Coffee-related anecdote - I just finished a science fiction trilogy written by a Navy man. The protagonist was ALWAYS drinking coffee, getting coffee, or wondering if there was coffee made. I’d guess he didn’t wash his cup, either.
You’ve got to remember that I am just a simple farmer. A man of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know… .
Was the coffee made with a pinch of salt? That’s REAL Navy java! 
**This **might be of interest to some:
"The best cup of coffee you'll ever drink."My Daddy, career Marine, put salt in his coffee. A tiny pinch. It’s the only way as far as I am concerned.
People used to always drink coffee after the evening meal, or after a post-dinner card game or whatever with friends. A few people drank Sanka, but just about everyone drank real coffee. It’s only recently that NOT drinking coffee in the evening became a thing. So yeah, of course cowboys drank coffee. Of course.
Tea!?
Get mah rope!!
Long ago, watching The Dick van Dyke Show (first run), my mother and my older brother got into a heated argument over whether Rob was actually drinking coffee or just pretending.
“You know, there isn’t really any coffee in that cup.”
“Yes, there is.”
“No, there isn’t.”
“Yes, there is. I saw it. [INDICATING A POINT ON THE TV SCREEN] It came up to here!”
“No, there isn’t!”
I swear, this went on for three or four minutes. It would have been comical, if my brother hadn’t been right. There *was *coffee in the cup; I saw it too, but I was afraid to say anything.
Even more bizarre: We were watching a rerun of the episode several months later, and they had exactly the same argument. :smack:
Hey, lotsa things growin’ out there wild to sample! :o
There may have been liquid in the cup, but it wasn’t necessarily coffee.
On the old Jackie Gleason Show they used to do a segment in which he would do a monologue sitting in a chair while drinking a beverage from a coffee cup. He would sip from it and then roll his eyes and say “Mmmmm. That’s good coffee!” Everybody knew it wasn’t coffee, of course. 
So TV cowboys were imitating 1960’s life. Probably with commercials for Maxwell House, “good to the last drop”. I do recall my parents serving coffee to guests after dinner.
“Big Joe never asks for a second cup of coffee on my cattle drive.”
Sure looked like coffee to me. OTOH, Dick did battle alcoholism at one point, so who knows?
Once on The Tonight Show, Carol Wayne (the hot “Matinee Lady”) took a sip out of Johnny Carson’s ever-present coffee mug. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “There’s *whiskey *in there!”
We also make our coffee a LOT stronger than folks did back then. Coffee beans were dear, and had to be carried a long way. Even today, every cup of coffee I’ve bought West of the Mississippi and East of the Sierra Nevadas has been really weak. One lady warned me when she heard my accent “Now, this is coffee for people who drink coffee all day. If you want it strong order a double espresso.”
She was right. Next morning I ordered a large coffee and an espresso - which I poured into it.
I imagine they’d make it stronger as a storm kept them up for long stretches, but overall, nothing like the way we use up coffee beans.
How doe you tell two brown liquids apart on a black and white show?
But I’m not actually suggesting that Dick might have been drinking whiskey, even if Jackie and Johnny were. It could have been Coke or any other dark beverage.
It was black. No cream.
It *could *have been something else, but I don’t see the point of a substitution. Surely their budget could stand the cost of a can of Folgers. I think Laura even poured it from a coffeepot.
Doesn’t mean they brewed it on the stovetop; I’m sure they had an urn on the set making coffee for everyone working on the show. Probably just drew it from there.
Actually, this is a moot point. What she meant was, there wasn’t *anything *in the cup. She was adamant the actors were just pretending there was.
Shitkicker.
No, I understood that was the argument. I was just nitpicking so I could tell the story about Jackie Gleason.
That’s Hedley!