Word: ritzes
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...affair was Paris' biggest and smartest since the liberation. In the refined splendor of the Hotel Ritz garden last week, some 1,500 diplomats and millionaires and their ladies gathered to sip champagne and nibble pastries in honor of the hotel's 50th birthday. None contributed more glitteringly to the glitter than a white-haired little woman who greeted them at the entrance in fluent French, English or Spanish. She was 81-year-old Marie Louise ("Mimi") Ritz, widow of the man who founded the hotel-and thereby made his name a synonym for ultra-fashionable...
Ambitious son of a Swiss herdsman, César Ritz left home at 15 for a job emptying slops in small Paris hotels, moved on through other jobs till he became a manager. He quit to start at the bottom again in Paris' famed Restaurant Voisin, an international hangout for royalty and gourmets. There young César's instinct for the personal touch drew the attention of influential customers. During the siege of Paris in 1871, food was so scarce that the city zoo slaughtered its two elephants, of which Voisin's got the trunks. Thanks...
Cold Cigars. From Voisin's, Ritz moved on to successively bigger jobs in Nice, San Remo, Lucerne, Rome, BadenBaden, Vienna. He remembered and carefully catered to the whims of such tourists as Cornelius Vanderbilt (who liked to chew cold cigars), John Wanamaker (who asked "are you leading a Christian life?"), the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII (who liked his beef well-done). On one of the jobs, César Ritz formed a lifelong partnership with an obscure chef named Auguste Escoffier...
...partners for help. By lavish spending on gaudy entertainment (for one party, they flooded the main dining room, served dinner on gondolas to the music of imported Venetian gondoliers), they boomed the value of the stock to ?20 a share in three years. This and other triumphs prompted Ritz's millionaire friends to back his fondest dream-a hotel of his own in Paris, which would be "the summum of elegance." Ritz himself saw to it that the new hotel on the Place Vendôme was comparatively small (only 225 rooms), exquisitely furnished (mainly Louis Quinze and Empire...
Scoring, First Period: Wood (Ritz) 7:59; Ritz (Wood) 8:55; Welch (Dalley) 9:17; Soper (Clapp, Armour) 10:40; Armour (Clapp) 17:02; Clapp (Calhoun, Armour) 18:50; Ward (Minot) 19:30. Second Period: Arnold (Huntington, Abbot) 3:10; Guernsey (Read) 15:10; Moher (Wood) 18:29. Third Period: Clapp (Soper, Allen) 3:44; Guernsey (Read) 6:48; Greeley (unassisted...