Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 347
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room only. It was a small, modern, third-class hotel in a quiet handy street near the city's centre. All American hotels had only double-bedded rooms and did not serve meals. Usually there was a long wide entrance hall from the street, with a long row of rocking chairs against one wall, in which the guests could relax, chat, or merely watch passers-by in the street through a fully glazed front wall, but in any case, rocking away without cessation.
Self-serve cafeterias were a new type of eating-house in the United States, and there were two big "chains" of them, the "Clinton" and the "Boos Brothers". None had yet appeared in Sydney, so they were quite a novelty to me and I had most of my meals in them. The Volested Prohibition Act had not been long in force, and of all the many and various five-cent cuts of pie, the favourites were blackberry and raspberry, particularly if they were old enough for fermentation to have set in and given a vinous flavour.
The old saloons were still in business, now selling root-beer and other soft drinks, but many were undercover outlets for bootleg supplies of spirituous liquors. A well established customer was usually asked by the barman - there were no barmaids - whether he wanted "red" or "white", "red" being the "hard" liquor. Many people were secretly trying to make drinkable alcoholic brews with potatoes and fruit mashes. Some hopeless addicts drank the methylated spirit still sold for household and commercial purposes, and frequently were carted off to a hospital to be stomach-pumped; in some cases going blind after repeated excesses.
There was intense rivalry between San Francisco and Los Angeles for the title of being the principal city of California; each had nearly a million population, Los Angeles being a very recent and rapid growth because of the newly established and booming film-making industry at Universal City just outside its perimeter. Mayor Rolph of San Francisco carried the war into the enemy camp, and organised a tremendous "Boost San Franc-