Diamond Jim Brady

James Buchanan ("Diamond Jim") Brady (August 12, 1856 – April 13, 1917), was an American salesman of railroad equipment who became wealthy during the Golden Age of railroad expansion at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century but who is remembered today only as America's (and perhaps history's) greatest trencherman. His legendary appetite and reputed feats of gargantuan eating were widely celebrated during his lifetime and, as the years have passed, have only grown in the telling. Never married, although he was known for consorting with another famous personage of the Gilded Age, the singer Lillian Russell, a voluptuous beauty nearly as large as Brady himself, he endowed various institutions with millions of dollars, including Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, where the James Buchanan Brady Urological Institute still bears his name.

Born in modest circumstances in New York City, Brady was the son of a saloon and free-lunch-counter operator, and, most likely, named after the Democratic presidental candidate of that year, James Buchanan. He first worked as a hotel bellboy, then for a few years as a young man for the New York Central Railroad, and finally became the star salesman for the railroad supply company that made him rich, Manning, Maxwell & Moore. According to Time magazine, writing 21 years after his death, Charles A. Moore "sent Diamond Jim out on the road with instructions to spend all the money necessary to make customers like him. Diamond Jim stuck to this tenet through the panic of the middle nineties with such success that spending money to make money has been the Manning, Maxwell & Moore system to lick depressions ever since."

Americans of the 19th century, particularly those in the frontier areas, had a reputation for, and enjoyment of, notable exaggeration in both their humor and their descriptions. It may be that this affection for the tall tale, such as those about Paul Bunyon, Davy Crockett, and Mike Fink, also lent a certain tolerance to the purported accounts of the quantities of food that Diamond Jim was reputed to consume on a daily basis. Certainly no one, until at least 2009, has ever tried to seriously examine Diamond Jim's supposed daily consumption of calories.

In 1964, for example, in the first volume of the well-known American Heritage Cookbook and Illustrated History of American Eating & Drinking, the notable television critic, social commentator, and animal rights' activist Cleveland Amory contributed a chapter about Diamond Jim in which, over several paragraphs, he outlined a typical day's menu for Brady:

• A gallon of orange juice for breakfast, then "hominy, eggs, corn bread, muffins, flapjacks, chops, fried potatoes, and a beefsteak."

• At midmorning, according to Amory, would be a snack of "two or perhaps three dozen oysters."

• Lunch would follow: "More oysters and clams, then two or three deviled crabs, next a brace of broiled lobsters, followed by a joint of beef, a salad, and several kinds of pie"

• An afternoon snack for the life-long teetotaller would be a heaping seafood platter and several bottles of lemon soda.

• Dinner, according to the restaurateur George Rector, who said that "Diamond Jim was the twenty-five best customers we ever had," might consist of two or three dozen Lynnhaven oysters, each of them at least six inches long, then half a dozen crabs, two portions of green turtle soup, six or seven "giant" lobsters, followed by two portions of terrapin, two entire canvasback ducks, and, for the main course, a steak and vegetables. Dessert would be an entire platter of cakes and pastries, followed by a two-pound box of candy. All of this was generally washed down, as were most of his meals, with large beakers of orange juice.

• Finally, after an evening at the theatre, which Brady adored, would be a supper of several birds and several bottles, possibly of root beer.