 At the Admirals Club, you can view C.R. Smith's collection of 18 well-preserved bottles of whiskey, some of which date back to 1917.  |
|||
Whiskey Under Glass
Pre-Prohibition bottles once owned by the president of American Airlines find a safe haven at LaGuardia Airport
Posted: Thursday, March 17, 2005
By Dan Daley
Behind a locked door at New York City's LaGuardia Airport, a glass display case shelters 18 bottles of venerable whiskey. Frequent flyers with a bent for Bourbon might consider joining American Airlines Admirals Club, just to pay homage.
Alas, these bottles aren't for sale. They comprise part of the collection amassed by Cyrus Rowlett (C.R.) Smith, the one-time Texas cotton picker-turned-accountant who helped pull a disparate collection of regional airlines together into what became the world's largest air carrier.
Smith, who was American Airlines' president from 1934 until he retired in 1968 to become President Lyndon Johnson's Secretary of Commerce, was emblematic of the executive corps that ran the machinery of mid-20th century U.S. industry: a self-made, self-reliant man for whom a stiff drink was simply part of the stuff of life.
Reflecting on his stint as deputy commander of the Air Transport Command in World War II, Smith once stated, "During the early days of the last war, when a lot of people were buying up sheets, pillow cases, sugar and razor blades, I invested my money in the necessities of life--Bourbon whiskey and Texas chili, and my safe return from the wars was evidently influenced by the good physical condition which that diet produced."
Smith's collection includes whiskies dating back to about 1917; Kentucky's signature Bourbon makes up about half the group. A bottle of 18-year-old Belmont Bourbon was made at a distillery that occupied the site of the current Heaven Hill in Louisville. A bottle of Old Charter (the only brand in the collection still available today) came from the A.B. Chapeze distillery in Kentucky's Bullitt County, not far from the Jim Beam distillery.
The Special Old Reserve Bourbon, made by the Wilken family in Kentucky's 5th district, has a 1917 vintage but a bottling date of 1932, before the Volstead Act was repealed. "It was bottled during Prohibition, probably under the medical-use exemption," speculates Charles Cowdery, author of Bourbon, Straight: The Uncut and Unfiltered Story of American Whiskey (Made and Bottled in Kentucky). (The medical-use application seems to have served Smith well--he died in 1990 at the age of 90.)
Cowdery suggests that Smith's choices of straight whiskies indicate a sophisticated palate: "In an era when blended whiskies were the biggest sellers, these labels indicate a certain knowledge and connoisseurship about whiskies."
Smith has an entire museum dedicated to him near American Airlines’ Dallas-Fort Worth hub, but the whiskey collection has been part of the Admirals Club in New York since it opened during the New York World's Fair in 1964, and followed when it moved in 1989 to its current location in the main terminal.
Nick Morales, a bartender at the club since 1969, keeps the collection under lock and key, opening it once a week to clean the bottles. "We put paraffin on them about 15 years ago because the liquor was slowly evaporating," he says. "I think we have it under control now."
Smith's vintage Bourbons and ryes aren't the miniatures that we've learned to tolerate on airlines, but they are a little bit of history.
Advertisement
