515 Crew

The Quest for El Dorado

“Mel loved to drink,” says Emma Halverson, Mel’s cousin and heir. “He started pretty young, I guess. He didn’t have much parental supervision.”

So it would appear. A careful study of Mel’s journals, graciously provided by Mrs. Halverson, reveals that Mel loved everything about the drinking experience: the taste, the joy, the tradition, the camaraderie, the madness, the adventures. Especially the adventures. Mel spent five years, between 1946 and 1950, restlessly crisscrossing the globe, drinking his way through the great libertine cities of Dublin, London, Havana, Barcelona, Rio, New York, New Orleans and Paris. He would later realize he was subconsciously and systematically searching for the El Dorado of alcohol, the mythical golden city with the perfect drinking scene. The manner of fleeting paradise the Lost Generation had found in Paris in the 1920s. If it could no longer be found in the City of Lights, if the war had chased it away, it must have gone somewhere else, right?