Communing With My Dad’s Spirit Through Whisky, And Our Favorite Bar

My dad was a real-life Mad Man. His first full-time job after graduating from Columbia Business School in 1957 was writing direct mail for Esquire and its sibling publication, GQ. Much of his work was attempts to get men to subscribe to the magazines — or trying to get them to pay their late subscription fees. Like most of his ilk, he ate his share of red meat and drank a fair amount of booze at the Midtown hot spots like Rattazzi, PJ Clarke’s, and Frankie & Johnnie’s, first as a bachelor and later with my mother, a fellow copywriter whom he met in 1964 at an advertising convention and wed two years later.

After taking a more circuitous route, I wound up following in my dad’s footsteps and took on writing as a vocation. I also inherited his love of eating and drinking well. I was, and still am, fascinated with mid-century New York, when it was unquestionably the center of the modern world and you could still rent a dinky apartment in the Village for $50 a month. He was only too happy to regale me with stories about it all, from re-litigating old battles with his bosses at Esquire to tales of long, lubricated nights out at long-gone piano bars and watering holes (”Yes — we really did drink that much,” he said after humoring me by watching an episode of Mad Men).

My parents divorced when I was six. I lived with my mom, and my relationship with my dad was often strained when I was growing up. It took a while, but as I hit my 30s and he passed 70, we’d both mellowed a bit and had grown to enjoy each other’s company. We started having boys’ nights out, where we’d “shoot the shit,” as he put it, over dinner and drinks. When I started writing about spirits and cocktails, he became an invaluable resource on how folks of his generation imbibed. On Scotch, for instance, he wrote in an email, "Scotch was big in those years — Cutty, Dewar's, Johnnie Walker, J&B (known as Jewish Booze). None of the really expensive stuff. Don't ask me why. The Scotch drink of choice was with water or soda, or straight/on the rocks with a water or soda chaser. No cocktails a la Rob Roy. The myth was that sticking to Scotch was the way to avoid a hangover — I was able to prove the falsity of THAT."

Even though he had a steady job, he was never above taking freelance gigs, writing direct mail copy for everything from cigars to dolls to records by Nat King Cole. His job and his, um, hobby only intersected one time, in 1965, when he was hired by Seagram’s to help launch their new blended Scotch, 100 Pipers. Blends ruled the roost back then — single malts were only on the radars of the most serious whiskyphiles — and 100 Pipers was an upscale blend, a decade or so in the making, at least according to Seagram’s. Dad’s direct mail campaign involved sending lots of swag to the 1960s equivalent of influencers, which in this case was Esquire subscribers who lived in the right ZIP codes in the right parts of the country. They got posters, coasters, even records of bagpipe music, in exchange for filling out forms confirming they’d hipped their regular bartenders and various business associates about 100 Pipers. The letters were all addressed “Dear Sir.” After all, we were still decades away from whisky being marketed to women (though not from women drinking the stuff, as my mom could attest).

I don’t know how successful Dad’s marketing campaign turned out, but when we started drinking together, several decades later, 100 Pipers was, as far as we knew, defunct. I’d never seen it in a liquor store or bar, and nobody I knew was familiar with it. By then Dad and I had, after much trial and error, found our regular haunt for dinners out. Donohue’s, on East 64th St. in Manhattan, was a relic of days gone by, a nondescript mid-century American bar/restaurant (it opened in 1950) that had somehow endured through decades of changing tastes and evolving neighborhoods and rising rents, and emerged on the other side virtually unchanged, from the polished wood-and-leather booths to the long bar in the front to the daily specials written on a chalkboard in the back (the prices, alas, had adapted to the times). A large chunk of the clientele seemed to be original as well. “The average age here is deceased,” my dad joked, even though he was at least as old as all but the most geriatric patrons.

Dad had mostly stopped drinking by then, but he always made sure to sneak a sip or two of my martini, which we both admired because it came in small three or four-ounce glasses, with a “sidecar” in a mini carafe on ice for a well-chilled refill when needed. Large, 6-9 ounce glasses, which were in vogue at the time, inevitably warmed up before you could finish them, and nobody wants a warm martini. Dad advised me to order mine with “several olives — that way you know you’ll get more than two.” The food was straight out of the Eisenhower era. Broiled scrod, ham steak Hawaiian style (topped with pineapple rings), roast Maryland turkey with stuffing and gravy, London broil and more, all with two important questions attached: “Baked, mashed, or fries?” And once that had been navigated, “Peas, carrots, or broccoli?”

Donohue’s was our venue of choice for the last several years of my dad’s life; we had our last dinner there a few weeks before he entered the hospital for the final time, in 2016. After he died, I stopped going — it just didn’t seem right to go with anyone else, and hitting the joint by myself, even to lift a glass to his memory, just felt too depressing. But about a year later, on a warm spring afternoon, I was supposed to meet a booze publicist friend for cocktails on the Upper East Side, at a bar which turned out to be closed because a movie was being filmed on the premises. I figured, if I’m ever going to go back, it might as well be now. Let’s go to Donohue’s, I said. And lo and behold, what did I see when we walked in but a bottle of 100 Pipers blended Scotch whisky sitting dead center on the back bar.

100 Pipers, it turns out, never really went away after all, although it seems to have transformed from a luxury whisky to a bottom-shelf brand over the years. At one point in the late ‘80s it was said to be the fourth best-selling whisky in the UK; a few years later, its name was changed, first to 100 Pipers of the Black Watch, and then simply to Black Watch. In India and Asia, where the name stayed the same, it still does well, and according to Wikipedia, at least, it’s one of the best selling whiskies in Thailand.

Which doesn’t solve the mystery of why it’s at a random watering hole in New York City. But it’s a mystery I don’t want solved. I choose to believe it’s my dad’s way of saying hello. And every time I go to Donohue’s — I’ve started going there regularly again — I order a glass of 100 Pipers and toast his memory. It’s my way of saying hello back to him.