World's Oldest Bartender Calling It Quits

By Harry Kimball,  Newser Staff
Posted Aug 29, 2009 2:45 PM CDT
World's Oldest Bartender Calling It Quits
Angelo Cammarata talks with a patron at his bar in West View, Pa.   (AP Photo)

The longest serving bartender in the world—that Guinness-certified honor came 10 years ago—and slinger of one of the first beers after Prohibition ended is hanging up his cocktail shaker, the AP reports. Ninety-five-year-old Angelo Cammarata, owner of the beloved Cammarata’s Café in Pittsburgh, is selling after more than 70 years behind the bar. It’s bittersweet, he says. “This is a good bar. All my customers here are family.”

“We're a local bar, shot and a beer,” he says. That tradition goes back to just before midnight on April 6, 1933, the night before beer became legal again. “The first strike of the clock, I took a case of beer off, took it in our grocery store, took bottles out, and started selling them, 10 cents each.” The venture was so successful the store became a bar. Not that Cammarata himself is much of a drinker. His father told him, “'Beer is made to sell, not drink. Don’t be your best customer.' And I took that to heart." (More Angelo Cammarata stories.)

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