Forever Toots's

Bernard Shor is a beefy saloonkeeper who looks like an elderly, slightly worn cherub. He insults his best friends ("Ya crumb-bum!") and coldly rejects sycophants ("How should I remember ya when I only seen ya oncet?"). Everybody calls him Toots, a name that has stuck since childhood when he was--incredible as it may seem--a pretty boy. His pals are sportsmen, athletes, politicians, showfolk, journalists and has-beens; in short, Toots Shor is a Runyonesque character too true to be fictional.

For 19 years, he ran one of the most popular restaurants in Manhattan. During that time he befriended the low and the mighty, urged them to drink sturdily and eat what one habitue called his "training table" food. He pounded their backs, and they counted themselves lucky if they were awarded with "palship," Toots's ultimate accolade. He was favored by politicos; Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower had him to the White House, and Jack Kennedy invited him to his inauguration. Every ballplayer worth his mitt got the de luxe, or crumb-bum treatment, and even Bernard Baruch, elder statesman of the stock market ticker, benched down at Shor's now and then. But Toots made no attempt to attract the glossier types of cafe society. "Who needs ya?" he bellowed cheerily.

Ladykin Chicks. For the loyal "pals," it was a sad day two years ago when Toots closed down his "joint" on 51st Street to make way for an office building. Toots got $1,500,000 for his lease, took off for Europe, then returned to New York to eat and drink in other places while he waited fitfully for workmen to build a new restaurant a block north.

Last week the interregnum ended as Shor proudly opened the doors of his new place, which, by happenstance, occupies the site of the old Leon & Eddie's, where Shor had been a $50-a-week bouncer. His new joint, a handsome nine stories high, cost $5,000,000. Inside, the new Shor's reflected the old: a huge circular bar, a wood-paneled main room, dining room upstairs, hatchicks who look like ladykins. Chief added feature: a 400-car garage on the top seven floors, which will enable customers, in the words of a Shor lieutenant, "to scratch their fenders and get loaded without ever leaving the premises."

Shor had planned no special ceremonies. sent out no invitations. Nevertheless, just before 3 o'clock in the afternoon, crowds assembled outside the revolving door. Shor himself padded about bellowing orders in his raggedy voice and acting as nervous as a bride's mother. His wife, three daughters and a son sat placidly at the headliners' banquette in the dining room.

A Little Booze. At 3, the revolving door spun like a roulette wheel and in tumbled the mob. At 3:15 the bar was jammed three, four, five, six deep, and the noise was like a rocket's roar. It was just like the old days. "Lemme hear them tills ring!" Toots yelled. To his eleven-year-old son Rory, Shor called "C'm on, little Toots! Drink up! Have a little booze!" A young Roman Catholic priest entered diffidently, and Shor bounded over to him to greet him with a hug and a kiss. It was "Father Bill" McCormick of Brooklyn, who had blessed the new restaurant for Shor a day earlier. "That's the kind of place it is," Shor explained later. "A place where children can come, a place where the clergy comes. Everybody feels at home here. Nobody is pushed around except by me."

And so it went, all through the day and into the night. Groucho Marx showed up, and so did Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick, Hugh O'Brian, Hugh Downs, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, Phil Silvers, Hal March, Jack Dempsey, Rocky Marciano. Kyle Rote. Charley Conerly. Frank Gifford, James A. Farley. Jackie Gleason could not make it, but he sent a mass of fall flowers and a pal's salutation, which began: "Dear Clam Head."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.