Tom Bullock

Tom Bullock (1872–1964) was the bartender at the St. Louis Country Club and the author of The Ideal Bartender (1917), the first cocktail book published by a Black author in the United States. The book contains 173 recipes — many of them the earliest published versions of classics now treated as Anglo-American — and was prefaced by George Herbert Walker, whose grandson would become President George H. W. Bush.

Bullock served presidents, railroad barons, and the upper crust of Gilded Age St. Louis from behind a bar most cocktail histories refused to name. His book is in the public domain. It belongs on the shelf next to Jerry Thomas, not as a footnote to it.