Los Angeles herald., 1906-12-28
BOSTON GOES
MAD OVER COFFEE
OLD AND YOUNG ALIKE FEEL
EFFECTS OF CRAZE
Men, Women and Children Line the
Coffee Counters-Resorts Are Not
Called cafes-Latter Are
Held In Low Esteem
Special to The Herald

DDtClHl 10 ne iieIHlu.
BOSTON, Dec. 27-Boston is coffee
mad. Men, women and even children
stand three deep In front of the coun-
ters where the beverage is dispensed,
waiting their turn.
There is scarcely moment in the
day from early morning until dark
that some customer is not thus en-
ployed and n the luncheon hour the
sole accompaniment of the coffee is
often the lightest trihe of solid food.
There are places, like those of other
cities, Where coffee Is sold along with
forty sweetened beverages, some of
them mixed with ice cream, but the
unusual thing about the Boston cof-
fee craze is the fact that 1t affords
support to many places where no 9TH
er drink and no food Is dispensed.
Boston does not call these resorts
cafes. In Boston a cafe is a place
where you can get almost any drink
save coffee. A cafe, indeed, is held
in low esteem by Boston respectable
ity, but a coffee counter Is a sort of
social exchange.
People make appointments to meet
at these places. Two or three Just on
the edge of the great retail provision
market present at the noon hour a
sort of epitome of Boston society.
Persons of the highest fashion per-
haps do not frequent these places, but
it is never safe to speak slightingly of
the coffee counters in any circle of
Boston. OF course there are coffee
counters and coffee counters.
Just a Common Place
There is one where you sip your cup
and MUNICH your cruller in company
with the car conductor, the market
man who has driven in from his SUI
burban farm and even Jack ashore,
hn t,rr, in wi hnnp N gOhnr-
ing up. There the others where you
elbow Harvard professors, spectacled
girls from the art schools and uni
versity lecture rooms and the most
delicious old ladies in that kind of fine
antiquated shabbness which in Bos-
ton is the certain cachet of high re-
spectability.
These various types meet on terms
ranging all the way from nodding ac-
quaintance to cordial intimacy. You
involuntariiy catch the most delicious
snatches of conversation to right and
left as you drink. A scandal monger-
ing society reporter of the yellow kind
could make her fortune by frequent-
ing the right coffee counters.
The coffee counter is a place to un-
bend, a place for the exchange of fam
lily news and domestic recipes for the
cure of lumbago and the sanitary
cooking of beans. Here, too, one sees
the display of bargains by women
fresh from the morning campaign in
the neighboring market.
There are coffee counters where you
may study special types of Boston
ans. One employs three or four
pretty girls and is the resort, not of
Boston's gilded youth, but of Boston
grizzled middle age.
II is delicious to note the awkward
attempts of these veterans at gallan-
try. With only narrow counter be-
tween the wrinkled customers and
the fresh loellina girls the temptation
to the former is irresistible.
Where Graybeards FIirt
Coffee is sold at 2 and cents a cup
and every veteran puts down his
nickel and seeks to cover the rosy
fingers with his dry palm when the
change is laid upon the counter. Only
dotage could enjoy this form of fir
tation, but it goes on every day in
the week and all day long.
If Jealous wives do not make irrup-
tions into such places it is only that
they know better than their lords the
absurd futility of their gallantries.
The coffee counters are as innocent
of real scandal as Quaker meeting.
Nothing about the coffee counters
is more characteristic of Boston as
she is than the fact that the patrons
Jake lllGlI uTlllh III Iull NlSW VI pctoSCl .
by upon the street. Boston is so en-
amored of her law touching theSpublic
sale of strong drink that half the
town thinks it a fine thing to take its
liquid refreshment of any kind in the
presence of the other half.
Nobody seems in the least shocked or
disturbed at this display. The pro-
fessors, their spectacled young women
pupils and the dear old ladies, mon
uments of ancestral respectability,
turn their cups bottom upward in the
sight of a gaping multitude.
Custom has made this public display
exhilarating rather than embarrassing
for those who are not quite certain Of
themselves and customers of assured
responsibility are stonily Indifferent
to the stares of the street. The griz-
zled elders execute their absurd gal
lantries with pride in the publicity
with which the trihing favors of the
pretty girls behind the counter are
accorded and the girls wink over the
heads of the old men at younger men
on the sidewalk.
The marvel of it all is that Boston's
special providence has not taken Of
fetal cognizance of these public goings
on. With the next gubernatorial cam
paign a year off some censor should
have leisure to look to the nerves of