The Penn's Grove record., 1913-05-30
ROOSEVELT ON
WITNESS STAND
Explains His Abstinence from
Liquor to Jury in Libel Suit
DOCTORS BACK UP HIS STORY
Roosevelt Tells of His Lifelong So.
briefly in $4,000 Libel Suit Against
Michigan Editor, and Is CORRIDOR
ated by Friends and Physicians.

Marquette, Mich.-Theodore Roose-
welt, a picture of rudy vigor and per-
feet health, turned a square head and
a square jaw in the direction of twelve
farmers, teamsters, miners and woods
men in court and gave his character
for sobriety as moi a total abstainer,"
but eve intoxicated in his life. His
testimony and that of others who fol-
lowed corroborated such a description
OF abstemiousness.
One of the two ex-Presidents of the
United States was placed in the ex-
traordinary position of defending his
temperatures owe a long period of
years.
The Colonels teeth snapped en-
phatically when he leaned toward the
jury of farmers and workingmen and
told them that never since he became
of age has he been under the influence
of liquor even in the smallest degree.
With great particularly he described
just the kind of drinks he had taken
and the kind that he had avoided. A
crowded court room hung upon his
words and marvelled at his
for details.
He said that he had never drunk a
cocktail or a highball In his life. He in
sisted that he never drank brandy or
whiskey except when chilled after ex-
posure or under the advice of ply
sicians, because he didn't like the
taste of either. In Milwaukee ten
years ago he took a sip of beer be-
cause some one had told him that it
was the stuff that made Milwaukee
famous; but he didn't fancy it and
promptly washed the taste out of his
mouth with a swallow of white wine.
He gave the jury a list of the wines
that he has partaken of on occasion
white wines, Madeira, champagne and,
very occasionally, a glass of sherry.
1t was his custom at home, he testi-
fled, to drink a glass or two of white
wine with Poland water At public
dinners he sometimes took a glass of
champagne, maybe two glasses, but he
was sure he never tasted champagne
more than once a month.
Mint juleps were a rare pleasure,
said the Colonel, but he couldn't re-
member having slipped more than half
a dozen a year The cross-examiner
asked him if he drank them all at
once. He said l%aughingly that he took
them a long distance apart.
Most of his mint iulep experience
vas in the White House, in whose
grounds there was a fine bed of mint.
He laid stress or the fact that on
his campaign trips he never drank
anything until he went to bed. Then,
he said, it was his habit to take a
goblet or perhaps two goblets of milk
with a teaspoonful of brandy to the
goblet. He found that the milk and
brandy rested his throat and made
him sleep we'll.
No alcoholic person could have
rallied from the shock of a bullet
wound as Theodore Roosevelt did in
Milwaukee last fall, emphatically as
serted DR.. Alexander Lambert, Col
onel Roosevelt's family physician, on
the witness stand.
DR.. Lambert, who treated Colonel
Roosevelt after the Milwaukee shoot
ing and who was his constant attend
ant when he was President, was the
first expert witness to back UP Colonel
Roosevelt's own assertion, made
earlier in the day, that the former
President is "abstemious, but not a
total ~abstainer" in the use of liquors.