ABSTRACT
In his wonderful new memoir, A Drinking Life, Pete Hamill talks about the late 1960s in the Lion's Head, the neighborhood saloon in Greenwich Village. Vic Ziegel, the sportswriter, missed the place so much when he was out of town that he once phoned from Ohio and asked the bartender to hold the phone up for a minute so he could hear some Lion's Head conversation. Some sociologist from the New School announced one night that the greatest graffiti locations in New York State were the old train station in Albany and the men's room of the Lion's Head. One of the regulars was George Kimball, now a fine sportswriter at the Boston Herald but at the time a quirky candidate for sheriff of Douglas County, Kansas. George had only one eye. He was running against an incumbent who had one withered arm.
