Historical Resources

Dr. Alice Hamilton
Dr. Alice Hamilton was a tireless crusader for public health in an age of corporate deception and malfeasance. (Sound familiar?) Dr. Hamilton, the first female graduate of Michigan Medical School, the first female professor at Harvard, became America’s leading authority on lead poisoning. The stuff that General Motors insisted would improve America’s cars, dodging what lead did to America’s health. Dr. Hamilton was a giant figure in the campaign to finally remove lead from gasoline, and first in line for the history books—and in Swirled All the Way to the Shrub.
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The Tickless Telechron
The pleasant hum of the Telechron clock, never making one feel like one’s life was tick-tocking away. Owners of the Telechron instead felt part of the fluid movement of time. The wonder of the Telechron’s 60-cycle-per-second engineering was only matched by the elegance of its varied cabinetry and the appealing typography of its handsome faces. Telechrons play a timeless part in Swirled All the Way to the Shrub—read on, and you can hum along.
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The Harry Johnson Bartending Manual
The bible of bartending decorum, comradely customer service and the finest cocktail recipes of the day. Covers essentials like keeping ants and other insects out of mixing bottles, knowing how customers desire their drinks mixed, improving the appearance of the bar, and of course, many cocktail recipes. The indispensable handbook of The Shrub’s impeccable bartender, McNeal.
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United Fruit Company
Ahh, the banana, the delightful crescent of friendly yellow, the sweet deliverer of hunger pangs across the globe. You wouldn’t think such an innocent fruit could be at the center of so much perfidy and shame, but alas. The growing interest in the South American fruit in other parts of the globe created a growing commercial lust in companies trading in the fruit, so much so that United Fruit, the biggest banana importer/transporter of them all, grew vast in size, but shrank in conscience. The company laid waste to good morals, and that blackness plays a peeled part in the love life of some of Swirled All the Way to the Shrub’s principal characters.
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Sylvia Beach

Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare and Company publishing fame is a secondary but significant character in Swirled All the Way to the Shrub. She is noted for publishing James Joyce’s Ulysses, no small feat considering that the work was banned and a publisher could be prosecuted for its distribution. She is a central figure in Pinky’s attempts to set his novel to sail, though hard winds do blow.

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