Nov 2005, series of emails re Toots Shor…
Dear Mike:
I am trying to fact check the dates Toots Shor's was open for an article I am writing and wonder if you know whether it was still active in the 1960s. Thanks so much! Dina Kaplan
----------------------------------------------------------
sorry, Dina. Toot's went down for a few years.
But then a group of restuarant investors used him to front for a new Toots Shor place near Madison Square Garden. I don't have the dates in my mind.
When you finish the article send it to me, if you can. I'm interested.
Mike
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Mike
Dina
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Dina:
The Lion's Head real time was way back in the late forties and fifties when e. e. cummings, Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan reigned along with the literate crowd of the day. The sixties may have been the time that young Pete Hamill and company grew out of short pants and into the place but I think that its reputation had already been made.
In 1955 or 56 my English teacher at Horace Mann took a few of us down to the Lion's Head to meet Brendan Behan who refused to talk until each of us, underaged gigglers that we were, drank a half-pint of Stout. Mr. Baruth, a giant among English teachers, was non plussed and stood on a chair so as to declaim from the Plow and the Stars.
For the most part there was little intercourse between the denizens of the Lions Head and Toots Shor --- except maybe, now that I think of it, Hamill and Norman Mailer, perhaps Jimmy Cannon. But I was just a lucky peanut shell on the floor.
Moochies was beyond my ken.
Mike
