Our fair city has been honored by a substantial library of books written about her. It is remarkable how many of the books about Cincinnati are well written, informative and entertaining. Some – I am looking at you, Charles Cist – still hold up after close to 200 years.Scanning a shelf ranging from Daniel Drake’s 1815 “Picture of Cincinnati” to Cist’s “Miscellany” and his trilogy of “Sketches” to Dabney’s “Colored Citizens” to the WPA Guide to Alvin F. Harlow’s “The Serene Cincinnatians” to Dick Perry’s “Vas You Ever,” it should be quite a task to name the premier volume ever written about the Queen City, but it’s not. There is really only one contender and it is Frank Y. Grayson’s 1924 “Pioneers of Night Life on Vine Street.”Grayson’s book is a collection of newspaper columns originally appearing in the Cincinnati Times-Star. The book was, in fact, published by the Times-Star with a delightfully droll cover illustrated by George Bristol, political and sports cartoonist for the paper. The columns were inspired by Prohibition, and the passing of a golden era in Cincinnati’s history. Grayson achieved his majority at the dawn of the 1890s and sailed through the pinnacle and into the twilight of a rambunctious Cincinnati obliterated by America’s experiment with barbarism.Grayson remembered not only the tales, but the telling. His columns and his book are sprinkled with slang that had, by 1924, grown an ankle-length beard and hobbled off to linguistic amnesia. The floradora girls who decorated the old concert halls were “gels,” while their masculine admirers were “blims” or “geezims.” Whiskey earned the nickname “nose paint” because it reddened the proboscis. Beer was “gambrinus.” Getting sozzled involved acquiring “a healthy bun.” A “map” was a face. Retiring for the night became “going to the hay.” A fine fellow was a “good old scout.” A raconteur didn’t just spin a yarn, he “perseverated.” The cardsharps, faro addicts and dice fiends were, collectively, “gamboliers.” A pickpocket was a “dip.”That refulgent vocabulary enriched a narrative proficiency rarely equaled in these parts. Grayson knew everyone and every anecdote ever uttered along that storied avenue. He remembered Dave O’Brien, a tragedian of somewhat less than stellar talent, who had spent his career bloviating to the hinterland hicks on an endless rural tour of whistle-stop lyceums. As a result, Mr. O’Brien became accustomed to a deluge of produce, fresh or not, hurled over the footlights by unimpressed patrons. According to Grayson:“It was told of him that he was walking along Vine, near Sixth, one sunny afternoon in June when a tomato rolled off a Gracian pushcart a few feet from him and struck the ground squishily. It was such a familiar sound to Dave, so suggestive of a threat of oncoming onions, beets, cabbages, etc., that he instinctively leaped sideways and plunged through a plate-glass window.”Grayson described one of those lodge picnics that involved a wagon ride up one of Cincinnati’s hills to a park just slightly less sweltering than the soggy basin below, at which the men of the family downed suds straight from the growler. This, of course, led to altercations:“Papa gave his nearest neighbor a dirty look and remarked that for two bits he would pull his nose around on the back of his head and tear his ears off and tie ‘em to his ankles, so he’d look like a human being. The friendly neighbor replied that he would like to see any rinky-dink of a whamdoodlebug try it just once, so Papa let him have it. He started his swing from the ground and it landed with a noise that sounded like that made by a fat man falling down the cellar steps with an oleander plant in his arms.”Memories of Over-the-Rhine sent Grayson into paroxysms of ecstasy, his fond remembrances inspiring lines of positive poetry:“We like to dash among the breakers that collapsed into white foam on the sands of happiness. We used to call it riding the old roan. You remember that, don’t you? Riding the old roan! Roan-colored just like some hosses you know. You get me? Sure, you got me the first time. So we take our feet in our hands and we traipse over the little bridge that spans the canal and we find ourselves in Elysium. Nobody goes Over-the-Rhine alone. Of course not. There is real companionship.”Frank York Grayson came into this world in 1872 on a farm somewhere between Harrison and New Haven, out in the western reaches of Hamilton County. His father, Colonel John Temple Grayson, traveled for business and his beleaguered mother, Evalyn Williamson Grayson, could not control her impetuous and curious son. He rarely spent a day in school but, as a teenager, opened a drug store soda fountain in Harrison.From his perch across the marble counter, Grayson overheard a lot of gossip and began writing some of it for submission to the local newspaper. By 1900, he had honed his journalistic style to a level that earned him a full-time slot as a Cincinnati Enquirer crime reporter. A colleague, Nixson Denton, clarified what “covering” the police beat meant in the early Twentieth Century:“In those dear, dead days the ‘covering’ wasn’t done by taxi and phone. Mr. Grayson’s feet, which still bulge port and starboard, are proof that he took his job seriously and that you couldn’t stumble across a mutilated body without finding him there, taking notes, most of which he could seldom afterward read.”After nearly a decade with the Enquirer, Grayson accepted a job in the city auditor’s office, but life as a public servant didn’t take and he was soon back among the ink-stained wretches, as a copy desk and make-up man for the Cincinnati Times-Star. For the next decade, Grayson wrote about all sorts of topics, notably about the steamboats then slowly disappearing from the Ohio River and, of course, the columns that comprised his fascinating book.From 1925 until his retirement in 1953, Grayson followed the Cincinnati Reds for the paper, earning the nickname “Pappy” from reporters young enough to be his grandsons. The old veteran summed these striplings up in the introduction to his masterpiece:“He has reached the age where he is counting the blonde hairs on his face. His lower lip is loose and built to order for the dangling cigarette. He has fallen for these movie cuties of the masculine species so hard that he patent-leathers his hair. He looks like a collar ad.”Grayson’s beloved wife, the former Daisy Budd, died in 1951 just months after the couple celebrated their golden wedding anniversary. Grayson retired two years later. He was cutting a stand of pampas grass in the yard of his Terrace Park home when he died from a heart attack aged 82 in 1955, leaving behind a grown son and daughter. It was Nixson Denton who wrote Pappy Grayson’s obituary for the Times-Star:“To list Frank Grayson’s literary achievements is to list a good many of Cincinnati’s newspaper highlights of a half dozen generations. Baseball was his first love, but his ‘Pioneers of Night Life on Vine Street’ had and has about it an air of immortality.”The good folks at Ohio Book Store have reprinted “Pioneers of Night Life on Vine Street” for about one-quarter the price you will pay is you find an original 1924 copy in the wild. Why one of the local libraries hasn’t digitized it remains a mystery. Grayson neglected an index and a digital copy would assist searching immensely.