Word: 1920s
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...Sponges. Barby Sabini, a shifty Italian from the unsavory Saffron Hill district, started the racket way back in the 1920s when he and his brothers, armed with wet sponges, used to hang around the race tracks, erasing the chalked odds on the bookie's tote boards if they failed to pay protection money. After holding onto their franchise in the face of attacks by some of the toughest tearaways in The Smoke, the Sabini gang at last gave way to the Black Brothers, who in turn were muscled out by Jack Spot. Born of Polish-Jewish parents...
...Dixieland and big-band swing and dove into the cool depths of bop and progressive jazz, they also left behind the sweet, lucid sound of the clarinet. Once known as an ill woodwind that nobody blows good, this relatively new instrument suddenly struck the U.S. mass ear in the 1920s in the hands of Ted Lewis, who made it wail, and reached peak popularity in the pre-World War II days of Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw, who made it swing. It is still a must in every Dixieland and New Orleans jazz group, but is rare...
...help, and then correctly pointed out that the family piano was flat. A few months later, his parents sold their home and possessions in Bolivia to give him U.S. training (in San Francisco). After one of his rare appearances four years ago, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote: "In the 1920s it was Yehudi Menuhin, in the 1930s it was Isaac Stern; and [now it is] Jaime Laredo." After that, scholarships, first with Concertmaster Josef Gingold of the Cleveland Orchestra, and then with Master Teacher Ivan Galamian at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute, with whom he still studies...
...Esso Standard Oil, the backers (as Esso Standard Oil took pains to point out in its own case) went in as individuals, not corporations. Nevertheless, the bugaboo of business control of newspapers is a real one in France. When some 60 dailies cluttered Paris kiosks in the 1920s, bankers and munitions makers kept newspapers like mistresses. By World War II, big business had a firm grip on the major Paris dailies. Afterward, millions of angry Frenchmen blamed business for the papers' sellout to collaborationists...
...coal miner who is soul-deep in debt to his employer. The song landed with a sixteen-ton impact because of its tootling orchestration and Tennessee Ernie Ford's richly lugubrious style. To the jukebox generation the words were all but meaningless. Yet, as late as the 1920s, the ballad's bitter plaint was a real-life refrain to millions of U.S. workers from Georgia's green-roofed cotton villages to Oregon's bleak lumber settlements. Those workers had lived, like Composer Merle Travis' coalminer father, in company towns-drab, depressed communities where the worker...