Article on Prohibition-era cocktails, excerpt

History of the Last Word Cocktail

The Last Word cocktail was created sometime around 1920 at the Detroit
Athletic Club, a storied private social club that quickly became a speakeasy
once Prohibition was enacted. As such, the Last Word was likely one of the
very first Prohibition-era cocktails—one some would argue was also one of
the best.

Interestingly, it was conceived not by a bartender but by a prominent

vaudeville performer named Frank Fogarty, who was one of the finest
monologists of his time. Small wonder then, that such a talented wordsmith so
fervently wanted to have the “last word” that he created a cocktail called just
that.

Speaking to the New York Morning Telegraph in 1912, Frank Fogarty said,
“The single thing I work to attain in any gag is brevity. You can kill the whole
point of a gag by merely one unnecessary word.” He seems to have applied
this same philosophy to his drink, as the Last Word contains a perfect balance
of four equal elements and exactly nothing more.

Ted Saucier’s Bottoms Up (1951) provides the first written recipe and what
little history we know of the Last Word Cocktail. Though the drink vanished
into obscurity in the following years, it was revived again in 2004 by Murray
Stenson of the Zig Zag Café in Seattle. A tip of the old straw boater hat to Mr.
Stenson, for rescuing one of the finer cocktails of the early 20th century.