We're running a bit late to the corner of 55th & 3rd. Max Wastler is waiting for our lunch date. After a handful of text exchanges, we spot him in the red brick saloon—penny-tile floors, carved mahogany bar, tin ceiling and stained-glass transoms. P.J. Clarke’s is a vestige of a better time—another century all together. It also serves a legendary burger. It’s wall-to-wall packed with suits (and deals were certainly being made) but we manage a grip of stools at Doug Quinn’s bar with a bit of timing and keen eyes...
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While browsing The Cary Collection last month, we discovered a most curious book in Cary’s voluminous inventory. Simple in appearance, bound in black Moroccan leather with four names stamped in silver leaf across the cover. It is a yearbook of sorts—Thomas William Ludlow Ashley’s Skull and Bones yearbook to be exact. Founded in 1832, the secret society at Yale university in New Haven, Connecticut is infamous for tapping campus leaders and other notable figures for its membership. The family names on the secret society’s roster read like an elite party list—Lord, Whitney, Taft, Jay, Bundy, Rockefeller, Goodyear, Kellogg, Pillsbury, Vanderbilt, Bush and so on. Though Ashley went on to enjoy a longstanding political career in Washington, it is another politician’s membership that shrouds this yearbook with bated breath—a one George Herbert Walker Bush...
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