The First Stage of Intoxication

Many of the restaurants Fred Harvey operated across the country included bars selling cocktails, whiskies, and similar drinks. Someone at the Fred Harvey headquarters thought that it would be amusing to have beverage menus with paintings of “the seven stages of intoxication.”

Click image to download a 1.1-MB PDF of this beverage menu.

The paintings were by William Dean Fausett (1913-1998), who was born in Utah and studied art in New York City and Brigham Young University, among other places. He eventually painted portraits of many famous people including presidents Eisenhower and Reagan. Although Fausett settled in Vermont after World War II, this series of paintings was first publicly shown in Salt Lake City in 1939.

This menu shows the first stage of intoxication, which is verbose. Later stages were supposed to be jacose, amicose, vamose, bellicose, lachrymose, and comatose. The pictures are amusing, but it is also possible that they were meant as a warning to members of the Church of Latter Day Saints, in which Fausett was raised and who are not supposed to drink alcohol.


Leave a Reply