Her given name, thank you very much, appears to have been Clara.
A 2007 Wall Street Journal story by Eric Felten credited a “Mrs. Julius S. Walsh Jr. of St. Louis” as the originator of the cocktail party. In preparing our April issue, which included a special guide to hosting such a party, we couldn’t help wondering about Mrs. Walsh’s identity – independent of her mister.
Felton himself cited a May 1917 St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press report and noted the Walshes’ address as 4510 Lindell Blvd. – ironically, less than a mile from the site of the cocktail party featured in our April guide. Although most online references just echo Felton, one does quote a March 30, 1917, Kansas City (Mo.) Star story about the high-noon gala (while referencing Oxford English Dictionary political citations for the term “cocktail party” that precede 1917). Applying a bit of arithmetic to the Star quotation, incidentally, seemingly sets the date of Mrs. Walsh’s party: Sunday, March 25, 1917.
In any event, Mr. Walsh himself apparently served as president of both Terminal Railway Co. and Mississippi Valley Trust Co. A bit more digging yielded this from Stanford, Ky.’s Interior Journal for Jan. 2, 1906: “The wedding of Miss Clara D.D. Bell, of Lexington, and Julius S. Walsh, Jr., of St. Louis, was celebrated at Bell Place, the home of her mother, Mrs. Arthur Cary. The wedding was attended by hundreds of guests from a distance and was the most notable affair in the history of Lexington society.” In addition to the involvement of Walsh, the timing and high-society aspects of the wedding seem suggestive.
In that regard, whenever bons vivants gather at one another’s homes to enjoy a cocktail or two, they should perhaps drink a toast to a lady not only married to Mr. Walsh but also named Clara.
Photograph by Carmen Troesser
This article appears in May 1-31, 2010.