The following account is in the tradition of stories about unsuspecting people who end up owning horses that have learned to stop at drinking establishments or brothels.
Sheilah Roberts Lukins, Bottoms Up: A History of Alcohol in Newfoundland and Labrador (St. John’s, NL: Breakwater Books, 2020), 121, 238n15.
It is said that by the late 1940s and early 1950s, nearly every house on or near Princess Street [in St. John’s] bootlegged liquor.
The local police soon found a clever way to catch some of the local bootleggers. They simply watched the horses. These clever delivery animals knew their routes well and knew exactly where to stop with their wagons. One of the soft-drink companies had a delivery wagon with a driver who was less than hard-working. In the middle of his deliveries, he would regularly scoot down to Princess Street to visit a bootlegger. Here he would stop the horse and pick up his drink. The fellow soon lost his job for various reasons, and the company hired a new driver. They never bothered to train new drivers because the horses knew the routes so well. So when this new driver steered the horse and wagon in the direction of New Gower Street one day, the horse went about its business “training in” the new driver by turning onto Princess Street, where it stopped at a house. The driver looked around confused, but soon realized what had been going on. It was said that the horses showed the police the location of every bootlegger in town. This helped the police apprehend many of them. [n.: Patrons of Fiddler’s Pub in discussion with the author, July 2017.]
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Stories about naïve diners’ experiences with finger bowls typically involve the water therein being sipped or drunk. In Woody Allen’s memoir, however, the situation is reversed: he mistakes a bowl of clam broth for a finger bowl, and washes his fingers in it. (On the finger bowl faux pas, see Véronique Campion-Vincent & Jean-Bruno Renard, 100% Rumeurs (2014), 344-56.)
Woody Allen, Apropos of Nothing (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2020), 34.
“Dear Dad.” M*A*S*H, season 1, episode 12, 17 Dec. 1972. Corporal Radar O’Reilly mails a jeep home piece by piece, telling Colonel Blake the packages are toys for orphans. Dr. Pierce (voice over): “Radar is not the first guy to do this, of course. It’s an old army bit. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of George Washington’s soldiers hadn’t mailed home a horse one piece at a time.” (There’s an unintentional double negative there, I think.)
C. H. Moore, “On the Level,” Crime and Punishment #12, March 1949. “A soldier in Germany stole an army Jeep and had mailed half of it to his home in the U.S. before he was caught!”
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