Word: grandness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...started with an advertising man's dream-a vision of a helpless, pliable throng, ears open and guards down, known in the trade as a "captive audience." Trapped in Manhattan's cavernous Grand Central Terminal, where each day 500,000 persons swarm to & fro, was the biggest audience in captivity. The temptation was irresistible. Grand Central expanded its public address system into a small broadcasting studio, laid in a supply of canned music, syrupy-voiced announcers and loudspeakers (82 of them), and went into business. Advertisers eagerly paid $1,800 a week for the privilege of spraying music...
Last week, before the New York State Public Service Commission, Grand Central and its captive audience met in combat. Spokesmen for the railroads defended their right to raise revenue with noise, said a poll by an outfit known as Fact Finders Inc. showed over 85% of the commuters approved, hauled out a psychiatrist who said the noise could harm nobody who was all right in the head. The whole storm of protest, complained that railroads, was started by "an adult comic book," i.e., The New Yorker magazine...
...issue was clear-cut. It was a case of free enterprise v. what Justice Brandeis once defined as the individual's "right to be let alone." New York's five Public Service commissioners retired to give the matter careful deliberation in some nice, quiet place-not Grand Central...
...France's Communist Humanité promptly turned Duval's story into ready political capital. When readers of Le Monde started sending money and gifts to Duval, Humanité snorted: "The workers want no alms . . ." Later it added: "Plumber, take the gifts in money and kind that the grand bourgeois of Le Monde will throw you, then spit in the faces of those people...