Splendor in the Glass

Ivan Claman is a teetotaler, mind you. For the 65-year-old, a swizzle stick is an art object. During the past six years the retired financial consultant has accumulated nearly 2,500 antique glass cocktail stirrers, most from the 1930s and ‘40s. In the heyday of the Art Deco era, swizzles were designed in one dazzling permutation after another as promotional items for hotels, nightclubs and restaurants. “They’re just brilliant colors, both in the glass and the inks. They’re very vibrant. Some of the colors are unbelievable,” he says. “There are no longer any of them made, so they’re collector’s items.”

Today’s plastic swizzles are mere flotsam, says Claman. “Things were more flamboyant [then]. High-end restaurants used to give these out with cocktails and dinner. If you were a diner at Perino’s, you were not the riffraff. The grand old style of the Copacabana, that the hoi polloi went to 60 or 70 years ago, is gone.”

Claman’s quest gathered steam when he read about the International Swizzle Stick Collectors Assn., a group of aficionados who hold a biannual convention in Las Vegas. He joined up and has been on the prowl since. He has tried unsuccessfully to find companies and employees who designed the sticks, and has spent countless hours researching copies of Hotel Management Magazine from the 1930s. He even paid a librarian in Toledo, Ohio, to find a former glass company employee. Her reply? “I really don’t know if any of these gentlemen have anything to do with your swizzle stick.”

A stickler for record keeping, Claman maintains a detailed spreadsheet to sort his sticks alphabetically, chronologically and geographically. “Most major cities’ big hotels were east of the Mississippi. When you find them from the West Coast, you don’t find as many. I’ve got some from the Awahnee Hotel in Yosemite, the St. Francis, the Mark Hopkins and the Fairmont in San Francisco.” Most of his collection is in storage while he remodels his La Palma home, but a portion is displayed at the Pacific Western National Bank in Pico Rivera. The thousands of stirrers fit nicely in several inventory card files, he says.

Claman’s pieces range from 5 to almost 7 inches in length. Many have advertisements baked into the glass or on rolled parchment sealed inside. Some have colored beads that roll within the slim glass tube. Virtually every color of the spectrum was used for swizzles but red glass is rare, he says. “I have a lot of decorative ones with cobalt glass. I’ve got literally hundreds and hundreds of plain glass.” Although many swizzles have spoons or ribbed square muddlers on one end for mashing fruit, Claman avoids them and the models with top hats or other figures on them in favor of pieces with history or slogans such as that of the Highland Hotel of Springfield, Mass., which boasts, “Every meal a pleasant memory.” There also are bon mots such as, “Please don’t break me but take me home” or “Stolen from George Washington Hotel.”

The prize most coveted by Claman is a set made by top area restaurants in honor of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, but he has budgetary standards. “I’ve seen glass cocktail stirrers where people want $50 to $100,” says Claman, who pays $2 to $3 for most finds and considers $5 or $6 his top end. This isn’t his only collection, after all. “I’ve probably got 1,500 different casino chips, but they’re a lot more expensive.”