and campus mementos, as well as the photographs of Hve or six beautiful young ladies, to all of whom, by their inscriptions, I was virtually promised in marriage. Father commented caustically on the end results of my three years at Cornell; it was apparent to him that the advantages of a college education were highly overrated. He opined that if I intended to take unto myself a harem, I would soon be in need of a very successful business career. A short time before, due to poor health, Father had sold his interest in the Bismarck Restaurant; but since then he had been offered a lease on the Berghoff, a small hotel with a bar and two dining rooms that was owned by a large brewing company. His illness prevented him from assuming the full-time duties of